By demanding higher sick pay and a new furlough scheme, Keir Starmer would be doing politics, not playing politics
Britain’s abysmal level of statutory sick pay is a killer. If you are even eligible – and all too many low-paid, insecure and zero-hour contract workers are not – then you can expect to receive a derisory £96.35 a week, lower than almost every other western nation.
With in-work poverty at a record high, the country’s low-paid workers (who are less likely to work remotely) face an impossible choice: they can ignore a sniffle and a temperature, or risk a test that could lead them to isolate and forgo their full wages. And so Covid rips through our workplaces, transport systems and the wider community. The result is more illness – damaging the economy and further overloading an overwhelmed NHS – and, most seriously of all, more death.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
