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Inadequate Covid health and safety policy is placing workers at unnecessary risk

Trade unionists blast government's mishandling of the pandemic at the Covid Zero Alliance

by Matt Trinder
Industrial reporter

WORKERS have been placed at significant and unnecessary risk by inadequate Covid health and safety policy, a leading trade unionist said on Saturday.

Janet Newsham, chairwoman of the National Hazards campaign and a TUC tutor, argued that workers had been let down by the government, employers and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

She was speaking during the online launch of the Zero Covid Campaign, a group fighting for tougher policies to combat coronavirus.

Ms Newsham said: “The pandemic didn’t cause the occupational health crisis, it exposed it.

“Health and safety law enforcement and trade union organisations have been attacked and undermined by deregulatory neoliberal governments of all shades. 

“There has been an insatiable drive to cut regulations, the very ones that protect workers and communities.”

She condemned Prime Minister Boris Johnson for failing to provide adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) and funding for workplace ventilation to combat aerosol transmission of the virus, and for allowing employers to define what constitutes a key worker.

It is also unacceptable that HSE checks on workplaces have been conducted by phone, Ms Newsham said.

Her comments came as a survey by the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) found that more than one in nine workers had been ordered to return to work in breach of Covid rules and that companies had avoided fines for breaking regulations.

Ms Newsham said: “The UK government’s priority was always business first, profits before people. Business and Brexit before health. 

“Government advice has undermined health and safety law and has been an abuse of available science. It’s a class war.

“But this pandemic has shown a unity in our strength and we need to organise and act collectively.

“We remember with heartache our dead, but we will continue to fight like hell for the living.”

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