Morrison’s has just joined the ranks of those employers who seem to think that their employees’ medical details are their business.
Supermarket Morrisons has confirmed it has cut sick pay for unvaccinated workers who are forced to isolate after being exposed to Covid.
It follows similar moves from big retailers including Ikea, Next and Ocado as staff absences rise.
Unjabbed Morrisons workers who are told to isolate but test negative now get statutory sick pay of £96.35 a week.
How are they told to isolate? By the app? Well, get rid of it. I have no idea if I have been close to someone who has had covid at the time, but I do have my suspicions (and I didn’t get it). No one told me to isolate because I never downloaded the app, nor have I left my phone number with any organisation likely to issue such instructions. I simply would carry on as normal. Problem solved.
The logic fail here, though, is massive. Regardless of vaccination status, being told to isolate makes no difference whatsoever. If you are told to isolate, you are told to isolate, whereupon you stay at home. Whether you have had the jibby-jabby makes no difference to this, because you have tested negative – in other words, you don’t have the plague. What we have here is a form of spite and nastiness against the ‘other’ and it is now spreading like a cancer.
The move was intended to encourage workers to get jabbed, the newspaper said.
That’s an interesting use of the word ‘encouraged.’
However, any Morrisons employee who tests positive is paid full sick pay while they isolate, regardless of vaccination status.
You see what I mean about the complete absence of logic.
Workers who cannot receive Covid vaccines for medical reasons are not obliged to isolate in England.
And again. Indeed, this is as ridiculous as the mask rules. None of it has any logic or reason to it whatsoever. The world has gone insane.
Indeed.
My 19 yrs old got his 2nd injection 10 days ago (He’s studying in France and has held out as long as he could but not being injected was starting to really affect his life. It’s bad here, it’s way worse over there) and promptly tested positive with flu symptoms within 5 days. He did not get it when my wife and me went down briefly with it in December 20, when we lived in the same house.
There is no doubt in my mind that the injected poison is the reason.
By my experience LR, this thing cuts both ways. For example, in 2020 I took early retirement with a very healthy payoff from my job as a welder and finished in the August. In November I got a call to go back to ‘help out’ on a rolling contract which I did. At that time there were 51 welders from 115 isolating on that particular factory. Nothing wrong with them, but they were on full sick pay for (at the time) 14 days. It appeared that they were taking it in shifts to be off work, constantly testing and checking the app. I don’t know exactly how they were doing this, unless they were purposely having contact with people they knew who had tested positive or isolating. After a couple of months the company announced a ban on mobile phones during work hours.
I was moved to another factory after 5 months – by now I was raking it in, the first two 12 hour night shifts there netted me £1720. Same problem there, unprecedented orders in the company’s history couldn’t be completed on time and it was hurting the company. Eventually they announced that if an unjabbed person tested positive and had to isolate, they would get no company sick pay.
Personally I wasn’t bothered about this but its the way that the company did the research that got me, they simply sent out a team leader with a clipboard to ask everyone on shift their vaxx status. Of course, my reply was ‘none of your business’. I think I was the only one to give that reply. I’ve never had the app or been tested.
The rolling contract was initially for 2 weeks but ended up being a full year. I finished again at Christmas due to there being no work because of supply chain difficulties.
When a company is hurt like that it does what it thinks necessary to stem the tide, and that’s where the idiotic, sometimes unlawful rules get made. The government guidance at the time made it very easy for anyone to take a week off with full pay.
We have very few issues with sickness absence… covid related or otherwise.
The reason? Everybody (from top to bottom, irrespective of vaxx status) only gets SSP when they are off sick…. concentrates the mind somewhat.
Simples.
We self employed don’t even get that.
I’m sure that there are laws against arbtrarily altering people’s working conditions in this way, there must be some lawyers rubbing their hands.
The thing about this kind of illness is that it only retreats into the background once enough people have been exposed to it and developed resistance. So none of this isolating is doing anything other than prolonging the problem.
The problem with lockdowns in the 1st place, which is why Australia is now seeing the number of cases explodes when they were boasting about their zero covid status only a few months ago.
Closing the schools in March 20 was a stupid thing to do as leaving them open would have let covid go through the not at risk population going into summer, which would have been perfect for a seasonal virus, and the natural immunity from that would have greatly helped thereafter.
Can see both sides of this.
From an employees point of view, because i am one, it galls me to see the same bloody faces taking advantage of this that always took the piss out of the sick pay, we get full pay if off sick, the usual suspects were and still are conveniently getting pinged so having extra time off to so called isolate.
The same ones complaining about the lack of massive pay rise they assumed we’d be getting this year, it seems adding 2 and 2 together is beyond many.
I haven’t got pinged because i believed this was a load of bollocks from day one so no testing no apps no bloody jabs and no taking the piss out of my excellent employer.
I know someone who was working in the NHS until recently who told her team to delete the app as the team would be unable to operate effectively if they got pinged. It was a small, specialist team with no real backup if they all got told to isolate. She has since retired and is much happier for it.
But, yeah, it’s likely to be the usual suspects taking the piss. And likely as not, they are the ones who were first in the queue to get jabbed.
I know someone who retired after working from home for a while and realised how much she had been spending on commuting.
I got to retire two weeks earlier due to having to self isolate, but this was right at the start of 2020 so the whole mess was a bit of an unknown.
The push from so-called ‘conservatives’ is now to get everybody back in to working in London to save the jobs of all the service industries.
But no-one seems to be asking why they should be immune from change. It’s as if every car driver was going to be forced to buy a buggy whip to stick in his boot every year. It’s madness.
I really don’t think that this change can be reversed. That said, working from home isn’t for everyone and isn’t always practical. All depends on what you do.