Regulating exposure: routine deaths, work and the Covid crisis

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the juxtaposition of two phenomena – deaths at work and coronavirus deaths – in the context of regulatory strategies which are ostensibly to prevent such deaths. More specifically, my particular focus is on the ways in which work, working and workplaces were managed – and indeed somewhat obscured – during the pandemic, so that the normalisation of work-related deaths by and large continued, even perhaps exacerbated, certainly killing tens of thousands of workers. To this end, in the following sections, I begin, first, by examining in historical context how workplace death because normalised through law and regulation, then turn to focus upon the various ways in deaths were further normalised and obscured during the pandemic in the UK. A key conceptual and empirical reference point here is regulation – a phenomenon and process which, as illustrated across different aspects of the pandemic, is revealed as permitting and routinising deaths related to work and working.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid exposure
• enforcement
• inspection
• occupational health and safety
• regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A death is attributed to coronavirus if it occurred within 28 days of a positive test. This replaced a previous definition, used by the Government until 12th August 2020, which had defined a coronavirus death as anyone ‘with COVID-19 on the death certificate’. On that latter definition, the total number of deaths, still officially recorded by the Government, stood at 129,369 at 31st January 2021 (Public Health England [PHE], n.d.).

2. This section draws upon work developed over several years with my friend and colleague David Whyte.

3. While I refer interchangeably to the Johnson and UK Government as a political entity as well as to the UK as a geographical one, it should be noted that across the UK, health is a devolved matter, while some powers crucial to responding to the health crisis, notably fiscal matters, are determined by the UK Government. Further, while it is slightly misleading to refer to UK responses to the health crises – these inevitably varied by jurisdiction – there were broad corollaries in the ways in which the four administrations acted, alongside some points of divergence both in practice and representation.

4. In England, lockdowns proceeded as follows, while there were variations in the other three jurisdictions in the UK: first national lockdown, March to June 2020; minimal lockdown restrictions, July to September 2020; reimposed restrictions, September to October 2020; second national lockdown, November 2020; introduction of an extensive tiered system, December 2020; third national lockdown, January to March 2021, release of all restrictions from March 2021- March 2022 (Brown & Kirk-Wade, 2021).

5. https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/construction-leadership-council.

6. Local authority inspectors have statutory responsibility for large sectors, including retail, wholesale distribution, warehousing, hotel and catering premises, offices, and the consumer/leisure industries.

7. Inflation adjustment calculated using the Bank of England inflation calculator.

8. Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) is a unit of measurement typically used in workplaces that have a mix of full-time and part-time employers and is used as a comparator across different workplaces or contexts.

9. All HSE data here is based upon a combination of publicly available data via the ‘Enforcement’ section of HSE Statistics and a series of Freedom of Information requests made since 2010, notably Freedom of Information Request Reference No: 2010020046, 12/04/2010; Freedom of Information Request, HSE Response, 2014060117, 2/7/2014, Freedom of Information Request Reference No: 201608042, 4 August 2016, Freedom of Information Request Reference No: 202104190, 20 May 2021.