Paddy Lillis – Usdaw General Secretary says: “Research over the past year consistently shows that women have been disproportionately affected by the social and economic impacts of Covid-19. Those with caring responsibilities are one of the groups of women that have been particularly badly affected as the pandemic has imposed new and additional unpaid care and childcare responsibilities.
“Even before the onset of the coronavirus crisis, reconciling paid work with unpaid care placed women under significant pressure. Since then women's attachment to the labour market, already precarious, has become even more destabilised as discrimination, redundancies and the intensification of unpaid care responsibilities threaten their employment, financial security and mental health.
“The Government's response to the pandemic has not only failed to protect the needs of women, particularly those combining paid work with unpaid care, but has further entrenched women's inequality, and put women’s continued economic participation at grave risk. We are calling on the Labour Party, working with trade unions, to bring forward more effective family-friendly employment rights.”
Usdaw’s call for a better deal for women workers includes:
- Introducing a statutory, day one right to ten days paid carers' and parental leave.
- Ending the qualifying periods for basic rights such as sick pay and parental leave and improving access to and increasing rates of statutory parental payments such as maternity pay.
- Strengthening protection against redundancy and health and safety rights for pregnant women and new mothers.
Notes for editors:
Usdaw (Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) is the UK's fifth biggest trade union with over 400,000 members. Membership has increased by more than one-third over the last couple of decades. Most Usdaw members work in the retail sector, but the union also has many members in transport, distribution, food manufacturing, chemicals and other trades.
For Usdaw press releases visit: http://www.usdaw.org.uk/news and you can follow us on Twitter
@UsdawUnion