Cheryl, You Are The Weakest Link, Goodbye!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Griffin
  • Start date Start date
G

Griffin

Guest
Just recently I've been thinking of leaving work. I'm getting fed up with thirteen hour days, the constant rushing to drop kids off/pick the kids up from their various schools/nurseries and dropping them off with someone before dashing back to work again. The lack of time to keep on top of the housework and the lack of time I get to spend with my youngest daughter Emily. I'd reached the conclusion that I was going to ask my area manager if I could take the six week school summer holiday off work to be with the kids. I was happy for it to be unpaid too. I'd then return to work in September, by which time night racing would be finished for another year. If she didn't agree to my demands I was going to hand in my notice, thus freeing me up for the holidays with the kids. I don't need to work, and if I couldn't do what I needed to then I wasn't bothered about leaving all together. Last Thursday I told Pat of my intentions and as long as a relief manager could be sent over for his days off he really didn't mind.

So off I went to work today (managing again) and everything was going well. I'd done the banking, so there wasn't a huge amount of cash in the shop. I still had quite a few winning bets that I knew would be collected over the lunch time, so when I went home for something to eat I left the safe open so that my cashier could pay the punters without them having to wait for me to get back. I made sure the door to behind the counter was locked and off I skipped. When I got back about 45 minutes later the deputy area manager was there with a face like thunder! Oops! She told me off for leaving the safe open and announced that as it was an act of gross misconduct I was being suspended on full pay while they investigated me :blink: I don't think she could quite believe the look of sheer joy on my face :lol: I quite literally danced out of the shop, saying goodbye to my favourite punters on the way out :lol:

I went home and made plans for a lovely few weeks of housework and dog walking before the kids broke up at the end of the month. Then I was going to have a wonderful summer with my three favourite little people :D About an hour later she phoned me to say that she had completed her investigations and as it was my first offence in an otherwise unblemished career she was willing just to give me a warning, my suspension was lifted and I could return to work tomorrow :what: Fiddlesticks :cry:

Methinks she was just desperate not to lose yet another manager, however she knows nothing of my plans to leave for six weeks anyway. I shall drop that little bombshell on Wednesday when I see the area manager :lol:

So instead of being at work tonight I've had dinner with the kids, drank an awful lot of gin and shall be enjoying watching Windsor on telly. I know where I'd rather be :D
 
I don't understand (bear with me, I'm an OAP now) why, if you don't need to work, you don't really care if you do this job or not, you don't really like it that much anyway, and you'd far rather be at home and with the kids, you just don't stop working, Griffin? :blink:

Forgive me if it sounds bleedin' obvious, but if I were you, I know what I'd rather be doing, too!

You know what is a pretty good deal, though? Getting a job share in something like a local hotel or similar, say on reception, for 2.5 days a week, or three mornings, whatever. That allows you contact with the outside world in a pleasant setting, meeting generally nice people, and bags of time with the family, too. No chance?
 
I do enjoy working there on the whole. I like being out of the house (to a certain extent), I get to watch plenty of racing, I chat to loads of lovely people and I love working with Pat & Jan (Kenny walked out two weeks ago). I know that if I left completely after a while I'd miss it and want to go back. Although we could do without the money, I like having that little bit extra to buy stuff mostly for the girls. Whatever happens I'm having my six weeks off and that's final :P
 
It depends whether what Griffin did was prohibited by work rules though if usual practice and a blind eye turned to it that would not be enough to justify any disciplinary action . Indeed , it islikely to be contrary to the disciplinary procedure to give warnings out without a disciplinary hearing . Sounds like the deputy manager has been told by someone higher up not to be an idiot.
 
There is nothing to prevent a verbal warning, which should be confirmed in writing, for a breach of company rules without a disciplinary hearing.
 
If the company rules say that the safe should always be kept locked - and after all that is to protect the staff as much as the company - and a member of staff is issued with a warning on Monday for disobeying that rule then does exactly the same the following day, I am saying that that could be grounds for dismissal. Do you disagree?
 
No- of course not.

No doubt you will also agree that if a disciplinary investigation uncovers a manager conniving or turning a blind eye to the practice or poor training not having made it clear that the safe was always to be locked even though it meant that punters could not be paid that any grounds for disciplinary action would be seriously undermined and dismissal likely to be found to be unfair.
 
Apparently I've still got to go to a disciplinary meeting tomorrow lunch time where they will officially give me my warning. I've got a fair few bones to pick with them aswell and I feel tomorrow may be just the time to do it :P

Considering my lunch break is for an hour, do they seriously expect any punter to have to wait an hour for me to return, and then another 15 minutes on top of that while I wait for the time delay on the insert? So if a punter walks into the shop two minutes after I leave (presumably on his lunch break too), shoves £20 in a machine and within minutes wins £500 he is then expected to wait over an hour for his money. Not very good customer service is it?

Another point I'll make is that I think that forcing a young girl to single man in a shop from 10am until 9.30pm is a greater crime than me leaving the safe unlocked for an hour. The deputy area managers daughter is on holidays from university and she has been single manning practically every day since she started working for the company. She doesn't complain because her boss is her mum :angry: She's younger than me for Gods sake :angy: Pat and I get anxious if a stranger or even two strangers walk into the shop. How must that poor girl feel when every single person that walks into the shop is a stranger who needs to be viewed with suspicion?

As long as the shops are open, they don't care who is running them. If they increased wages, employed more staff and made it a blanket rule that if there isn't sufficient staff then shops can close at 6.30pm they'd find everybody would be happier, work harder and stay with the company for longer. As it is, they employ more idiots than people with brains and the whole company is falling apart.

Another question is what action would they take if somebody who was single manning shut their shop at 6.30pm because they refused to work for 13 hours without a break? I almost did it a few weeks ago until they sent a cashier from Swindon to me. I'd like to see that stand up in a tribunal for unfair dismissal :D
 
When you have your meeting, put all your complaints in writing, as you have above. Give them to your managerrs verbally then tell them that you have summarised the points in writing and here they are as an aide memoire. Keep a copy for yourself.
 
Griffin - most important is that you take someone with you to the meeting. It doesn't matter who it is; for a disciplinary hearing you are entitled to have someone there with you and it is always prudent to have someone who can act as a witness to whatever they/you say.

All your gripes are totally within reason - it is sad to see that things don't appear to be getting better, no matter what the companies say. A large part of the reason behind me leaving my shop was being totally fed up of having to single man my shop from 09.15 until 22:00 in the height of the summer; unable to have a lunch break unless one of the staff from our other shop in Newbury would come down to look after my shop for 20 mins while I went out to grab a sandwich. I hated single-manning but had to do it daily - my shop was in the town centre so would attract many drunks and undesirables. The shop was just outside the main shopping centre though, and their security staff knew I was often on my own so they would look after my place too. I also had a direct phone number for the police station as they too knew I was on my own a lot of the time.
 
Brian, would it be worth Griffin's while to try and get a rep from her local Health & Safety office alongside her during this, since there do seem to me to be some very genuine safety issues (which we discussed at length on here a little while ago)? If there is to be a general airing of grievances, perhaps there is a proper grievance procedure (we had one 30+ years ago in Saudi, so I can't imagine that the UK hasn't caught up with American work practices by now), which would entail Griffin formalizing all of the issues she mentions?

As things stand, it looks to me that the company is already regularly - as a routine working practice - flouting EU directives on the number of hours an employee should work without proper breaks. If they can't be bothered to hire two people, so that one relieves the other during elevenses, lunch, and a tea-time break, then surely they're transgressing Health directives?

It may be no bad thing if Griffin has the stomach for a bit of a fight, to bring this disreputable area of racing out into the open, so that it can be brought into line with proper work practices. I'd have thought the company stood to be heavily fined, rather than it take any high ground over a simple error or one-time transgression.
 
Originally posted by krizon@Jul 5 2005, 12:12 PM
Brian, would it be worth Griffin's while to try and get a rep from her local Health & Safety office alongside her during this
Click to expand...
No, as the rules of disciplinary interviews don't allow for this. She can have a colleague or a union repreasentative present. Also the HSE wuld not want to attend a disciplinary interview even if they were allowed to do so.
 
Okayyyy... so, as an alternative, should Griffin demand that the tribunal is transcribed, and send a transcript to her local H&S rep? Surely there has to be SOME interest in this issue, beyond the employer/employee relationship? Griffin: do you belong to a union?
 
As far as I'm concerned, the HSE are a waste of time. Even if their rules are broken, they don't always tend to bother doing anything about it. Mick Quinn broke so many H&S rules you wouldn't believe when I had an accident whilst working for him; would they do anything to him? Would they hell. For starters he didn't have a medical book, he allowed a member of his staff (that'll be me!) to be taken away from his gallops, unconscious, in an ambulance, without anyone accompanying me. He then didn't bother contacting the hospital to check whether I was alive or not, despite knowing full well that I must have been detained in hospital overnight as I shared a house with his head lad and hadn't returned that night! He then didn't bother to inform the HSE about the accident despite rules that if an employee suffers an accident at work and is hospitalised overnight HSE must be informed. The local HSE knew he had broken all thses rules yet told me they were powerless to do anything to him about it! The bastard then tried to force me to return to work whilst I was still signed off with post-concussional syndrome, citing that the staff were over-worked & he needed me back. I did go back eventually depite still being signed off, I worked a couple of hours & then handed my notice in! AND the arsehole still owes me wages.... :angy:
 
It's not a tribunal, it's a disciplinary interview, the result of which will be, I'm guessing but I'd go 1/10, a verbal warning.

The company will have a Health & Safety Officer - although ultimately responsible for H&S in any organisation is the Chief Executive. The route to take is the internal one to start with - if she were to contact the HSE they would ask immediately whether she had exhausted her company's procedures.
 
Did you not approach the SLA about this, Dom? It sounds scandalous. More people should approach tv and newspapers with their stories - you'd probably have been paid a year's salary by the latter for a scoop! Especially during the neglected horses scenario - if you had brought forward your story (which, after all, was easily verifiable) then, he might've been stopped for a lot, lot longer.

Griffin: there you go - you approach that Kenyon chap to do an undercover in betting shops to suss out how badly the staff are used, get paid a fortune to tell your story to the tabloids (yes, I know, you'll have to wear a low-cut top just this once!), and retire to Spain!
 
Originally posted by BrianH@Jul 5 2005, 11:29 AM
It's not a tribunal, it's a disciplinary interview
Click to expand...
and it's entirely possible that most of the issues raised by Griffin will be deemed irrelevant to the actual situation being "discussed".
 
Maybe so, simmo, but they're clearly causing a lot of resentment. Just enjoying the craic with the customers and workmates isn't enough reason to stay in a company which values you so little, and its cash so much. These malpractices need to be exposed in order to be stopped, and employees treated within proper work rules, as per other office and shop workers.
 
I worked for a few bookmakers in my younger days-Hills,Ladbrokes,AR Dennis.In my experience area managers and their assistants were the greatest merchant bankers of all time.Most of them got their jobs by stabbing others in the back and placing the rulebook over commonsense.They were also top notch at bullying.
Griffin -I think you will find that late opening will become the norm and not just a summer phenomenon-a couple of shops close to me cover American racing and dogs until 9 o clock when there are no horses on.
 
Originally posted by krizon@Jul 5 2005, 01:34 PM
Did you not approach the SLA about this, Dom? It sounds scandalous. More people should approach tv and newspapers with their stories - you'd probably have been paid a year's salary by the latter for a scoop! Especially during the neglected horses scenario - if you had brought forward your story (which, after all, was easily verifiable) then, he might've been stopped for a lot, lot longer.
Click to expand...
This was 5 years ago, Kri - the SLA were (and still are!!) next to bloody useless then. I did approach ACAS though, and they said they were quite willing to take him to court for me. However, being the naïve young thing I was at the time I decided against it as the racing world is exceptionally close-knit & they tend to close ranks; at the time I wasn't entirely sure I wouldn't want to return to employment in the racing world in some capacity but knew that if I'd brought some kind of a case against a trainer I'd pertty much be black-balled for all time within the racing world. How I wished I'd carried on through ACAS - I did also very seriously consider going to the JC when the cruelty charges were brought against him to tell him of my experiences with him but in the end I couldn't. I utterly despise the man and his treatment of staff/people/horses but I just couldn't face getting involved with court cases or even facing him again.
 
Back
Top