RE: Agency Work - The Dark Future.

Please give "The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp" a read before continuing.

<img alt='buzzoole code' src='https://buzzoole.com/track-img.php?code=8ac5d1aedd9d248eb55d5957d518d983' />

I recently worked for about 9 hours without a break the other day for a famous British company. One of the managers was decent enough to state that there was no job at the end of it and considering that I want to make something of my life I packed the job in.  The work involved 10/15 miles worth of walking each day and I was making 1/3 less than the full-time staff, working on a zero-hour basis and at any moment I could have been shown the door. The level of stress that this style of business places upon employees cannot be understated and in most cases many refuse to leave first, they will work and work until they break. I decided to leave first.

There are others that may have children or a mortgage or a car, they don't have the option to walk away as I have done, before some company throws them away. In the case of the Amazon Warehouse Temp Jeff Lockhart Jr. was striving for a full-time job so that his family could live a decent life.

A lot of companies rely on temp staff these days. I have worked alongside people from all walks of life working as temps, from middle managers, engineers, pensioners, mothers and fathers, graduates, school leavers. You name it and someone is probably out there right now working as a temp, desperately trying to gain full-time employment.

From my experience of temping for several companies and having spoken to workers all along the chain of command. I can easily tell you that companies are hiring temp staff as they have bitten off more than they can chew. Instead of seeking to develop fully trained staff, companies can afford to spend the premium hourly agency rates because they find it more preferable to be able to discard a person at a moment's notice then to actually treat someone with respect and train them to do a job that needs doing. (E.G Delivering your NHS results, handling special mail, a good chunk of this is now being done by agency workers.) 

In order to keep costs low, this means paying people a low rate and demanding a lot of work from both agency & full-time staff. Requesting overtime from staff repeatedly and refraining from taking on actual staff is becoming accepted. In regards to building a stronger, sustainable and more equal society....this is not the way to go. We have a vampyric economy that physically drains workers and companies discard the individual like an old printer.

"One worker told officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that 15 people had collapsed in a single day." - Amazon sustains itself from the blood of it's workers. As do many other companies.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading,

I doubt I will be buying from Amazon any time soon.

From Keeping A Log

Afterthought:

The other day I had a dreadful dream and I awoke feeling drained, as if I had never slept. I envisioned a world where lives were forfeit for money. Families that loved one another dearly were watching their mothers and fathers sacrifice themselves for a few tokens of gold and before the family picked a single piece up some disgusting crawling husk of humanity dragged itself over to money and fell upon half the coins. Everyone was constantly running on wheels that powered some great train whilst the air turned black.  As one person collapsed, another was thrown in, the body cast aside and the machine kept on moving forward. Children were being shepherded from out of their schools and onto this machine. Some would climb into the wheel like an anxious babe before running on the wheel just like their parents had done. Every middle man and manager was grinning like a Hyena and the crowds kept repeating in a soulless monotonous tone that a "a job is a job, a job is a job".  A great weight, just a slab of black, was slowly lowered upon the creaking train. I heard crumbling noises, they kept on repeating their mantra until it all went silent. 

I'm not sleeping well at the moment.

RE: Why do graduates work in non-graduate jobs?

As an agency worker a few people have asked me how someone with a degree ends up working on zero hours in air vents or raising invoices or now working for a prestigious delivery service.

A fair question and I can offer a blunt answer:

Life doesn't always turn out how you want.

We can blame politicians, headteachers (regular hour long assemblies about why YOU need a degree), business leaders for failing to invest in the people of Britain however whilst we try to determine who crashed the car, a cold hard truth remains: We all need to bring in money one way or another. I cannot ignore my rent with the declaration of "I have a degree" and when the bailiffs come to repossess the home I cannot shoo them away with the fact that "I have a degree".

Having a degree does not guarantee anyone a decent UK based job. A degree enabled me to work in China and live independently outside the U.K. In Britain, gaining a degree no longer represents what it used to. The people of Britain have chosen a world view that puts profit first. Profit in an ideal situation represents efficiency and the ability to create more money than what a company needs to pay staff, materials and fuel costs. The best example I can find right now is the fact that the British Steelmill in Redcar is being shut down for reasons relating to profit. It is owned by foreign companies but the British have decided to let those from across the sea lay waste to the workers and their aspirations for the sake of profit. The individual dreams that we may have are cast aside whilst our business leaders and politicians worship greed and gold above everything else.

When weplace profits above all else, the general population are damned. If a person or company is incapable of generating money then that entire lot is condemned to destitution. Until the British learn that another way is possible, that our desire to see profits is irrelevant if workers are feeling cold and unable to prosper...we will continue to zero hours, we will continue to see hopes dashed and graduates will continue to take whatever job they can find in order to keep a roof over their head.

Britain faces a crisis of underemployment.

Every year we have more graduates leaving university and they will take any job they can find whilst looking for that "dream job". The jobs we take are often for a fraction of the wage that is normally paid for that job and in my case done under a  zero hour arrangement. Britain faces a tide of potential "scabs" (workers that will take your job, for next to nothing and agencies are the ones looking for to fill those gaps caused by strikes). I have been called into companies after staff have been laid off or lost. I do the jobs that other people used to do and agents do the work for a few quid less. This destroys the ability of existing staff to fight for stronger wages or any sort of job security because managers know that at the drop of a hat, many people will come running to pick that hat up and fulfil that job. When looking for work, often we don't mind entering at a low wage if it means after a few months we can push for a raise after proving ourselves. Sadly after a few months people tend to wake up and realise that the job barely pays and they need another, or there is no real review coming and "you're better off buying a lottery ticket".. (It is not uncommon for people to have more than 1 or 2 jobs now as they try to make ends meet.)

This race to the bottom shall never cease and until the working class wake up and realise what is happening then things will continue down this path. I work alongside many migrants, I wouldn't pin our downfall on migrants for they are just like me, simply trying to survive and we are both physically getting out there and trying to work to survive. We no longer work to live, we work to merely survive. #StayPositive :D

I am off to watch cartoons, have a shower and sleep.

Take it easy and thank you for reading.

Michael