Charity bags

I've just been reading back through the posts and realised I hadn't written about the time I worked for a clothing charity. You know the sort- they put a bag through your letterbox and ask you to fill it with your unwanted clothing and leave it out a couple of days later.

I worked for this firm a couple of times. The first time was when they were still based in Kettering and I was asked by my temp agency if I'd do a few shifts shunting the vans as they returned to the depot. The drivers would return to the depot and park the van in a side street. I'd collect the key, drive the van around the block to the loading bay, put the van on the weighbridge while full, then back it up to the unloading bay where a team would unload it. Once it was emptied I'd drive it back to the weighbridge to be weighed, then fuel it and park it in a compound. Repeat until all the vans were empty of goods, full of diesel and parked.
It wasn't too strenuous although it was sometimes stressful getting thirty vans into a tiny compound. It was just possible if you turned all the wing mirrors in and squeezed through the tiniest gap between the vans. Sometimes I was sure I'd miscalculated and wouldn't get the final van away and the gates locked, but somehow I managed to park them all. Once the vans were parked I could go (and still be paid for the full shift) so there was always an incentive to work quickly.

I was offered a job driving a van but turned it down. There were better jobs going at the tims, but a few months later I was offered the work again. By now the firm had moved to Wellingborough and I had to drive there and get there by 6 in the morning, pick up the van and assistant (who sat in the passenger seat all day without exchanging a single word in conversation, listening to Radio 1 at full blast- o joy!)and then drive to the town where we'd be working.

I'm not sure how many vans there were. I guess there were at least thirty. The firm had a contract with a large charitable organisation, and the bags we distributed all had the charity's name printed on it. We'd drive to a town, buy an A-Z street map in order to keep tabs on where we'd been and where we had to return to, and then we'd start work.

Our brief was to distribute 1000 bags to homes in the morning, have a break, then drive around the streets where we'd left bags two days beforehand, pick up any bags that had been left out, and then drive back to the depot. Simple? Er, no.

Some towns were easy to work, especially those with street after street of terraced houses. In some towns there were over a hundred houses in a street, and you'd soon polish off a thousand bags. But once you'd covered those streets you'd move into the more up-market estates where the houses were set back from the road, and there were fences between the gardens. These streets took much longer. Once you'd done those houses, then you'd move on to the detached houses with the long drives, then to the villages surrounding the town....

Unfortunately the person who allocated the work would tell you that you had say, three weeks to cover the town of Hereford, except that there aren't that many houses, and you'd be scratching around after two weeks. You were expected to return to the depot each night with a full van, and some areas were easy, but others were very hard. I remember being told to distribute 1000 bags a day to Ross on Wye and all the surrounding area. I drove to the area, bought an A-Z and found that there weren't more than a few thousand houses in the whole of the county! There were more sheep than houses to be honest.

Urban areas were good, but the yield from rural areas was always very poor. Why was that?

I expect that people who live in rural areas shop more often. They probably buy more clothes and therefore fill their wardrobes more quickly. Every few months a charity bag drops through the letterbox and the householder sees a way of easing the clothes storage problem, while making them feel they are doing their bit for chariddeee.

My experience would bear this theory out. I was sent to Walton on Thames to cover for a sick colleague, and by the end of the afternoon it was hard to get any more bags in the van, it was so loaded. It really was rich pickings compared to deepest rural Herefordshire.

What else did I learn? I loved the different archtectural styles in the old building wherever I travelled, but I'm sad to say that the new builds were all depressingly similar. I'd walk down a street on an estate near Colchester and realise that I could be anywhere. All the houses looked the same. In a lot of cases they were decorated the same, with the same front doors in the same colours. I really could be anywhere. And that's a shame.

In the end I had to pack it in. The money wasn't bad for temping through an agency, but the firm wanted me to work for them direct, and to be paid according to the tonnage I collected. I'd seen enough to realise that the area they offered me (half of Essex outside the M25) would never yield as much as the area within the M25 , so I declined. I was also fed up with the 13 hour days. I was leaving home at 5.30 in the morning, leaving the depot at 6.00, driving for anything up to 120 miles before starting the rounds, walking for three of four hours, then driving around picking up bags and then driving back to the depot, arriving back sometime after 5.30 most nights.
By this time the work arrangements had changed so the drivers were now responsible for weighing and unloading their own vans and then parking them. They were also responsible for fueling them and washing them, and I'd not get home until after 7 at night. That's lot of hours and a lot of miles for minimum wage.

I did a couple of days driving to charity shops collecting bags of unsold clothing. That may come as a surprise to you, but charity shops rely on new stocks coming in every day or week, and they don't keep stock for more than a few weeks at most. If it's unsold after that time, it's bagged up and sent back to the depot.

I recall one journey where I had to drive to Brighton and collect some bags. I arrived at about 9.30 and found the shop. Once I'd loaded up I then drove across country to Tunbridge Wells, then on to Whitstable. My last pickup was supposed to be Minster, but I chose the wrong one and ended up driving around Sheerness instead of further east near Canterbury. By this time it was late afternoon and I still had to drive back. I got back at about 9 o'clock, fifteen hours after i'd set off.

One of my colleagues would drive from Wellingborough to Penzance, then to Falmouth and Plymouth and back- almost every day! He'd be on the road for 15 or sixteen hours a day. There's no way I could do that week in week out. Of course there's nothing to stop a van driver driving these hours- there's no tachograph and so no driver's hours regulations.

Looking back I must admit I enjoyed my time on the charity collections. Although there are many shady operators, the firm I worked for did a good job and performed a useful role in keeping people's wardrobes just empty enough to fit a few new clothes in. The clothes we collected were sold on to Eastern Europe and Africa, providing needy people with good cheap clothes and making a few pounds for the charity in the process.

Did I tell you about when I used to

Did I tell you about when I used to work as a washer upper in a hotel restaurant kitchen? I've had so many different jobs over the years it's hard to remember which ones I've described. So forgive me if I repeat myself.

When you work as a temp there's a dead period over Christmas that lasts up to four weeks. All the factories would shut down and if there was no work, there was no pay. In 1997 or 1998 (I can't remember now)it was fast approaching Christmas and the job prospects looked bleak. A family friend worked in a local hotel and through her I managed to land a job as a lowly kitchen porter on minimum wage.

I remember my first day there. It was obvious that no-one had been taking the cleaning seriously for months. They did just enough to get by, and that wasn't good enough for me. The front of house plates and cutlery were ok (but the cutlery should have been polished to remove the water marks. The kitchen utensils were a different matter. They needed a good scrub, but all they were doing was to put them through the dishwasher. It took a few weeks but I eventually got rid of all the accumulated grease and stains from the pots, pans and platters. We then looked at the deep fat fryer. It was obvious that it may have had the oil changed but no-one had dismantled it for years. There was so much grease and sludge it was hard to tell what it was...

One of the drawbacks of working in a kitchen is that you work a split shift. I would get to work for about 8.00 (someone else had cooked the breakfasts). I took all the deliveries in and put them away (taking care to rotate the milk so that the old stock was used first- something i'm not sure was followed before I got there) Then I'd clean up the breakfast things and completely clear the backlog of washing up. By then it was time for the lunchtime serving. There are periods of intense activity followed by times when the restauant is empty. That's when you need to get ahead. I would peel sprouts. A 28lb net of sprouts takes about an hour to peel and cut a cross in the base.
I'd have a couple of hours off, which is not really enough time to do anything and then it was back for the evening shift.We'd have a full restaurant plus a Christmas party in the ballroom.
When there's a party of 150 all wanting a Christmas dinner at the same time, you need to get ahead. For a couple of hours it's crazy, then it's a mad rush to clear up and get home before it's too late, and then it's back the next morning to do it all again.
I think I got six weeks work in all, then it was back to the agencies. I managed to get the kitchen and all the equipment shiny as new before I left. I wonder how long it stayed that way?
The first jobs they found me were as a kitchen porter at the local college, then as a-
kitchen porter in a local factory.
Eventually some driving work came through and my spell in the catering corps came to an end.

Job mobility

It was Norman Tebbit who encouraged the unemployed in the 1980s to get on their bikes to find work. In the 1960/70/80s it was not uncommon to move around the country as part of your career path. I moved my family 150 miles from Northamptonshire to Somerset when I changed jobs, and then moved them back again three years later. It was the accepted thing back then. In the retail sector, Marks and Spencer made a point of relocating their managers every three or four years, and often from one end of the country to the other. It was how one gained the necessary experience.

So much has changed since then. I would be very reluctant to uproot my family just for a job, when there is no longer such a thing as a job for life; or when loyalty to a particular firm is no longer held in esteem by the employer or considered a good career move by the employee. So what has changed?

Salaries for a start. Back in the mid 80s I was earning about £9k as a shop manager. I bought a house in a town close to where I worked for just over £23k.
Today I'd be lucky to earn 20k (if that), while the same house will now fetch over £130k. My wife was able to stay at home with our children until she found an evening job waitressing. It was (just)possible to manage on one salary.
A man with a young family just can't make that kind of move anymore, without also finding a job for his partner.
Then there is the regional differences in house prices. Kettering is historically one of the cheaper parts of Northamptonshire. A similar size house as ours in say, Northampton would cost £50k more to buy. The further south, the more expensive. This means that I could not afford to relocate any closer to London or the South East, so that means that I have to stay put. If I lived in Stoke (one of the poorest places in the country) there would be now way that we could afford to move to a more expensive area when wages have not kept pace with property prices.
I'd love to live in Cornwall, but house prices are more than double what they are where we live, and salries are much lower.
People are no longer as mobile as they were because of the imbalance between salaries and house prices.
And I fear it will get much worse.

Temping today

No I'm not about to go back to temping.. It's just that I've had a couple of conversations recently that tell me I wouldn't be able to get a job even if I wanted to.

One of our clients is Polish. She works at a fruit & veg processing plant owned by a large retail chain. I recall working there a dozen or so years ago before it was bought by the current owners. At that time most of the staff were Portuguese and were bussed in from Peterborough every day. I mentioned this to my Polish friend and she confirmed that there were still a lot of Portuguese there, along with (I think) Somalis and the inevitable Polish. But no British staff.

I mentioned working at Gilson's Bakery. She had friends there. It was almost all Polish staffed now.

A few weeks ago I met a friend who used to run my Agency. He's now working in Wellingborough. Most of his workers when he was in Kettering were Polish. Once the workforce reaches a critical point where the majority speak Polish, it's not long before everyone must speak it in order to work there.

So I will have to consider learning Polish if I want to work in our local food production factories.

My Agency manager friend was very gloomy about the future. Apparently the EU have introduced a new law that takes effect next October, where temporary staff must be paid the same as permanent staff, with the same rights and benefits. The Law of Unintended Consequences will mean that temporary work agencies will close up, as firms will not hire short term staff at an extra 25% (at least)above what they pay for permanent staff. Another Unintended Consequence may well be that that all staff will become temporary (as in Spain).
The exact wording of the Regulations have still to be decided, but one thing is certain. It will be harder to employ temporary staff, and therefore, harder to find temporary work.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/employment-matters/strategies/awd

Cleaning

I was walking through the hospital corridors this morning when I saw a man wielding a dust sweeper, painstakingly collecting every fibre of dust along the margins of the corridor, and it reminded me of the time a dozen or so years ago when I worked as a cleaner at Whitworths in Irthlingborough. I'd worked there a few times in the production area doing various jobs. Sometimes I'd run a packing line, where we'd run a machine that put pre-packed bags of sultanas or other dried fruit into the cartons. Easy and repetitive (as long as the machine behaves itself). Another time I worked on the dried apricot production line. When the apricots arrive at the factory they are well and truly dried into a hard mass. They are soaked in a weak acid in order to separate them and soften them. Funny enough, I haven't fancied one since then.
Then I worked in the pepper and spice department for a shift. I was on the floor above the packing line. I had to keep the pepper flowing through a hole in the feed hopper where it was gravity fed into the little pots that you buy in the shops. I used a broomstick.
Such variety! Those little packs of casserole mix? Packed them. Currants, sultanas and raisins? Packed them as well.

Then there was the small matter of disposing of all the cardboard and packaging that the raw materials came in. I worked on the baler for a few shifts before I reached the pinnacle of my time there. I joined the cleaning team.
We cleaned the wash areas and the toilets around the factory. We kept the rest rooms and canteens clean, sweeping and mopping. We emptied the ashtrays in the smoking areas, we picked up any rubbish lying around.
And we spent a long time hiding away, because with all the will in the world it only takes fifteen minutes to sweep and clean the restrooms after the mid-shift breaks,and the rooms weren't dirty anyway. We found an empty office in an old part of the site and made ourselves scarce for an hour at a time. It was a big site and they just assumed that we were working at the other end. The place was spotless, so if we didn't do even the little bit we did, then you'd soon notice.

So we squirrelled ourselves away, reading books and doing the crossword, waiting for the next foray with mop, broom and bucket.
I drove past the site last year. It's gone. All the buildings demolished, with no trace of the busy and bustling enterprise that employed hundreds of staff over three shifts just a decade before. They're going to build houses, but where will all those potential buyers find jobs to pay their mortgages?

Back to work

I started writing this blog while I've been off work having treatment for leukaemia. I've more or less finished listing the jobs that I've done over the last 43 years, and I'm having my hopefully final appointment with the specialist this week. Whatever the outcome, I'm back to work from Wednesday.

I've been blessed in that I'm working in a small independent solicitor's office, and they've kept my job open for the past 13 months. I was also lucky in having critical illness insurance cover, and that has now finished after 12 months of paying our mortgage. We, like everyone else I know, can't afford to live on only one income, so I have to go back to work.

That small fact is one noticeable change over the last 40-50 years. back in the 60s a man could earn enough to have his wife stay at home and run the household. Not any more.

Twenty five years ago I worked as a retail manager and earned about £10k. When I left the retail sector fifteen years ago that had risen to just under £20k.
I did a lot for the money. I recruited and trained my staff, ordered all the stock for the shelves, did all the merchandising, handled all the cash and bankings and was responsible for the security (yes I even arrested shoplifters and confronted and ejected louts who'd congregate in my shop).

These days the job pays considerably less. Why? Because the job has shrunk. The manager is now nothing more than a glorified key holder. EPOS takes care of the day to day ordering. Head Office allocations take care of the rest. 90-95% of my takings were in cash, nowadays it's far less. There's no doubt that the job has changed and the industry is far more centralised.
My friend used to work in a major booksellers. He was employed on the national minimum wage (which is also the national maximum wage in some jobs). Part of his job included being a keyholder from time to time. That's how far the job has changed.

It's quite hard to find a job that allows one to use one's initiative. Jobs are micro-managed and all creativity is stifled. It may be because the product/service demands uniformity of delivery, and it may be because the quality of staff is such that they can't be trusted to use their heads. The downside is that we have produced a generation who are almost incapable of showing initiative, of using their heads.

Red tape and regulation has chaged the workplace. There is a thing as The Law of Unintended Consequences. Take Employment Law.

It was originally introduced to give employees some protection from unscrupulous bosses who could sack you without notice. That is a good thing.
The Law of Unintended Consequences (LUC)kicked in, and now bosses won't hire anyone for fear of being unable to get rid of him or her.
Health and Safety was once a matter of common sense. Some aspects of the Law are reasonable, but LUC has made over-regulation a barrier to employing staff.
Maternity leave and sick pay sound great, but LUC has made these a major barrier to bosses taking young female staff on.

I could go on. The workplace is not what it once was.

I learned a few things down the years. I discovered very early on that the staff who make themselves indispensable and never have a day off or take holidays are 9 times out of 10 on the fiddle. This has been born out time and time again.
A friend of my boss ran a two-branch business a few miles away. A couple of years ago he bought new accounting software as his business was booming. It immediately showed a discrepancy in the books. He initially blamed the software, but after a major investigation it uncovered a long lasting and systematic theft by a senior and trusted member of staff amounting to thousands. He has since gone out of business.

About twenty years ago I was asked to manage a different branch of the bookshop chain I worked for. I hated it. I hated the journey. I hated the fact that the shop was in the middle of a building site and it was impossible to keep clean. I walked in one day to find a piece of the concrete ceiling had come away and brought the false ceiling down.
But what I hated most was the discovery after just a few days that my assistant manager was on the fiddle. The shop floor staff knew it but he'd intimidated them into keeping quiet. My predecessor and the area manager were oblivious to it.
They didn't believe me when I broached the subject. It was difficult to convince them, because they should have picked it up but hadn't. And yet it was obvious to my trained eye and years of cynical experience.
He confessed once he was confronted and was dismissed. Once he'd gone the staff told the whole sad and sorry story. Of how he'd walk out with armfuls of videos on the days when he managed the store. He was taking cash and stock and it took an outsider's pair of eyes to notice.

Luckily these incidents are few and far between.
But every system that's ever been set up and declared foolproof will always tempt someone to cheat it.

Fork Lift trucks

I first used a fork lift truck back in the 70s when I worked on the night shift at Tesco. I had no training or elfin safety in the use of the reach truck. my options were simple. I needed a pallet from the top of the racking and there was no-one else to get it down but me. I'd watched a few people use the machine so I worked out what each lever and pedal did, and then jumped on. It was a hair-raising experience, and I guess it stayed the same even when, many years later I'd taken my test and was passed fit to be allowed loose on one.
There are a number of different types of forklift but the two main types are reach and counterbalance. For the scientifically minded a folk lift truck is a lever, (just as a shovel is)and if you try and lift too heavy a weight, or put the weight too far in front of you, the truck will lose stability. It also helps to have good eyesight and co-ordination, as I found out quite quickly.
A reach truck has a long wheel base with the front legs positioned in front of the forks and to either side. My truck had a single steering/driving wheel beneath the driver's seat, which makes it quite manoevrable, as it can turn almost in its own wheelbase length. It's very stable but not as fast as a counterbalance truck, which relies on a solid ballast weight at the rear of the truck to counter the weight of the object carried. You can always tell if the truck is overloaded as the driving wheels come off the ground and it becomes a seesaw.
One evening I was taking a pallet of coffee from the top deck of the racking and failed to notice a supporting cable between the rack and the roof. I drew the pallet out, reversed the truck and very neatly skimmed the top layer of coffee jars off the pallet and crashing down around my ears. This creates a dilemma. Do I sit tight and be covered in coffee powder and broken glass or do I get off the truck and risk being hit by full cases?
As I grew in confidence (albeit not much confidence) I used to be called to move pallets for other people, and even to unload lorries (once I'd transferred to days), and the regular forklift driver was on lunch. Eventually I moved on to other jobs and careers and left it all behind.
Until the turn of this century when I found myself at a distribution warehouse dealing in tenpin bowling equipment. This time the truck was an ancient battery driven counterbalance truck that wasn't quite up to the job.
I lost count of the times my heart was in my mouth as I unloaded a full pallet of bowling balls that overloaded the truck by at least 50%. Or the times I held my breath as I tried to retrieve a very heavy pallet from the top of the racking at the limit of its capacity. I worked there for three years and never had an accident, but it was a close run thing on more than one occasion.
There's something utterly buttock clenching about inching across the warehouse floor with a very heavy pallet of very expensive machinery on the forks, and the rear wheels having only the most tenuous contact with the floor.
And then knowing that this is only the first pallet and there's a whole 40ft container still to unload.
When that job ended and I was back in the market place I had another qualification, namely a current fork lift licence. And yet it was the last job I wanted.
I recall going for an interview at a distribution company as a progress chaser, but not getting through the interview but finding myself undergoing an impromptu fork lift driving test in the warehouse. I was awful. I took ages to do the simplest task. My nerve had gone. I didn't get that job either, and I'm glad about that.

While on the subject of forklift truck driving, my son left school at age 16 with ten GCSEs and an utter contempt for the education system in this country. I got him registered with my main employment agency and he was soon earning a man's wages. He saw that he could earn more than the basic minimum wage by training to get his forklift licence, so he paid over £200 to take it. At that time the basic agency hourly rate was £4.50 per hour, while a forklift driver could expect £6.50 because they were in short supply. My son actually held a forklift licence before he passed his test to drive on the roads.
With the rising number of unemployed looking for work, the Jobcentre started sending them on forklift training courses. (Sending people on courses is the main way the Jobcentre keeps the unemployment rates down. If you're on a course, you're not seeking work.)
The consequence was that within a year or two there was a glut of forklift truck drivers and they no longer commanded a higher wage. The last I heard, the basic hourly rate at the local agencies was approaching £6 per hour, but forklift rates were still at £6.50. You have to speak Polish as well.

It's good to know that the law of Supply and Demand still holds good.