The usual way it used to work at Supermarkets - was that you got planned for 15 hour shifts, especially if your start time was 17:45 (nights begins @ 18:00) with a right-through rate, having you finishing at 08:45 the following morning paid at day rate throughout.
If you objected - you didn’t get asked back via that agency. That didn’t stop you from getting a shift at the same site via a different agency who pays overtime after 8 hours… So you get a shift planned where you are driving back in the gate at exactly 8 hours into your shift - so you can be sent promptly home on flat money.
The “overtime on agency” - never really happens. It is single time at best, and often a spanish inquisition if you were not actually planned for 15 hours - but booked that, or worse - Called someone out to get you “because you’d run out of time”… As if that were the Driver’s fault FFS…!
Do you really think people would deliberately hang out a job to book a couple of hours extra, when it involves an unpaid night out on a friday night FFS? “Unpaid” because it wasn’t pre-authorized…
That’s how tight-fisted some firms out there are though.
The boot is on the other foot now though, as agencies cannot get bums on seats despite them keep upping the rates.
Drivers have hung up their keys for the last time, and are not coming back to the world of 60-84 hour weeks over 5-6-5-6 shifts across 4 weeks, having to spend 6 days holiday to get a full week off, getting 90 minutes docked off a 12 hour shift for “unpaid break” etc etc.
It is better to have a stance on the other side of the divide by this point:
EE drivers - are returning home to their old countries, their economies in those countries having by this point recovered enough to have their cake and eat it in a job at home, where they are not surrounded by union members glaring daggers at them all the time… Who can blame them?
I’ve had it with “defined contributions” jobs. I’d like to see a return to “defined benefits” ones.
No more “open-ended contracts”.
The contingency is that during the lockdown - a lot of us have learned to get by on a lot less. Become “Professionally Frugal” if you like…
This means if one is offered by an agency “two weeks work, before you get banned at site again, 'cos nothing has changed” - I’ll simply turn it down flat, and they’ll have to pay someone else the extra ££££ to sit in that seat I could have sat down in for less - but didn’t.
If I get offered more than that though?
I’m still free to cherry pick the good stuff… It isn’t a question of “serving two masters”, but rather "not letting fear of not working - hold you back from trying out ALL options, not just those within one’s comfort zone risk-wise.
I’ve already experienced the worst this industry can offer. That storm has now passed though, and I look forward to the first multi-million yards that now go under because they garnered no loyalty from their drivers whilst they could…
This week, we saw Aldi up their full timer’s pay, whilst Tescos seem to think that paying Golden Hellos is the way to go…
We’ll see! 
