There are calls to improve pay and conditions in one of few growing areas of jobs market during Covid
Steve Humphreys, a British Airways cabin crew director, was among 9 million people whose work ground to a halt in the UK this spring. With a screech of tyres his last flight from Barcelona touched down in mid-March, flights were cancelled and a 47-year career in which he served golfer Seve Ballesteros on Concorde and the boxer Nicola Adams on the Bradford-to-Heathrow shuttle was over.
He has since joined a wave of UK workers furloughed or made redundant by the Covid pandemic switching into care work, which has emerged as one of the few growing areas of a ravaged jobs market. The sector has the fastest-growing number of vacancies, according to figures for December from the jobs website Indeed, and in November there were more vacancies in health and social care work (about 125,000) than in any other sector, according to official statistics.
