RE: Guardian article pt1 Quote: “...We are busier than ever.”9 Apr 2020 11:28
Pt2
But another worker said: “I don’t understand why we are practically being forced to work when clothing retail is not exactly an essential service and it seems the company care more about profit than staff. They should take example from Next and River Island that have already closed their warehouses.”
One worker said huge sales had fuelled demand: “We’ve had 400,000 orders built up over the last week. Normally there are 120,000 at any one time, at most. Even at Christmas and New Year we wouldn’t have anything like that much.”
Each order contains on average 2.5 items, meaning workers have to rush around the 1.2m sq ft warehouse picking them for each consignment, sometimes clocking up 20 miles during a shift. Workers say the aisles are 4ft (1.2 metres) wide, meaning it is inevitable that they pass each other closely.
“The bosses tell us to keep two metres apart but they aren’t actually instructing anybody in how they are supposed to do that,” said one worker. “Then they have a go at people because they aren’t meeting their KPIs [key performance indicators]. Each picker is expected to pick 80 items an hour, but obviously if someone else is in the aisle they need and they wait until they come out, the KPIs go down.”
In a joint statement, PLT and Clipper Logistics, which runs the warehouse on behalf of the fashion firm, denied that any staff had been disciplined for failing to meet their targets and said they had rearranged the warehouse to make social distancing possible. “The extra measures we have put in place to keep our teams safe do have an impact on the speed that our teams can work and we recognise that this will be the case until things return to normal,” they said. They claimed a maximum of 275 people worked in the warehouse on any one shift, though the Guardian’s sources said that in busy periods that could increase to 400.
In addition, the lowest paid workers were told this week that instead of a planned pay rise of 35p an hour, which would have increased their hourly pay to £9, they would get just 15p extra. “Morale was already at rock bottom,” said one worker. Staff said it was “a joke” that they were being considered key workers.
Clipper Logistics has other warehouses for food companies and was this week contracted to build a new supply chain for NHS personal protective equipment (PPE) products. “They don’t have to furlough us. They could move us to another warehouse where we would actually be doing essential work,” said one staff member.
Boo Hoo, set up by Umar’s father, Mahmud, has a distribution centre in Burnley, Lancashire, which is also busier than ever, according to workers.
A warehouse operative said despite managers repeating distancing guidelines during morning briefings, the number of orders coming in meant workers could not adhere to them.
“You’ve got to understand the amount of stock we’re dealing with. We’re getting thousands of cartons coming in every day,” they said.
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