Initially, I had planned for my first post to be something lighter and more casual, but needs must.
This morning, I did a shift at a shop I’ve not worked at before. The manager there informed me that the company has started closely watching the CCTV to make sure that all staff are keeping the corona related health and safety measures that have been implemented. If they are not being kept, staff will be fired, without severance pay. He’s already lost two members of his team this way. The company had announced last month that they will be doing redundancies - to be precise, they’re aiming to lose 2000 jobs by the end of the year, and are currently in negotiations with the union over how that will be done.
The fact is, whilst many of the regulations that have been imposed are sensible, they are literally impossible to keep all of the time. For example, the shops are too small and require movement from one workspace to another such that it is not possible to remain two metres apart from other staff members at all times. Similarly, we are supposed to clean all surfaces every 30 minutes. But since we have reduced staff in shops, in an effort both to save money and to make social distancing more feasible, there just aren’t enough people to do everything that needs doing in a day AND clean every surface every 30 minutes. As ideal practices to aim towards, there is nothing wrong with these and similar guidelines that we have been given. But to sack people for not keeping them is not at all reasonable, and since there is a constant stream of communication from shop managers to area managers to higher up, the company administration know this.
As such, this is a fairly transparent way to get out of paying their sacked staff their severance pay. And they will almost certainly get away with it. The union is, to be frank, so far up the company’s arse that they will never challenge a single thing they do. Throughout all of this, they’ve even been using the company as a positive example of how to handle the pandemic, despite their fairly shambolic response.
For me, what makes this especially bad is the amount of loyalty so many staff have to the company. Many people have worked here for decades, and I have heard multiple people unironically describe the company as family. This is of course the product of an extremely effective slew of marketing and of the systematic destruction of any real trade union activity in the company (I know that in the 80s, the union was incredibly active, and many of our current policies that are seen as “treating their workers well” were initially brought in to undermine strikes and destroy that movement). But that many people are loyal staff and have stuck with the company for a long time, and have been happy to, are now going to end up abandoned with nothing over not wearing gloves at the right time or forgetting a mask or something like that, seems to me unnecessary cruelty.
But of course, from the perspective of profit, it is absolutely necessary.
Beyond simply being terrible, it’s also worth noting how the use of corona related regulations can be used to go behind the union’s back and undermine labour rights. This is not something I had anticipated, and I hope that I am alone in that. Otherwise, we’re all in for some nasty shocks over the coming months. That said, we knew that the pandemic would be used as an excuse for wider economic restructuring in the u.k. demanded by Brexit and the accompanying shifts in social formation. But the exact methods of that restructuring, and their cruelty, is still hard to bear.
PS: I refer to ‘the company’ throughout this post because we have a fairly strict social media policy, and I could be fired for this. I chanced that a few times on twitter because I work under my “deadname” but the risk does seem unnecessary. I also want to say that if I lose my job, I am secure enough that I will get by for a few months or so, so I am not in serious danger. My concern is for other people.