- Conference
- 2022 Local Government Service Group Conference
- Date
- 15 February 2022
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference notes that UNISON members in councils, schools and across local government have been on the front line of the fight against Covid and have been instrumental in ensuring that vital public services could continue during the pandemic. This has meant they have been more exposed than most to the physical and mental impacts of Covid.
As at December 2021, Office for National Statistics data showed that 1.3 million people in the UK were experiencing self-reported long Covid. People working in health, social care, teaching or education were included in those greater affected, along with those who had an activity-limiting health condition or disability. Education staff are the second most likely group to have long Covid, after healthcare workers.
Separate figures from the Labour Force Survey in 2021 revealed that 645,000 workers reported having a work-related illness caused or made worse by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. This includes long Covid, stress, anxiety and depression. The data also shows that nearly 100,000 workers reported catching Covid-19 at work in 2020/21 – far more than the 32,000 cases officially reported by employers to the Health and Safety Executive under the Reporting of Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).
These figures make clear that Covid and long Covid have been, and continue to be, massive threats to local government workers’ health, safety and physical and mental well-being.
Conference notes that even during lockdowns, huge numbers of our members could not work from home, and continued to provide services in workplaces and in our communities, putting them more at risk. School support workers kept schools open even when teachers were teaching online lessons from home; refuse workers continued to travel in cramped vehicles; social workers and housing workers continued to visit people’s homes. Many members contracted Covid, and Conference believes that Covid should be officially recognised as an occupational disease.
Conference believes that those with long Covid should not be subject to normal sickness absence processes and triggers.
The Equality Act makes clear that a person is disabled if they have a mental or physical impairment that has lasted or is likely to last 12 months or more and which has a substantial impact on their normal day to day activities. Conference believes that for many of our members, their experience of long Covid would already make them a disabled person under the Equality Act and therefore entitled to protections and, in particular, to reasonable adjustments, such as changes to sickness absence triggers.
Conference calls on the Service Group Executive to:
1)Support UNISON’s work through the TUC’s membership of the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council (IIAC) to recognise Covid-19 as an occupational disease including calling for government-funded research into work-related exposures, risk and disability;
2)While awaiting any IIAC decision on prescribing long Covid as an occupational disease, campaign through Labour Link and other political routes to promote the need for long Covid to be recognised as an occupational disease and to get political support for the campaign;
3)Endorse the campaign agreed at 2021 Disabled Members Conference, “for the government and employers to recognise that people with long Covid can be defined as disabled under the Equality Act if the condition has a substantial impact on their ability to do normal day to day activities that is expected to last 12 months or more”;
4)Circulate and promote UNISON’s Guide to Supporting Members with Long Covid to branches and regions;
5)Ask sectors, regions and branches to raise this with employers and employers’ organisations as a priority in ongoing negotiations, so as to seek to get it agreed and included in relevant policies and procedures.