The Dearly Beloved, on occasion, alerts me to potentially suitable employment. She sees these things on her internet device. A local, major, employer is always seeking staff. It's a constant thing. Usually this is for their main site far, far away. They also have a lesser site not so far, far away. This role? Hamper packers at the lesser site for six weeks prior to the pagan festivities. I applied. Well, they were going to ignore me like everyone else does, weren’t they? It came as a shock to be offered an interview and an even greater shock to be offered a job on the spot! It must have been the Harris Tweed jacket and Smith tartan tie that swung it.
I have often wondered why said company has such high churn rates. I had always assumed that it was due to their far, far away location that generally made employees Teflon-esque. After all, this company sells high quality merchandise, describes itself as 'most prestigious', and is fiercely protective of its clientele, putting customer service at the heart of its ethos. Customer-facing employees are beautifully attired and unfailingly polite. Surely this is an employer of quality and a position to be coveted? Is it not solely the time and expense of the daily commute that causes employees to depart for pastures more propitious?
Err, no! To say that this is the most tight-fisted bunch of charlatans I have ever had the dubious pleasure of working for would not be stretching a point. The offer was for work from 8am to 6pm over each seven-day period for six weeks. Both prior to and at the interview I stressed that I would NOT be working any Sundays. I was assured that this would not happen. Predictably it did happen and I was alone in declining. Anyway, I was expecting to be paid for forty seven and a half hours. The rate of pay was to be £8 per hour, 17p above the minimum wage. Well, I wasn’t expecting more so at least a long day would make the 40 mile round trip worthwhile.
Then I discovered that two 15 minute tea breaks were unpaid. Forty five hours. And then it turned out that the warehouse closes at 17:30 most days and at 17:00 on Friday. There goes another three hours per week. Isn’t that unethical? To offer hours that can’t actually be worked?
Then we discovered that we were on flexi-time. ‘I say, you have tackled that jam mountain with alacrity. Well done! Now you can go home (and not be paid for the rest of the day).’ On other days they wanted us to work ‘overtime’, but paid only at single rate. And that’s why, as things started to get hairy, I said ‘no’ when the kind offer to start at 6am came along. The wee lassie sent to supervise was unamused! It’s a principle thing. I’m not going to drag my aching and weary body from its bed in the middle of the night for an extra net tenner. 06:45 is quite early enough. Other gems from the contract:
[The employer] does not recognise local, public or statutory holidays and any such day will be treated as a normal working day. The business will be closed on Christmas and New Years Day, if you are rota’d to work on Christmas Day or/and on New Years Day, 1 days allocation for each will be deducted from the 28 days.
The Employer does not operate a Company Sick Pay Scheme (Note: statutory sick pay does not cover the initial three days and pays a maximum of £92.05 per week. Try telling your landlord or mortgage provider that you cannot pay this week as you have been unavoidably off sick!)
There are no collective agreements
Should the Employer lose money as a consequence of staff not taking care to [do stuff properly]…disciplinary action…deduct from any monies due to you (including your salary)…limited to 10% of each gross payment…until all loss suffered…has been recovered.
Pay slips are published on-line. There is a £10 charge for resetting forgotten passwords. It costs £2.50 to replace a lost employment card.
Further anecdotal gems gleaned from ad-hoc conversations. Time recording is by facial recognition software. On arrival one is required to look into a camera and a voice says ‘thank you’ when, or if, it recognises your ugly mug. Apparently, if one clocks-in one minute late, 15 minutes pay is lost. Conversely clocking-out a minute early loses another 15 minutes.
The Xmas bonus for permies is a twenty pound voucher which must be spent on company merchandise. Certain products are excluded and there’s a three-week time limit. Given the markups, this probably costs the company about a fiver!
The company does not employ cleaners. Every permie is scheduled to do cleaning from time to time as part of his duties. Hence the kitchen and rest rooms are clean-ish but really needing professional attention. Could do better.
Who suffers this exploitation? Kids who have left school and just ‘wanna job’, eastern Europeans who think that they are being well paid, and many oldies seeing out their final working days. Well, you can’t raise a family and provide them a home on fifty quid a day!
What about the job? Hard physical labour! We arrived on that first morning to an empty warehouse. Things started to be delivered. Trestle tables, wrapping machines, bubble wrap inflators, flat boxes, miles of sticky tape and an appropriate number of dispensers, baskets, gift boxes, freezers, an ITC station – all the equipment needed for the job. The hamper contents were also arriving – booze (Champagne, single malts, other spirits, wine, sloe gin…) chocolates, truffles, mince pies, paté and foie gras, peaches in brandy, jars of jam, curd and marmalade by the thousands, sweet and savoury biscuits, tea, coffee, cake, Selkirk Bannock, chutneys of various kinds, Turkish Delight, stollen; it seemed endless. Everything in glass needed to be individually wrapped. And that’s what we did for two weeks. We carried cases of product from delivery pallet to wrapping machine, where it was unpacked, wrapped, repacked and returned to pallet, suitably labeled as everything now looked identical! The wrapping machines were rather basic affairs. A roll of brown paper and a roll of tissue paper are fed into separate orifices and emerge together. The brown paper is such that expands into a mesh. The motor is controlled by a foot pedal. The papers are ‘cut’ by thrusting the hand in and moving it each way. That was fine for the first half-hour. After a few days we’d all learned to wrap our finger tips in Sellotape to stem the bleeding, chafing and soreness.
After a few weeks we started to build the hampers (without the fresh products) and experimenting with production lines. Yes, moving everything again and stacking partially completed hampers. There was a flurry of activity leading up to the third of December. A certain hamper type was without booze and fresh food, and designed for dispatch to the ‘rest of the world’. Many hundreds of those were sent away on that particular final day of dispatch.
And then it started getting exceedingly busy. A flatpacked walk-in fridge was erected and lots of salmon, venison, duck and cheeses arrived. The idea was that we would build the fresh packs and store them in the fridge until dispatch day. At that point we would add a frozen gel, and insert the fresh pack into the hamper, box it, label it and await ParcelForceMan to whisk it away. Up to this point it had been a fairly impressive operation (apart from running out of brown paper and having to wait a week for 3,500 bottles of Claret). And then slowly but surely it descended into farce. We would constantly be running out of stuff. We would be left waiting while the local supervisor contacted far, far away, to make a decision on how to proceed. I lost track of how many times the Caboc came to an end. ‘Put in two blue cheeses instead’. One hopes the punters are keen on blue cheese! One morning the boss-man decided to cut 1kg truckles of Godminster into quarters and rewrap them as substitutes. Hundreds of small individual cheeses were dug up from somewhere with a short remaining shelf life. They were sent down for disposal as substitutes. We had to wait a few days for extra salmon. And when that ran out we moved onto to frozen salmon. Duck and venison was frequently replaced by chicken, beef, pork and game terrine. Was this fear of over-ordering fresh that might not sell before its before dates? The worst of all was the frozen gel packs. Three domestic freezers had arrived in the first week and were gradually filled with warm gels until they were all full of frozen gels. Although it looked a lot to me, that supply didn’t last long. After that it was pure desperation. A domestic freezer will not freeze industrial quantities of anything overnight, or even in weeks. Despite our best efforts, the frozen ones ran out, then did the partially frozen ones, as did those that were at least cool. At the end the gels were actually warmer than the food they were designed to keep fresh. Pure amateurism. Or just stinginess.
Then the partially built hampers ran out. So more stuff arrived and we resumed building. But once again there were too many absentees. Anything and everything was being dragged out to substitute. If you’re expecting a selection box of luxury chocolates, do you really want a bag of fudge and some tablet? Or a chocolate Christmas tree? Or some star shaped biscuits that stick up above the basket rim and so will likely arrive as crumbs?
On the final Wednesday shed loads of additional workers were sent down from far, far away. After weeks of building hampers carefully and correctly it was distressing/amusing/astonishing to see them being thrown together with gay abandon, the output bearing little resemblance to the advertised product. And to think that the prestigious and beloved clientele are paying through the nose for these luxury items. These are not bargain basement hampers from Kwiksave. The smaller hamper is seventy quid. The most popular, a hundred quid, and the others range up to all of five hundred smackers – not including delivery charges.
So how do I conclude this report? The Congregator observed that the generous person will be blessed and will prosper because he shares his food with the poor. Our Lord encouraged all to practice giving – with the result that the recipients would, in turn, pour into your laps a fine measure, pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. Happy and loyal customers flow not from prestige or beautiful products but primarily from brilliant and sincere customer service. The best customer service emanates from loyal employees who are valued by the business and engaged in the business. They share the rewards. They are enfranchised. Those exploited and treated as a mere resource care little about the company and its customers beyond the purely mercenary and selfish position of protecting ones own job and income stream. Clearly this is a lesson yet to be learned by this employer. Or one that does not need to be learned in a micro-economy dominated by tourism and features low pay, antisocial hours and multiple jobs just to make ends meet. Maybe this too is why the boss is known for never speaking to his employees, rarely even making eye contact. He turned up in the warehouse on the Wednesday of the final week. After six weeks of grueling effort, a few words of encouragement and gratitude might have seemed appropriate. No! He was briefly seen talking to his senior manager and then slunk away. I called across ‘Hello Wallace’ (name changed for my self-protection) but was ignored. It is possible that he didn’t hear me. It has subsequently been suggested that he didn’t want to hear! I had had an interview with him a few years ago for an employment opportunity. I haven’t heard back so just wanted to know whether he has come to a decision yet.
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