‘I’ve sacked people for sitting down’: Undercover inside JD Sports
‘I’ve sacked people for sitting down’: Undercover inside JD Sports
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‘I’ve sacked people for sitting down’: Undercover inside JD Sports
What is JD sports?
That was 2 years ago, I wonder if anything has improved since then
God the low paid work situation in the UK is a fucking joke.
You take arrogant uneducated swarmy cunts on just above minimum wage and put them in charge of legions of apathetic kids and job centre transfers on minimum wage and what do you get?
An authoritarian culture of idiocy and disrespect equivalent to what you’d get if you put 12 year old kids in suits and put them in charge of an organisation.
The UK has a cunt problem. We just have too many of them. The decent, respectable, mature people capable of having a two-sided conversation have been replaced by hair gelled pricks who think they know everything purely because they think purely in idiotic black and white terms. Low tier jobs are full of proudly ignorant managers who boast about how many beers they sank on Friday night or how much coke they stuck up their nose.
The UK needs the intellectual classes to grow some balls and aggressively put the thick cunts in their place instead of promoting them to managers because they “get results”.
Self-righteous cunts who think they are right 100% of the time need purging from our society soon.
It’s a tragedy to think that our culture that once used to be respected as a bastion of intellectualism and prudence has come to this crass culture of know-it-all cunts who never even managed to finish Harry Potter when they were 12.
Identical to how OshKosh does business at its distribution facilities, but they’re even bigger, give even fewer shits, and conditions are way, way worse if you can believe it. We’ve somehow come full circle back to sweatshop labor in the first world because nobody seems to care, and there are no shortage of pieces of shit to take these enforcer “supervisor” roles to make your life a living hell through physical and psychological abuse. These people *want* you to know you’re worthless to them.
Don’t even THINK about taking a job at a distribution facility.
I’ve worked a job like this, not nearly as bad of course. But a hand scan in, hand scan out factory job screen printing vinyl stickers. I was making thousands of dollars of product an hour and I was getting paid 2 dollars above minimum wage. I was once told that I needed to give 2 months notice for a dentist’s appointment. Every day I’d go in and see people defeated, unable to leave or risk losing their benefits for their family but not making enough to improve themselves outside of work. Thankfully I had a friend who got me a great job I like going into but I was told day after day that I was lucky I escaped. And they were right
This whole video just plays out like a standard work day for America’s labor force.
Abercrombie and their child companies have been running a 3-strike policy since at least 2003. You don’t even have to break a rule to get a strike. A customer complaint about a company policy you enforced is enough for them to strike you and fire you, and once they fire you they ban you from working at any of their affiliate companies.
“If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean!”
It weakens the piece when everything is criticized.
For example biometric time clocks.
They have 1,500 hourly workers, how else would you do that efficiently and prevent people from clocking in/out the wrong person, either by mistake or on purpose?
We had those Kronos machines at our work place.
They cost around 1-2k per machine.
People went round scratching the top of the scanners to break the finger print scanner.
They then tried swipe cards and eventually put a car scanner on it.
Amazingly, since they put the card scanner on there hasnt been a single machine broken.
It took around 3 years and about 10-20k of broken machines (including people literally ripping them off the wall) for the company to get the message and make it a quicker process.
Hundreds of people clocking out at them machines is SLOW. Could take up to 10 minutes to clock out every day of the week!
I’ve seen places that will fire you and then rehire you a few weeks later because their turnaround is so high. This place looks like one of them.
People act like they’ve never worked in a warehouse that distributes high quality goods before. I worked for a company that handled Apple products and the whole warehouse system was nearly identical to this companies. It sucks and everyone is on edge from being over worked.
Wage slavery.
I worked at this factory when i was around 18. I was ‘forced’ to work there by the job center while i waited for the next college terms to start. I left with a repetitive strain injury on my arm which i still suffer from 5 years later. EVERYTHING this video details is correct, but what it scarcely covers is the insane levels of disrespect that the supervisor’s exhibit towards workers – a bunch of coked-up alcoholics demeaning teens and young adults for no particular reason other than to feel better about their shitty situation.
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I’d rather die than work there again.
Worked 2 days at an Amazon warehouse and the attitude towards production and resting were very much the same. I got admonished for running 180 items in an hour while the worn-down not-at-all-well-off guy next to me was cranking out 280 an hour. Realized right then and there I needed to be elsewhere. Take your 12.50 and shove it, beelzeb—— bezos, I mean
“Sacked” = “Fired” for those still wondering.
How cunty.
“[Kill me now](https://i.imgur.com/R0NZzL3.png)” written on the wall at [this](https://youtu.be/o3SDkE9cIys?t=1027) time. Must be absolutely awful.
>I’ve sacked people for sitting down
First job, grocery store. Very tall, do all the carts, bottle return (state with deposit), cleaning, anything to avoid hunching over. That means working hard and being reliable; less supervision.
Joe. Same year as me in school, got the job the previous summer because he was old enough, not the same social circles. He was skater/stoner, I was a nerd. Doesn’t matter. We played little league baseball together, we each knew the other was a decent human and someone who you could work with.
Joe sat down on the milk crate stack behind the can return, chugged some water, and hung his head. Summer, very hot, Sunday, pushing carts from 11-3 with a 15-minute break. Eastern European boss crone comes around. These floors are filthy, Joe! And you’re sitting down. Mop these floors right away.
He yelled at her that he’d been pushing carts non stop in the heat of the day and he sat down for ten seconds, and he’d probably continue for a minute, and if the floors were that urgent she could god damn well mop them herself.
And here’s the thing about integrity and work ethic. You’ll get fucked over from time to time. The world isn’t fair. But sometimes it pays off. There’s value in it. She wasn’t happy, but she laid off him, let him sit for a bit and rehydrate, and she walked by him for the mop and god damn well mopped it herself. Which is when I punched in.
She never cleaned not because it was beneath her but because that’s what high school students can do. She had other stuff. But she did it that day.
Unionise. It’s the only solution.
I’m over here in America like “am I… being exploited?”
Could you imagine a US senator running in inquiry into the way Amazon treats its warehouse workers? 😂.
You guys would be in for a helluva shock if you went to work at a NW GA carpet mill.
You can’t wear any jewelry, watches, wrist bands, absolutely nothing. Not even a wedding band. It’s for safety reasons. It could get caught in something and pull a body part in. No hoodies for the same reason.
There are no breaks and they don’t have to give you breaks. They’ll tell you that every chance they get. In Georgia there is no law saying employers have to give employees a break and there is no federal law either. We work 12 hour shifts, 8-8.
The building we work in is about 15-20 degrees hotter than it is outside and the summers in Georgia can get brutal. You would never see any of our employees wearing as much clothing as the people in that video were wearing. Some jobs can wear shorts, not many, others require you to wear pants and water proof boots that go at least 8″ up your calf because there are drainage systems that have caustic and other strong chemicals in them.
You can’t wear any kind of earbuds or listen to music. You have to wear ear plugs and safety glasses at all times. You absolutely cannot have your cell phone out, not even to check the time. Anything you do that is against company policy is a write up.
A write up is what they call a strike I guess. You get a verbal warning (“put your cell phone away and don’t let me catch you with it again”), then a write up, then another write up, and then you’re out. It doesn’t have to be the same thing. Get a verbal for cell phone, write up for not wearing ear plugs, another write up for walking outside of a pedestrian walkway, then take your safety glasses off to clean them and you’re out. They don’t fire you technically. They tell you to report to HR in the morning (which HR will have an email waiting detailing why you were walked out) and then HR gives you the actual pink slip.
A no call, no show is automatic termination. Meaning you were supposed to work, but didn’t show up and didn’t call an hour before your shift started. Might as well stay home and look for another job.
They also had a major layoff back in 2008 and even though business has picked up to pre 2008 numbers, we remain short staffed with lots of people doing the work of more than 1 person. We have also been on mandatory OT for years. Once a week you have to sign up to work a shift on one of your days off and that could be for any job you have been previously qualified for.
In 10 years we’ve had 3 raises of 2% or less. Years we didn’t get a raise, we got an “employee appreciation” check. Which is an extra check that is the average of what you have earned over the last 6 months.
You work all major holidays as well unless you have enough seniority to take a vacation day over all the others who want it off.
The equipment is raggedy and every machine and truck has its own personality you have to learn to use it correctly. They absolutely won’t spend money fixing anything. Yet in the preshift meeting they will tell you how well the company is doing with very little debt and lots of borrowing power.
Factories like this litter the area and if you leave, you’ll just end up working at a place just like the one you left.
The 19th century called, they want the workers covered in soot and boils.
There have never been more slaves than there are today.
That looks like a better version of working at an Amazon fufillment centre
Worker insecurity is great for profit margins.
I get it was bad and everything, but using the fingerprint for punching in and out didn’t seem extreme at all.
Amazon has the same thing for delivery partners. They have level two infractions, and level one infractions. A level two is something like leaving the package at the back door when you marked it as front door. If you get two level twos, they become a level one. A level one is something like throwing a package. Sometimes they’ll give you two level ones before you’re fired, or just one before you’re fired.
And that kids, is why you should learn a real skill that someone will pay for. Because working a 0 skill warehouse job is basically torture. They pass this off like it’s uncommon, but from what I can tell having several friends who’ve worked warehouse jobs, this is basically par for the course. And it’s not much different for any other 0 skill extremely high turnover type of job. Honestly, no one should be sad that these jobs will eventually all be done by robots.
the music is so that workers don’t talk to each other and mobilize against the boss.
I get that there are some gross things in this video but the headline here is a bad bit to pull out. The undercover reporter asked if she could sit down on a box and take a break. That wouldn’t go over well in a packing or machine operation job in any factory or warehouse in the world…If you just stop without letting anyone know, parts get backed up and the whole operation breaks down fast. It’s a job where if you are ten minutes late, the person who just finished a shift has to work those ten minutes. Slacking off or not showing up isn’t a victimless crime. It’s not something you can fix later by staying late. It affects everyone directly.
I’m trying to think of a good analogy to an office job…It’d be like if you worked at a call center but asked if it was cool you stopped taking calls. They might as well send you home at that point right? Someone’s gotta answer calls and you just add to someone’s work load if you’re not doing your part.
That’s not even touching on whatever safety violations there might be. Like maybe if a government auditor shows up and someone’s sitting on a box that’s a big fine for the company.
It is also worth mentioning that your first week or two on these jobs, they are actively trying to weed you out. Some people don’t last one shift and they want to know if you are going to make it or not. They are kind of incentivized to see if you will quit before they’ve spent time and effort training you.
There is some culture shock for me here too, because as someone in the US who lives in a “right to work” state, it wouldn’t be considered a breach of authority to fire someone over something like this. I don’t think it would be considered outrageous.
Listening to Missy Elliot, while in a queue to leave work, as a British person. Is the equivalent of the US government using van halens Panama against Noreiga.
This is nothing new, I did warehouse work for many companies through agencies back in the 80s and 90s and they treated people like shit and exploited them as much as they could while the agency took a large cut of the money.
Reminds me for a company I worked for briefly several years ago here in the US.
Hired through a temp agency, but still had an initial interview. I asked what the work hours were like, since I was looking for a daytime shift. I was told that I would work 7am-5pm Monday-Friday. Great, sign me up.
We weren’t allowed to sit down unless we were on our lunch break, we had two additional 10 minute breaks throughout the day but nobody really left their work station since it took 5 minutes to even walk to the break room. Supervisors were constantly berating people for not working fast enough. One of the stations I had to work on I was moving as fast as physically possible but was hardly able to keep up. For 9.5 hours. If you chewed gum, wore headphones, showed up in shorts, a ton of other things, or were caught with your phone you were immediately terminated. The turnover rate was enormous. They had new employee orientations with 10-15 at a time two to three times a week. The queue to get in or out normally took 5-10 minutes and you were not paid for that time.
On Friday we were told to check the schedule board for next week’s hours. Hold up, I was told it was a fixed hours position by both the temp agency and the company interviewer…
Nope. The shifts changed every single week. 7-5 was my first week, the second week was going to be Monday, Tuesday, Friday-Sunday 9pm-7am. I found my manager and told them I couldn’t work a night shift since I was going to school in the evenings and worked a second job during the weekend. They literally said, “Tough shit, you’re going to have to find someone willing to switch shifts with you.”
So I told them to get fucked and quit immediately. I was then patted down for box cutters, gloves, or other company items before being escorted roughly from the building. I got a call from the temp agency on Monday after that and was told that I was excluded for working for that company for the next 10 years. As if I’d ever go back. What a joke.
I’m grateful that when I worked a warehouse job in Ontario it was actually pretty nice. No-one yelling at me or harassing me. No real quotas to meet, but I still tried to work quickly and efficiently just for the sake of taking pride in my work and to develop a better work ethic. My supervisors and co-workers were friendly. If someone had a problem, a bunch of other people would stop what they were doing and help that person.
Just wanted to point this out so that people understand that low-wage warehouse jobs aren’t all as bad as in the video. I guess it depends on where you work.
This is a true sign of unemployment being too high. With enough people looking for jobs, people will take any job they can get.
“it’s one of the biggest names on the high-street” … Who?!
It’s not really high end though is it? It’s basically trainers for chavs.
Sad state of affairs when flipping burgers is a more attractive job.
I work in a warehouse.. this is pretty sensational propaganda lol
What needs to happen is people need to get some God damned empathy and self control. And just stop giving your money to these assholes. But no one actually gives a shit so nothing will change. Here’s hoping the baby boomers die soon. They are a generation without empathy.
In case anyone was wondering, we recently got new fingerprint clocking machines which are much faster….which is nice i guess.