The creation of a contracted-out workforce with insecure jobs threatens to reinforce existing health inequalities
While Covid-19 has highlighted structural inequalities in Britain, the government’s pandemic response has ironically reinforced these inequalities by allowing companies to perpetuate temporary, low-paid, insecure, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions.
Take the test-and-trace system, a crucial part of preventing the spread of Covid-19. Decades of funding cuts have eviscerated services for infectious disease control, including NHS laboratories and contact tracing. As a result, public health teams were left struggling to cope at the start of the pandemic. There were shortages of tests, while contact tracing and community testing were halted on 12 March 2020 and didn’t resume for some months.
