The last year has showed us how truly and utterly entrenched inequality is in our society. If you are poor, young, a woman, disabled, from Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic backgrounds, or already in insecure work, you are more likely to have suffered hardship during this pandemic. Poor and Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic people were more likely to be among the more than 120,000 dead.

The APPG on Covid are calling today for a national Covid-19 Memorial Day as a tribute to those who have died during this pandemic, to express gratitude and recognition to frontline workers, and to ensure future leaders heed the lessons learned.

A tribute is fitting, but reflection must be followed by political action.

For weeks on end, applause rippled across the nation from the steps of Downing Street to cities, towns, and villages across the UK.  The key workers I represent felt that warmth and appreciation. Many were humbled that the nation cared and saw their sacrifice.

But when the clapping stopped on a Thursday night, many went back to work to be met with inferior or non-existent PPE and an unsafe workplace. Many more worked extra hours, often unpaid – especially in social care. Too many received poverty pay for their contribution while hearing of billions wasted on dodgy contracts and a £37-billion test and trace.

This has taken a huge physical and mental toll on those who have carried the burden.  The applause was appreciated, but surely these workers also deserve fair pay and a decent standard of living?

Nurses, paramedics, lab technicians, community health workers, care workers, and local government and school staff are in the middle of pay negotiations right now. The government has the perfect opportunity to match its admiration with a practical show of support that will make our pandemic heroes more secure, less tired, and a lot happier.

As GMB’s National Secretary for Public Services, I represent and negotiate for hundreds of thousands of members. The government should heed the warnings the derisory 1 percent announcement for the NHS gave them. Everyone has a breaking point, and this pandemic was it for many in the public sector and on the front line.

No one wants to be in the situation where those who fought the virus for us are forced to then fight the government just to get fairness. But ministers seem set on this collision course, buoyed by the success of the vaccination programme – a programme ironically that is only a success because of its NHS rollout. If the government doesn’t change course, industrial action seems inevitable.

This is all before the true long-term impact of the pandemic is known.  We’re facing a growing mental health crisis, a crisis in our kids’ education (and maybe even socialisation), and of course an economic crisis. We must be more ardent than ever that austerity is not the answer; it is what left us unprepared for this pandemic, and unsafe when the virus hit. It is what punished the very people who protected us and will continue to do so if allowed to become the prevailing ideology again.

Neither is the long term public health impact of this dreadful virus understood.  It is for this reason the government must class the virus as an industrial disease for those exposed through their key worker status or because non-essential employers refused to close or adhere to government guidelines.

We all owe a debt to our public sector and key workers. It’s time the government paid up.