msgyorkie:
I have been flat out this year, havent stopped. Didnt even get a chance of furlough. I even asked for furlough this lockdown and was told “no way, we are way too busy!”
The money I have earned this year is so far looking like its going to be my best ever. The downside is I’m knackered as all 3 of my holidays were cancelled this year and had to do some DIY at home instead. 
I have been offered all the work I can eat as well, but just not at premium rates any longer.
I was looking forward to a long paid holiday when this furlough system was originally announced, but it has been left to employers rather than the employed to define “who gets” and “who doesn’t”.
I dipped out in the end because it would have been involving the optimum amount, had the system been fair and forthright, rather than “open to interpretation”. So a “pecking order” got introduced.
It was then an easy affair to drag up some past sins that I’d already been carpeted for, and I’d considered “cleared down”, to use the excuse so the agency then didn’t feel obliged to help me out.
Plenty of offers of low-paid work from other agencies, as it seems to be the case that “getting caught sinning” at the larger firms is directly proportional to the size of the pay and union presence at said firm.
Thus, at places like Royal Mail, I’m getting a bead drawn upon me the moment I walk through the gate, and now Supermarkets seem to be going down the same angle, a regimen where if your face doesn’t fit - you’re gone…
“Low pay, no union” firms however? - I’ll probably not run into such problems in the future. It easier to hide at such places, as well. The only trap to avoid - is getting out of this 55-84 hours per week rat race, which the higher hourly rate firms - won’t let you do so many hours, but lower pay rates - you find yourself pushing such hours - just to play “catchup” with one’s former bottom line, if one isn’t careful…
A difficult pill to swallow all in all, for sure - but my best bet for the future is to avoid all those shysters on the top platform who seem to think my behaviour steps on their toes all the time, rather than vice-versa when I mouth off about how appalled I am the way things like their own rules, and laws of the land are routinely side-stepped and double-standards abound. There truly IS no “respect and equal rights in the workplace” amount these Liberal-Left leaning firms.
It is NOT “Illegal” to drive an artic down Shooter’s Hill Road A2 for example, so I object to being lied to that it is.
It IS a legal requirement to report RIDDOR situations, rather than “cover them up” so the firm doesn’t get fined by the HSE.
But two arguments I’ve had with “officialdom” at the larger firms in the past…
Maybe I would have fared better over the years - if I’d been Jewish, Black, Gay, or Female eh?
Such is the dislike, that I’m most appalled of all at the level of dishonesty it has taken by firm’s old hands to put me in my current predicament, where I am politically destroyed, rather than just openly sacked on a whim that went down in print, the formal dismissal letter…
Any firm has got a right to sack anyone it pleases. It is time firms owned that, and just did what they felt they needed to do, without buggering around with this “office politik” thing, as if I were in a position to litigate… I stand about as much chance successfully litigating over any former “bad treatment” as Trump has of overturning this recent election… “Slim” at best… Why be afraid of just being openly abusive to me then? At least it would be Honest… I wasted 10 days back in April when I was just getting shifts cancelled at the last minute, because the Agency couldn’t be bothered to tell me that the main client had “let me go”.
That was dishonest of the Agency, but none of us would be surprised by such stock-and-trade behaviour from perhaps the biggest shysters of all.
