I work in the training industry, this week the number of cancellations has increased steadily. We work with unemployed people as well as the employed and delivering training is getting more and more difficult. Thus we’ve got to take 14 days annual leave - better than SSP I suppose.
Boris is still resolutely protecting the insurance companies by refusing to formally close us in the hospitality business.
As has already been pointed out several times, insurance only applies in specific circumstances, and government advice on a pandemic will not be one of them.
In the same way that if your house is blown up by terrorists or an invading army, you won't be covered on your house insurance. Some risks are too big - the entire hospitality business for instance - for insurers to pick up the tab at a premium that anyone would even think about
Forgotten how much large number of attendees on conference calls irritates me. Today’s call had some heavy breathing, loud keyboard bashing and one person apparently on the beach complete with the sound of seagulls in the background. Even when I asked for people to put their line on mute unless speaking it continued irrespective. 12 weeks of that to look forward to.
Civil Service here. Management and Unions have been unable to agree the WFH policy so still have to attend the office.
Seriously considering going to work until I'm ordered to stay home.
As has already been pointed out several times, insurance only applies in specific circumstances, and government advice on a pandemic will not be one of them.
Haven’t read the whole thread but thanks for the patronising tone.
My policy has a list of exclusions for business interruption, pandemics aren’t mentioned.
I’m definitely covered if someone drives a forklift into the building, now where’s that bloke who did the hotel in Liverpool?
We've stopped all our normal work (in all sorts of schools and nurseries, x10 staff every day, length and breadth of uk).
We took a decision last week to go online. So far my feet have barely touched the floor. It's not income generating yet, but may well be.
All the while sites are open (and we get paid) we’ll keep on building.
Same here, I always wfh but carry out surveys on site mostly in London, only affect so far is one job has been given a bigger window to happen because the German installers on part of it won't be able to get to site. Got a full diary for next week.
My lad just called after he got a call from a manager.
He works in an office but it's linked to the fashion industry.
The company are losing millions. His job is safe... For the moment but they have just sacked 30 from his office.
His gf (they have an 11 day old baby...) works at the same place but is on maternity leave lift have a job to go back to, who knows?
Bugger.
.
Forgotten how much large number of attendees on conference calls irritates me. Today’s call had some heavy breathing, loud keyboard bashing and one person apparently on the beach complete with the sound of seagulls in the background. Even when I asked for people to put their line on mute unless speaking it continued irrespective. 12 weeks of that to look forward to.
There's always a couple. No matter how many times you email video/audio conference etiquette guidelines around, there'll be someone eating crisps or walking through a station or trying to dial in from a poor reception area.
The call has been scheduled for a week you imbecile, prepare your quiet/good reception area and ****ing use it!
I work for a small (<50) company that works primarily within the construction industry. I work on site all over the south of the country.
As of today we have had one email about CV from our office to say all site workers are not to come in to the office anymore but just keep working on site as normal. No advice for site work, no plan on what we should be doing. We have people working for us in the at risk group and they have no communication as to what they should be doing now either. The construction industry has its head in the sand and no plan whatsoever.
When I asked my boss what might happen if I need to share time off with my wife to look after my kids who aren't in school anymore he wasn't happy with me.
On the conference calls most systems allow the organiser to set up auto mute for attendees, normally hidden In the menus somewhere. You then have the problem that people then forget to unmute. Also our work system beeps every time there is a new joiner, not to bad for a small meeting but a pain on larger company wide calls, also can be turned off but no one ever does it.
Apparently some (Zoom I think) have a press to talk system, ie press spacebar to talk. We use teams and webex so not checked for that yet.
Just had my first client cancelation citing the virus as the reason.
Annoyingly, there is no direct reason for the virus to bring a halt to the project in this instance - with a few tweaks to method, it could have gone ahead just as effectively as before.
I do think it's important to remember that fear will kill the economy even quicker than the virus, and that what we need to do is find imaginative and safe ways to continue life, wherever possible, not just close it down altogether.
(I hope this doesn't sound patronising to anyone in an industry where no such flexibility exists - which I realise is going to be the case for many people.)
WFH here, hate to say it but ms teams is working really well.
But, I have a nearly 3 and 5 year old, every time they hear me speak they charge into the dining room asking me what’s going on and insist on saying hello to the laptop. Was funny the first couple of times, Very old now.
Getting quite stressed about how we will cover child care and work as two working parents. My work has said it’ll be flexible and I can work whilst the kids sleep. I suppose that is nice of them, but the reality is this isn’t going to be a couple of weeks, it’s looking like it is going to be months and I’m not sure I can do 6am to 7:30pm doing kid stuff and home schooling followed by trying to fit a 7.5 hours shift in, as well as sleeping, cleaning and eating. Wife and I are going to split the care but that still means can’t cover full hours.
Other option have been told is a change of contract to part time working. Lots of focus on government giving money to business but what about normal people who’ve been screwed by this?
How our other employers handling the situation where child care is an issue
science research. Most office based staff (HR, Finance, etc) were wfh since last week, but science was attending as needed either to work or to keep equipment topped up so they could run remotely.
We've now decided to close more down so we can ensure running of critical services - eg: work for NHS to keep their scanners operational - which has been met with good grace but is compromising some long term experiments and we don't know how long it will take to restart them. But in comparison to the human cost, no-one's objecting.
Most of our income is for commercial projects or grant funded R&D and most of our partners are in the same boat, so we are in most cases going to be able to insert a pause in the project to deal with it, in the meantime we are doing as much analysis, modelling, writing up, etc as we can. I think we can keep pay coming for all in that period and then as above hope that science can restart without too much deterioration of experiments. But when it's open ended, who knows how long that can go on.
But some hope as well. One of our critical projects is on the kind of 'pregnancy test' sensor BoJo was talking about yesterday, detecting antibodies from a fingerprick of blood. We've had it working albeit in small scale for another disease, in simple terms 'all' we need to do is modify the sensor part to bind to Covid19 antibodies and scale it up. Under normal times this would be a long term project but throwing people and time at it..... those 'experts' that Gove et al have given up on trusting are currently working their arses off for us.
How are other employers handling the situation where child care is an issue?
Our company has already got decent flexi hours but the Finance Director said yesterday that so long as the work got done he didn't care when it was. He openly acknowledged the fact that in the office, people don't of a solid hour of work - they get a brew, have a quick chat with a colleague, nip to the cafe. 2 mins here, 5 mins there.
So he said that trying to enforce anything would be pointless, just asked us all to be sensible and if people needed extra help with childcare etc to just talk to him and Head of HR (who was also on the call) and they'd see how it could be worked into flexi time, holiday or unpaid leave.
But he was really relaxed about it, just said don't worry, no-one is going to have every minute of their day audited.
Possibly because he's got 3 kids himself! But he's a decent guy, genuinely looks out for his team.
I'm on the critical workers list, but as far as I can see if my wife and I work smart we can look after him and still do a relatively normal level of work.
I have to be on site at least one day a week (will depend on how many others catch the bug) but as far as I can tell if we don't have to take up a school space that someone else might need or cause staffing stresses then it's fine with me.
work is fine with the whole covid thing, we are a pharma drug release lab so have to keep working
I've two buisness.
First is a village shop, my wife and I run it with two members of part time staff (one normally does 4hrs a week and the other 10). We have had a massive increase in demand. Much like the supermarkets, to the point where restocking is proving impossible. Everyone working from home or in self isolation means the stock is flying off. We are managing to cope with some items, milk, meat, fruit and veg, eggs etc. Better than the supermarkets. But some items are now impossible to restock so when they are off the shelves they are gone.
Ive increased the staff hours to cope, but I can't afford to do this indefinitely - we are still a very small shop so paying some one £9 an hour for a day takes any profit away from the shop. This week trade has increase 3 fold but I've actually made a loss because of the amount of additional staff hours.
Buisness two is a Rural taxi, this was going well untill this week and I think I did my last trip (for the year) yesterday. All bookings have been cancelled until mid April, 99% of the remaining bookings are to airports for holidays/businesses so I can't see them happening at the moment.
Thankfully the buisness has no outgoings as I paid for the car and insurance in full. So Its now repurposed as a delivery vehicle for the shop for the isolated, elderly and infirm.
How our other employers handling the situation where child care is an issue
continuing the existing HR policy of 'don't be a dick'. i'm currently doing early shift ~6am-3pm so my self-employed wife can keep her stuff ticking over in the afternoons now schools out for the foreseeable.
Central London site has been told to wfh if that is possible, some people here me included. Don’t need to use public transport and in a quiet restricted access office. I now have a secure set of office all to myself so may set up an indoor audax later
Dropped to 50% pay via unpaid leave for the next few months. Since I have four weeks leave over the next two months anyway it won't change my life too much (apart from the lack of ready cash and the bike holiday in Mallorca being canned).
Other people have it much worse. On the bright side though apparently I'm a "key worker". I'm assuming I get some sort of special lanyard or credit card or something that lets me jump the queue at the petrol station.
I do think it’s important to remember that fear will kill the economy even quicker than the virus,
But what do we do?
At the moment my job is safe, I was very close to committing to spending £5k on the house, but just in case I’ve put it off for the time being. This means that a small local company has lost the work (for now), I feel bad for them & feel guilty. Hopefully they’ll still be around when this all settles down.
And that’s just one example from a private homeowner, I presume this scales right up through the whole industry.
I feel like a complete outlier at the moment, in that pretty much nothing has changed for me. I run a small engineering consultancy from a shed at the end of my garden with my other Engineer also working from his home. - We very rarely see each other and have operated a cloud based file sharing system for some 5 or 6 years now. Our on-site sub-contractors (most of whom are self employed) and testing laboratories appear to be managing at the moment, so fingers crossed. - I've seen / heard very little about the wider construction industry being significantly impacted yet ??
Yesterday I rang the small 3PL place that does our fulfilment for our bike stuff just to see if there was going to be any issues at there end. They are rushed off their feet sending out paper, printers, monitors etc for those now working from home. There's only 3 of them there so it's a very small 3PL company with serving small businesses but as an example, one of their clients sold 1500 monitors in 1hr!!!!
So some businesses are doing great, even if most are not.
First is a village shop, my wife and I run it with two members of part time staff (one normally does 4hrs a week and the other 10). We have had a massive increase in demand. Much like the supermarkets, to the point where restocking is proving impossible.
Obviously home working and schools being closed means a lot of food that was been eaten in workplaces and schools is now being eaten at home. Seems like the suppliers that are/were servicing those markets - workplace catering and restaurants - would be wise to find a way of getting their goods to the wider public.
The government have announced £2.9bn monies to free up hospital beds, of which the Local Authorities will receive £1.6bn to provide the adaptations and care staff to enable these already sick/frail older people to move into their homes or care homes ... if only it was that easy!
Recruitment of carers was a huge challenge before coronavirus ... I imagine it is almost impossible now; where are these potential carers going to be found? and care/nursing home places have always been few and far between, and from what I have seen the last two weeks, more of them have stopped taking new admissions anyways.
When all this is over I hope it leads to a greater recognition and value placed on carers. Rightly so the public recognise NHS staff who get on with their job without whinging; but at the moment care staff are given very little value in society; typically paid the minimum legally allowed; often given poor work contracts and conditions, and even now the likes of Domino Pizza who offer free pizza to NHS staff do not extend this gesture to them.
Gotta say, the company I work for has been outstanding, about 80% (of c.5000) now wfh - spent the week manning a helpdesk specifically set up to help people trying to connext from home, which has been really fulfilling. Email from the CEO this morning saying they will be as flexible as possible, 5 paid days of emergency leave available for those who have to care for dependants, anyone who takes leave for caring purposes will get another day's holiday for each four they take, and a discretionary fund to support those facing financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. I read that and it makes me so happy to work for this company - then I read what everyone else is going through, and it makes me desperately sad.
Then I read about the Britannia Hotels letter, and it makes me very, very angry.
I've just read on Twitter that Britannia Hotels have just sacked a pile of their staff, just terminated their employment.
Two of our suppliers have sacked half their workforce day 1.
I suppose in these odds times lots of rules are being ignored - but how are they doing it? No warning, no redundancy, no anything, just pack your bags so to speak.
My statutory redundancy, notice period and a couple of weeks for all the usual HR process is enough to keep us going for a few months and frankly the only thing letting me sleep at night at the moment.
P.S. the suppliers who did their staff like that, they're not getting any work from me after this is all over.
When all this is over I hope it leads to a greater recognition and value placed on carers.
Will you extend that hope of recognition to teachers?
Will you extend that hope of recognition to teachers
Only the ones who don't whinge about the unfairness of having to do their job.
Only the ones who don’t whinge about the unfairness of having to do their job.
That's funny, I've not seen any of that on here. In the meantime, I give much thanks, appreciation and recognition to all carers except your miserable ass.
I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but I'd imagine organisations like Brittania Hotels would be in a pretty precarious cash situation in March at the best of times. If you were the finance director, faced with running out of cash in a few days what would you do? If you let it fail, then nobody is getting paid anyway.
I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do, but I’d imagine organisations like Brittania Hotels would be in a pretty precarious cash situation in March at the best of times. If you were the finance director, faced with running out of cash in a few days what would you do? If you let it fail, then nobody is getting paid anyway.
Aye, but to make them homeless at the same time? FFS if the hotel is empty they could just let them stay. It appears that McDonald hotels have offered those fired work at their hotels in Aviemore.
We represent a foodservice wholesaler who has just switched from supplying pubs, restaurants, cafes etc to doing home delivery. Take up has been strong and he only launched it on Social yesterday. There's hundreds of foodservice operators out there with staff, vehicles and stock that should be doing the same in the not too distant future - especially with the fresh food.
That’s funny, I’ve not seen any of that on here. In the meantime, I give much thanks, appreciation and recognition to all carers except your miserable ass.
I applaud your recognition of carers, and even though I am not a carer .. I will take your appreciation and recognition of my role supporting them to do their crucial role in society; Thanks.
DT78 > very similar boat here, as are many friends.
Own company guidance so far has just been "be flexible, be patient, help each other if we can". I suspect many companies will take a few weeks at least to think about formalising anything. I've already chatted to my boss about my situation and will be offloading a few bits of work to more junior people.
Wife's job is more important - not been in post for long, and isn't frontline but helps keep NHS services going. So I'm scaling back to let her work as much as needed. She's still waiting on getting set up to WFH (handles patient data, so restrictions on access) but hopes to be within a week. Even then, I think only 50-60% of normal workload will be possible for me, maybe a bit more for her.
This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint - I think lots of parents have done a bit of WFH for a day or two when kids are ill or other cover fails. You can make it work, catch up in evenings/weekend, etc but it's not sustainable longer term. I suspect I may formalise dropping hours later (and I'd been toying with the idea of going to 25-30 hours pw around kids/school anyway) but I'm not going to initiate that conversation at this stage. We're lucky to be able to afford to, and the usual nursery bill is more than half my take-home anyway.
We have cancelled shift change now, if you are on site you can leave but no one can come in. We are getting pretty good incentives to stay as we don't know how long we will be stuck in country for, international flights from Astana and Almaty are being stopped until at least April 15.
I will take your appreciation and recognition of my role supporting them to do their crucial role in society; Thanks.
Not for the first time, that's the wrong end of the stick you have hold of.
Cant really think of anything to say.
When all this is over I hope it leads to a greater recognition and value placed on carers.
Will you extend that hope of recognition to teachers?
How about we extend teacher's pay and conditions to care workers 🙂
The home where my mum is has had to shut the door and non essential visits out - visiting family are big part of the place being able to tick over happily and the effort they must be making to keep people safe but also settled must be extraordinary. The wider carehome 'family' is really important - we're all friends to everyone and the eyes in the backs of the staff's heads. I know homes where family members keep on visiting long after their own loved ones have died just to continue to part of that community and play that role and the staff and residents being isolated from that is going to be tough.
The idea that staff and space can just magically appear from somewhere just because you say £number seems extraordinary. It maybe shows just how far from most peoples thoughts the care sector is most of the time that the suggestion could be made.
I certainly think care workers and the broader NHS staff should be valued, renumerated, resourced and supported far more highly. Not saying that in a "add £number = X more staff" way, just that it seems roll on massively dependent on good will and workers putting themselves to the sword to try and make their targets. It ain't right, not by a long stretch, but as opined elsewhere, we have the government we deserve. 🙁
Well I'm signed up for 7 day residential working if the worst happens. So far attrition seems to be me and a few others from the same town so it's okay so far. Would be better if we were generating but the site still needs babysat.
My bosses have now discovered that my corner of the agency are key workers. They are surprised by this, having taken no interest since we merged 10 years ago. Bit of a panic to find us laptops as they were hoping to close the office next week and put us out to pasture....
maccruiskeen
SubscriberHow about we extend teacher’s pay and conditions to care workers 🙂
The idea that staff and space can just magically appear from somewhere just because you say £number seems extraordinary. It maybe shows just how far from most peoples thoughts the care sector is most of the time that the suggestion could be made.
I recognise that I have banged on about carers being the overlooked and undervalued sector a fair bit in numerous threads on this coronavirus, but it is still an area being overlooked in all this. I hope at the end of all this carers get the recognition that they fully deserve, and this is reflected in their working conditions and wage packets too.
I just find it frustrating that public sector employees who are employed to serve the public are using this coronavirus to get time off work, or whinge and complain that they have got to do their job. I am not just aiming this at teachers who are reportedly 35% down from staff self isolating already, because in my own social work team of 5, within 5 days three have already isolated themselves ... its ridiculous and blatant that people are taking the pi$$.
Just been announced where we are - as of April, pay cut to £150 per week (£4 per hour).
Expected to work for as long as there is work - which I guess may last about a month at best.
No immediate financial hardship for me (if this all happened a or two month later, I'd be pennyless with half a house and a non-paying tenant in it), but long term implications.
Post virus will obviously be looking for new work.
