Ms Nora Labo:

For many of these workers, especially agency workers, the agencies sometimes actively tried to discourage them from applying for the Covid-19 illness benefit and tried to make them apply for the pandemic unemployment payment when they were self-isolating while ill. We do not know the reasons for this but we suspect it was because they did not want any clusters to show up. Our union - often me - has had to help workers by providing them with the relevant forms, filling in these forms for them and so on. This is because the employment agencies for foreign workers have made no effort to help them access any of the payments they were entitled to while ill and self-isolating at home. Workers were actively discouraged from seeking illness benefit even at the beginning of the pandemic when there was a huge financial difference between the unemployment payment, which was still at €203 per week, and illness benefit which was €350 per week. The agencies kept trying to force people to apply for the unemployment payment, probably so that a cluster would not appear in that area and would not show up in the statistics.