Article Text
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unusually challenging and dangerous workplace conditions for key workers. This has prompted calls for key workers to receive a variety of special benefits over and above their normal pay. Here, we consider whether two such benefits are justified: a no-fault compensation scheme for harm caused by an epidemic and hazard pay for the risks and burdens of working during an epidemic. Both forms of benefit are often made available to members of the armed forces for the harms, risks and burdens that come with military service. We argue from analogy that these benefits also ought to be provided to key workers during an epidemic because, like the military, key workers face unavoidable harms, risks and burdens in providing essential public good. The amount of compensation should be proportional to the harm suffered and the amount of hazard pay should be proportional to the risk and burden endured. Therefore, key workers should receive the same amount of compensation and hazard pay as the military where the harms, risks and burdens are equivalent. In the UK, a form of no-fault compensation has recently been made available to the surviving families of key workers who suffer fatal COVID-19 infections. According to our argument, however, it is insufficient because it offers less to key workers than is made available to the families of armed services personnel killed on duty.
- public health ethics
- health personnel
- applied and professional ethics
- ethics
- health workforce
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The are no data in this work.
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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The are no data in this work.
Footnotes
Twitter @Neonatalethics
Contributors DM developed the initial idea for the article and wrote the majority of the article. DW gave feedback throughout the development of the article and wrote a significant portion of the article.
Funding DM was supported by the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award: ‘Responsibility and Healthcare’ (WT104848). DW was supported for this work by a grant from the Wellcome Trust (203132/Z/16/Z).
Disclaimer The funder had no role in the preparation of this manuscript or the decision to submit for publication.
Competing interests DW works as a consultant neonatologist in the NHS.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
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