How bad employers could spread coronavirus further

Fresh evidence of the problem created by Britain’s – and for that matter the world’s – two-tier workforce emerged this week. Twitter told employees to work from home. Potentially exposed to the coronavirus? Need to self-isolate? No problem.

Greggs is in a rather different position. The much loved British bakery chain – at first for its sausage rolls but now just as much for its vegan offering – has a lot of bricks and mortar retail outlets that obviously require staff to be on site.

But chief executive Roger Whiteside nonetheless said his firm would pay those who have to self-isolate, in stark contrast to some other firms, which have defaulted to the miserable statutory sick pay minimum of £94.25 a week that’s available only after day four. In cases where staff qualify for it. Many part-timers don’t work sufficient hours or earn enough to do that.

It isn’t just between good and bad employers where the split is evident and the sensible behaviour of the good could be ultimately be torpedoed by the beastliness of the bad.

The problem caused by a two-tier workforce where some people will be left feeling they simply can’t afford to go off sick will make itself felt within workplaces too. The reason? Contracting out.

The issues created by the latter could become particularly acute at what are Britain’s most important workplaces as the country gears up to respond to the pandemic: those operated by the NHS.

The service has obviously got its own policies in place to deal with self-isolation, and has been working with unions to that end. This means that NHS staff who have to self-isolate should be able to do so because, well duh.

Staff feeling they can’t afford to and turning up to spread the thing is the very last thing hospitals need.

But wait just a minute. Not everyone who turns up to work at Britain’s hospitals works for the NHS. A raft of its services have been hived off into the hands of private contractors. Examples can include patient transport, catering, cleaning, porters.

People who find themselves working for contractors typically find their terms and conditions are greatly inferior to those enjoyed by directly employed staff.

Squeezing staff is how firms make money on the contracts they win, and how the NHS saves it (although history tells us the economy is often a false one for the service).

Even if those employers follow health secretary Matt Hancock’s determination that self-isolating staff should be treated as off sick, their workers are still going to face a nasty financial hit that some won’t be able to take if they’re left to cope with just the dismal statutory payment.

It’s not just, as I wrote last week, the disease of the gig economy this crisis is exposing. It’s that of the mania for outsourcing and the creation of a two-tier workforce.

It isn’t only the NHS this could hit. People working in social care are also frequently employed by contractors. If they don’t feel they can self-isolate when they should, or go off sick when they start sniffling, and then go on to transmit the virus to their elderly or disabled clients, who are most at risk, that’s more pressure and problems for the NHS. You see where this is going.

I spoke to Unison before writing this piece. It says there’s an urgent need for clarity and it’s right.

Dave Prentice, general secretary, has written to Thérèse Coffey, the secretary of state for work and pensions, asking her to amend the rules so employers have to recognise the time off as sick leave and provide wages for workers from day one. This should happen.

It’s no good Boris Johnson blustering about how wonderful he thinks NHS workers are.

Swift action is required to bring contractors and second-tier employers more generally to heel, regardless of any bellyaching.

This outbreak may not ultimately prove to be as bad as the worst case scenarios suggest, and increasingly panicky people are starting to believe.

But if it is, we could all pay a very heavy price for contractors’ penny-pinching.