book packing: 20p/hour is an insult

book packing: 20p/hour is an insult: Still not a living wage Well it has been announced that there will be a 20p rise in minimum wage taking effect in October 2015 ...

book packing: I feel like an idiot

book packing: I feel like an idiot: Yesterday I arrived, a little late for the start of 10-6 shift, but that's not the point I want to make here, as I walked in my team l...

I didn't ask the CEO ...

A a presentation by the CEO, all warehouse and office staff on the site were there, sitting on wedding style chairs as we were subjected to a speech by the CEO about how the merger has been successful in maintaining the company's position in the changing market of book publishing.  He announced higher than forecast profits of 6% (for which word has it that the full time staff will receive a bonus) and that the company made a profit of £69 million and that this was good as it would strengthen the company in terms of ... he listed some areas of business that went over my head the but one resonated loud and clear and set off a massive siren in my whole body was that this level of profit would serve to enable job security among the company's employees ...

well did he realize he was addressing warehouse staff working tenuous contracts for minimum wage?

I formulated a question in my head, ' Mr Well Done, please explain how this £69nmillion profit relates to job security for warehouse staff on 7 and half hours/week contracts at a rate that is below a living wage?'

I sat there formulating just the right phrasing to make my point direct and articulate, which was pretty straightforward, I have to say and then I talked myself through a motivational exercise along the lines of, only regret the things you haven't done, just take one small step at a time, the first is simply to stand up and gesture that I have something to say, the rest would just follow:

the moment for questions came and one person asked about working with 2 computer systems and then the meeting wound up, people clapped, I didn't, and neither did those sitting around me,

I hadn't moved.

I hadn't moved.

I hadn't moved.

I didn't act.

I was dumb.

I was mute.  I was inert.

Damn me, damn me damn damn me, I let that opportunity pass, the moment when I had a chance to speak out, to make a difference, I had the chance of an audience with all the staff on the site and someone in management and I just sat there on the golden chair clutching the goody bag.

The goody bag had Nigella Lawson's book Nigellissima, ISBN 9780701187330, I love the way Nigella writes so candidly about food and eating, not that I can really afford to by the ingredients to actually practice her recipes, it's a diet of lentils and boiled eggs for me, but the book is suitably aspirational and I like the pictures, she doesn't mess around with mixing colours on the plate, the food in most of the cooking books we pack looks to me like a plate of vomit.

Fuck them.

And their bloody core values the most celebrated of which was HEART-

HEAVY EXPLOITATION AND REAL TYRANNY - corporation halfwit fuckers, bunch of idiots wearing cuff links and serving the stakeholders and investors.

20p/hour is an insult

Still not a living wage

Well it has been announced that there will be a 20p rise in minimum wage taking effect in October 2015 ...

and quite frankly that is insulting, just like it’s insulting in the warehouse when they tell us that there will be sweets available to us at meetings that are targeted to making us work more efficiently …

Is it me? 

Am I just too sensitive?

There is a big drive these days for efficiency, and of course it’s the workers that get pushed for greater productivity,

So we’ve mostly we've reacted by slowing down, and the offer of sweets and meetings is simply condescending, extremely condescending, makes me want to react...

However there’s a nice bloke Freddie, we both have 14 year old sons, not exceptional really but my son lives in Tehran so I only get to be with him a few times a year, I often consult Freddie to get an insight in to the world of 14 year old boys.  This started one day as we were both browsing Sam Stern’s cookbook, Cooking up a Storm, ISBN 9781844287741 and wondering if it might be suitable for our respective sons, as a Christmas present for his son and for me to take on my impending visit to my son in Tehran.  So the conversations have continued and recently Freddie has been very concerned about getting enough shifts because he hasn’t been able to save enough money to cover his boy’s bus pass for the term ahead and payment is due at the end of the month.

I don't see Freddie every day, he isn't getting the shifts he needs, during the winter slump in book sales we've all had to take a cut in the number of shifts we get offered each week and this can be very problematic in terms of covering living expenses, in Freddie's case, he's struggling to save for his boy's bus fare to school, but he's been saving gradually and when asked him last week he told be that he's getting there, £70/term is what he's needed to save.

Bloody hell.

Yesterday  there was a book sale, I chose novel that I thought might be a good read for my boy, I asked Freddie at the sale what his boy liked to read ... but I've forgotten his answer, may be because I was in awe that he could tell me with such accuracy, I felt like a voyeur to an intimate parent child relationship, so I blanked it immediately, not that I'm jealous exactly, just that it's another world, one from which I've been excluded. My boys have grown up with paid carers or family of their step mother, while I've been excluded so this domestic insight was  somewhat tittillating, and definitely   problematic. My conversations with Freddie about our teenage boys allows me to play at being a parent again, takes me back to the school gate and banal conversations about lost PE shorts and costumes for the Christmas play, I'm role playing of course.  The reality of my parenting experience is pounding the streets of Tehran.

At lunch time Freddie approached me as I was sitting among the group telling silly stories and they were all wondering if I would actually be able to eat the bucket load of cooked beetroot I'd brought in for  my lunch!!

Freddie asked if my boy likes football ... no I said, he's into skateboarding and magic tricks.  Later back in the warehouse, Freddie told me he's seen a book on football and thought that my boy might like it because boys all over the world are in to football (I'd made an aside at lunch table that my boy was far to cool to be into football), and now I really regretted this, ouch, he'd actually bought a book for me to take for my boy and I'd rejected it, God, I'm and idiot.

Shit, he's saving for his kid's bus fare and bought a book for me to take for my boy, ouch, I need to accept this and cover the cost.

About £1, he accepted.  And I will take the book to my boy and tell him about Freddie, who struggles for save money for his boy's bus fare.

And the point of telling all this is that his struggle will not be relieved by the insulting gesture of minimum wage set to rise by 20p rise/hour.

I feel like an idiot

Yesterday I arrived, a little late for the start of 10-6 shift, but that's not the point I want to make here, as I walked in my team leader was there with his clipboard, the usual greetings were exchanged and then he  told me that I was the only agency worker on the later shift today - fine, aren't I the chosen one - was the greeting I received throughout the day from the other warehouse operatives all full time staff on almost double my wage. 

The thing is, and this is a something that really bothers people, there are 2 types of warehouse operative, those on permanent contracts and those employed by an agency on 7 and half hours a week contracts  (and more labour is hired during busy periods, and people are working on a totally as hoc 0 hour agreement).  I am on a contract for 7 and half hours a week, as are most warehouse workers.

In the team meeting that morning our team leader was handing out pieces of paper to all the permanent staff, he didn't look at me as he announced that this was an outline of the new benefit package awarded to staff,

'ah is that the benefits' package for the (...) staff?'

It was a subtle protest I thought later on, but I was glad that I at least I'd made some response, better to have reacted than not to have reacted.  There I was standing around in a meeting with my co workers, we are all warehouse operatives and collectively responsible for moving the books around and getting them dispatched on to the lorries for distribution, on one level and on another I am doing this job on minimum wage and everyone else around me is paid considerable more/hour, in fact they get about £10/hour and now this updated benefit package waved under my nose, right in my face ... I don't know ... am I expected to just stand there, an exploited worker in dumb acceptance of such blatant inequality?  

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." George Orwell, Animal Farm

And we in the warehouse are at the bottom of the pile, low down on the hierarchy, working in conditions that are profoundly inhumane ...

Later on I was packing alongside Jim, who told me that if I'd been at the meeting last Friday, a special meeting with the warehouse management staff, he said it would have made me furious - the importance of teamwork was stressed - during the meeting.

Jim told me he was looking forward to April when he'd turn 55. He'd then start getting pension repayments from the 30 years he'd spent working for a bank,  and then he would no longer be totally reliant on the wages he got from the 2 jobs he was doing; book packing like me, and  delivering Chinese takeaways.  I asked him what he planned to do when he didn't have to spend so much of his life working, his immediate response was

- to spend more time with my wife -

 that was the most beautiful thing anyone could ever have said, spot on, I thought.

He is 55 years old, looking forward receiving his pension repayments, and the big change would be more time with his wife, wow, wow, wow, that was very humbling for me.  Partly because I don't have a wife or a husband or any one person in particular that I share my life with, so I was in awe of that, and that such a basic and fundamental human condition was being denied because of the time spent working to cover basic costs of putting food on his table; that was shocking, he's worked all his adult life and just wants time with his life-long partner,

this doesn't really add up.

Seems very wrong.
 

the white Lamborghini

At lunch break today I took my usual lunchtime spot in the canteen, and was joined by another regular and his cheese sandwiches (he eats cheese sandwiches every day, has done for the past year at least,  it used to be Marmite, then one day he announced the change, a cheese sandwich, and it has been cheese ever since), anyway, we started talking about cars because someone was selling his Jag. and the youngster had wanted to look at it (purely aspirational he confided).

A bloke in a blue shirt with cufflinks put down a plate of chips and a plastic cartoon of canteen food on the counter and planted himself opposite us, highly irregular, the bar that divides the canteen is usually only occupied by warehouse staff, those that like to natter and get a good banter going as we refuel during our short and unpaid lunch break, who's this then?

"I've counted the chips so don't think of helping yourself", then he went off to get a fork and soon returned, 
" I wouldn't eat chips without ketchup anyway" was my response, bloody hell I thought, he thinks we want to eat his chips, they looked good, but helping myself certainly hadn't crossed my mind,

then I turned to Ned to resume our conversation about cars, the cufflinks butted in some comment about not being concerned with car brands any more and that he'd lived in Toronto where he owned  a Bugati and lived in an apartment in a location that would be the London equivalent of  Mayfair but that in Toronto it was 2000 meters square, and that he doesn't agree with the overinflated cost of cars in this country, so he doesn't have fancy cars any more,

"well I'd like a Lamborghini"

"I have a friend who has a Lamborghini",

long silence from Ned and I,

and the memory came to mind of the ridiculous challenge I'd set myself in an Essex nightclub on a recent night out for cocktails with my nieces that had just turned 18; the quest was to pick up a guy with a Lamborghini,

I couldn't help myself, and although my voice was confident and I looked him straight in the eye as I urged myself to say it aloud, but I might have been  blushing when I asked,

"is your friend single?"

Ned, "you couldn't resist that could you?",  also blushing,

"he's gay",

"oh,
actually, I'm on the look out for a boyfriend with a Lamborghini, you see, I get around on a pushbike, but sometimes think it would be lovely to be picked up in car and taken out at the weekend, and then it occurred to me that if I was to be driven around it shouldn't just be any car ... and that got me thinking about what would be my ideal car to be driven around in, and I came up with Lamborghini, they are wonderful machines, and that's why I'm looking for a boyfriend with a Lamborghini."

"What about a Ford Fiesta?"

"No, absolutely not, why would I want to travel in a Ford Fiesta?"

"On a recent trip to the Bertelsmann Head Office  ..."

"What, you mean the head office of the corporation?"

"Yes"

"You meet the staff there?"

"Yes"

"Well, I have a message for them, can you pass it on?"

A concerned look from the cufflinks as he shoveled fork loads of dripping brown noodles into his gob,

"ask them if they are aware that there are workers in the UK distribution warehouse working on minimum wage, and don't they think this might be bad for the reputation of the corporation?

Can you pass that message on?"

"Well actually I think a cap on wages is not such a bad thing",

"I would agree if the cap was set at the rate of a living wage, but the current minimum wage is below that of a living wage",

"Ah yes"

Ned looking as if he's thinking - oh here we go another living wage rant -

"well actually the people I meet are in IT; I am just a contractor ...

so how is the Lamborghini driver going to go with the minimum wage?"

HA, YOU'RE ON MINIMUM WAGE and you think you can pull a guy with a Lamborghini?

Fuck, now I'm red with fury, what is he getting at? where's the connection? Well Yes I do actually, I don't have status issues, but it seems that he and the rest of the world does.

I looked at Ned, I need back up here boy,

so I tried to get back to the relatively uncontentious issue of the car and asked what colour his freind's Lamborghini was,

white,

oh yuk, that's no good I said, to regain some dignity,

and then I got twitchy and felt I needed to go, I can't remember what he was saying as I was putting the lid back on my lunch box (it actually never fits properly anyway, all I wanted for Christmas was a lunchbox with a properly fitting lid) but I recollect the words Lamborghini and minimum wage being repeated and restructured in each phrase, in between mouthfuls of drippy noodles and chips,

I left,

I got back to the warehouse and realized I was actually 2 minutes early; no one is ever back from lunch break early.

                                                     ----------------------------------


On reflection, cufflinks completely missed my point, I'm thinking aesthetics and all that idiot  could see was an impossible scenario of a warehouse operative on minimum wage aspiring to having a boyfriend with an expensive and high status car, got me thinking that people really do have issues about status, that it really means something to them, that some people really do construct opinions of others based on their perceived income, so he assumed I must be very poor and clearly thought I must be deluded to think I could hook a guy that drives an expensive car.

This bothers me.  Let's put aside the notion that I do want to catch a guy in the first place in order to focus on the status problem. I am beginning to realize that it matters to people, that as a warehouse operative doing a manual job on minimum wage I that I am somehow excluded from an association with people with better wages, is this what cufflinks was getting at??

This got me thinking about a book I'd browsed once by Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, ISBN 9780375725357. And then I found a film based on the book, it's on youtube, it was a great comfort, I placed myself as highly evolved in terms of the complex problem of status that is a major disorder in contemporary western societies, in that I must have reached the enlightened state of being a 'bohemian' and cufflinks - matey was still confused with status issues.

My fury has subsided and my equilibrium returned, thank you Alain de Botton.