Dear Your Harlow

EACH Thursday evening people in Harlow stand and applaud our amazing essential service workers. This week, on Tuesday, 11am. We will remember with a minute’s silence to respect those workers who died from CORVID-19, after they possibly, or even probably, contracted it whilst at work: NHS staff, care workers, transport workers, postal workers, teachers and others have died.

The people that mark International Workers’ Memorial Day each year on 28 April make a commitment to ‘remember the dead and fight for the living’. Harlow Trades Union council would usually have a street stall church service & Harlow civic centre would have half mast union jack on this day.

The government has spent a month telling us to ‘protect the NHS – to save lives’. But the government’s own performance on providing adequate and appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) to all essential service workers so far has been at best unacceptably weak, and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services called it ‘shambolic’.

If frontline staff in PAH hospital work with inadequate PPE and they become ill, then they will be off work for weeks. So, to ‘protect the NHS’ the staff in PAH hospital must be given the PPE they need, or the government is failing its own simple test.

We know that the government has regarded care homes as a lesser priority and that care workers in homes and in the community in Harlow as we have already witnessed are risking their lives when selflessly doing their jobs. This is a scandal.

And we know that essential service workers in other sectors might have little or no access to PPE at all despite the risks that they confront. Also many other non essential workers are working who are not on the exempt workers list

It is noble and generous that people in Harlow clap for essential service workers, and stand to respect those who have died because of their work. But every one of us has a duty to do all we can to ‘protect the living’ too. That might be volunteering if we can. That might even be joining efforts to make PPE, because scrubs are being sewn at home and manufacturing is offering to divert its production. But it includes all of us making ‘political noise’ to demand that the government gets organised on PPE. Urgent action is needed to save lives. PPE failure is costing lives.

Mick Patrick
Secretary
Harlow and District Trades Council