OK - First to introduce myself. I work in a 7-11 store in the UK on a three week rotating shift of 40 hour weeks. In any given week the five 8+ hour shifts will be earlys, middles or lates depending on the rota. there are no weekends off but we do get one Sunday in three. I'm in my fifties, work at the Supervisor level with a Manager above me and at any time about three shop assistants to supervise. The work is hard and repetative. When you are not serving customers you are 'working stock' (ie getting the stock from the store onto the shelves or from the delivery cages into the store. Also there is the cleaning, baking and other general duties to see to. Wages are about £7 per hour for supervisors and £6.10 per hour for shop assistants (ie minnimum wage).
In the coming weeks I hope to give you a snapshot of what it is like to work at the bottom of the employment ladder in the UK (not all bad I assure you), but I want to start first with a situation that has arisen that MAKES MY BLOOD BOIL!
We have lost in the last few weeks, by natural wastage, about 60 hours of labour from the shop floor (One woman left, another has effectively gone onto permanent sick and a third part timer has left to have a baby and does not intent to return). Our manager (who I love to bits) approached our absentee boss to say that we needed to replace the staff with new employee's (other staff were already working to their maximum capacity) and could he arrange for the position(s) to be advertised. She was told that it had been decided that, rather than take on staff in the normal manner to fill the hours, we were going to employ 'work-experience' personell directly from the job-centre's, two at thirty two hours per week each. These poor schmucks would be paid £2 per hour each, kept on for 6 months and then replaced with new ones ad infinitum.
When this was relayed to me I was aghast. There had to be some mistake. It had to be in contravention of the terms of utilising such workers to use them to fill jobs that had been immediately previousely vacated by employee's paid at full, albeit national minnimum, wage. To do so would be no more than just a circimvention of the law pertaining to payment of wages and highly damaging to the overall work pool of 'real' jobs to boot!
(to be Continued.........)
