Background: Long-term health conditions can affect labour market outcomes. COVID-19 may have increased labour market inequalities, e.g. due to restricted opportunities for clinically vulnerable people. Evaluating COVID-19's impact could help target support.
Aim: To quantify the effect of several long-term conditions on UK labour market outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic and compare them to pre-pandemic outcomes.
Methods: The Understanding Society COVID-19 survey collected responses from around 20,000 UK residents in nine waves from April 2020-September 2021. Participants employed in January/February 2020 with a variety of long-term conditions were matched with people without the condition but with similar baseline characteristics. Models estimated probability of employment, hours worked and earnings. We compared these results with results from a two-year pre-pandemic period. We also modelled probability of furlough and home-working frequency during COVID-19.
Results: Most conditions (asthma, arthritis, emotional/nervous/psychiatric problems, vascular/pulmonary/liver conditions, epilepsy) were associated with reduced employment probability and/or hours worked during COVID-19, but not pre-pandemic. Furlough was more likely for people with pulmonary conditions. People with arthritis and cancer were slower to return to in-person working. Few effects were seen for earnings.
Conclusion: COVID-19 had a disproportionate impact on people with long-term conditions' labour market outcomes.
Copyright: © 2024 Webb et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.