As the link between infection and death has weakened, attention has turned to the longer tail of the Covid-19 crisis – the most severe labour shortage in almost 25 years. Vaccines have rolled out, support programmes have wound down, restrictions have lifted, but normality remains some way off. A surge in the Delta variant, hundreds of thousands self-isolating and the Brexit-induced exodus of EU workers has left employers struggling to staff their long-awaited reopenings. News of signing-on bonuses – or “golden hellos” – across several industries particularly desperate for workers have made headlines. Some of those bonuses are eye-popping – £10,000 for registered night nurses at Scottish care homes – particularly when you consider the average wage in those sectors. Care homes, according to a report from last year, are likely to pay less than the real living wage in much of the country. And a quick perusal of the government’s list of violators of the minimum wage law shows some of the same companies complaining of being understaffed. Meanwhile, Asda and Tesco are offering £1,000 bonuses for lorry drivers as worries of supermarket supply shortages loom. Companies often prefer to give temporary cash payments rather than promise a long-term pay increase or other changes to conditions. For most of the pandemic, politicians and corporate titans have predicted a “return to normal” that would allow them to relax back into the power relationships they’ve become used to over the past few decades, as union strength declined and inequality spiked. Such a return to normal now looks increasingly unlikely, but employers still appear to be banking on the remote possibility that the global pandemic hasn’t changed that much. The bonuses are surely welcome to workers in these industries, but they’re an extremely short-term solution to a long-term problem of eroding working conditions, exacerbated by a year and a half of pandemic misery. Indeed, they could cause more ill will as workers who’ve stayed on eye the bonuses on offer elsewhere and wonder where their pay rise is. Some companies seem to have understood that quick fixes won’t do: the John Lewis Partnership, according to the Independent, is responding to the driver shortage with a base pay increase of about £2 an hour. But many haven’t. For working people, the pandemic made it impossible to ignore conditions that had already been intolerable for some time. The applause for NHS staff and gratitude offered to key workers didn’t make up for the hazardous conditions so many of them braved. A report from the TUC noted, “many of those in insecure work are the sorts of key workers – carers, delivery drivers, shopworkers – whose worth to society was brought sharply to attention during the pandemic”. The social value of this work, in other words, is at odds with its low rates of pay and high rates of abuse. Although the death rates from the virus were lower among working-age people, once again a glance at mortality statistics highlights the raw deal many workers have received. Many of the jobs for which employers are begging for applicants are the ones that had higher death rates, including care home work, logistics and transport. The TUC called out “under-reporting” of the number of people who caught Covid at work, arguing that employers were dodging responsibility for dangerous conditions. Then there’s long Covid, still barely understood but, according to the Office for National Statistics, affecting nearly a million people around the country, with those working in health or social care reporting the highest prevalence. Given all this, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that workers are hesitant to plunge back into the same old conditions and might need to be enticed back to the job. Employers are used to having a pliant and desperate workforce but, according to James Meadway, economist and director of the Progressive Economy Forum, “the continued presence of restrictions and costs to using labour resulting from Covid-19 has given a little of power back to those expected to do the work”. Workers, after decades of downward pressure, are rightly demanding back a little bit of the value they’ve produced. Rather than complaining about the “pingdemic” or turning to quick fixes, employers may have to face up to the realities of a world with Covid-19 for a good while longer, and adapt accordingly. That means, rather than the just-in-time staffing so popular in recent years, they may have to get used to having more workers than the bare minimum on the payroll, to ensure that they are covered when illness strikes. While technology has allowed employers in the retail and other sectors to calculate staffing down to the minute, Covid reminds us that the thing being sliced and diced in those calculations is human labour – fallible human bodies that require care and rest. Expanding statutory sick pay would be the least the government could do to provide for a workforce still struggling with Covid. And those base pay rates may just have to go up. No doubt, employers will threaten to invest more in the dreaded robots if they have to pay more in wages and sick time. But for now, anyway, workers have some long-lost leverage. Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back