Has anyone bothered to think about the staff working at quarantine hotels? | The Independent
▻https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/quarantine-hotels-covid-red-list-migrant-workers-b1802864.html
The government’s quarantine scheme requires 11 days of hotel isolation for travelers entering the UK from a “red list” of countries. But the entire initiative risks being undermined by policies which make it impossible for workers in the hotel industry to protect themselves from the spread of infection.We need to confront the possibility of the virus spreading between guests and staff, who must be able to take time off work to isolate if there is a risk they could have come into contact with an infected person. However, a low rate of statutory sick pay, alongside restrictions, especially for migrant workers, on access to financial support, means isolating from work can lead to destitution for many people in these jobs.
The government needs to raise statutory sick pay from £95 per week, one of the lowest in Europe and utterly insufficient to support a family for 10 days or more of isolation. It also needs to scrap No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF), which keeps migrant workers in poverty, and expand access to its one-off isolation payments of £500. Without these measures, workers in these hotels will face the impossible choice between isolating to protect their health and feeding their families. The hospitality sector in the UK has the highest proportion of migrant workers, making up 30 per cent of the workforce. Most migrants living and working in the UK are automatically subject to NRPF, leaving them unable to access the public safety net, including universal credit, child benefit, income support or housing benefit, regardless of their financial circumstances.
Red list countries: Full list of 33 nations where hotel quarantine rules apply ‘I guess this means it is okay for me to be violated’ – migrant women have been forgotten in the domestic abuse bill. Long before the pandemic, NRPF conditions were causing severe financial hardship for migrants. For migrant workers in the hospitality sector, an industry hit particularly hard by the pandemic, job losses combined with NRPF conditions have meant they are unable to say “no” to high-risk working conditions and low pay. Throughout this pandemic, we have seen how frontline workers, often in low-paid work, have kept our country going. Yet these are the workers who are consistently undervalued by the government and by employers, despite the fact they have kept our shops open, our transports systems running and our shared spaces clean. The new mandatory hotel quarantine scheme is no exception. The responsibility for lowering Covid-19 transmission across our borders has fallen to low-paid hotel workers, security staff and cleaners. It is them ensuring that the scheme runs smoothly and safely. Low rates of sick pay and a reliance on the statutory minimum wage is prevalent in hospitality contracts, and even more so in cleaning and security contracts, which are often outsourced to agencies, and where insecure and zero-hours contracts are common.
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