Note the various updates at the bottom of this post. Also note that it is a very old article.
This is a shitty story for Christmas. The parcel delivery service, City Link, has gone bust after 45 years in business. Basically, nearly 3,000 employees have lost their jobs overnight – and virtually without any warning whatsoever.
Although this is bad enough, it is really just a sign of the times. These things happen. But what makes it really shitty is the timing – bosses waited until all the Christmas deliveries had been made on Christmas Eve, then told everyone they were out of a job on Christmas Day.
It stinks.
It reminds me of when I was in the rat race, at a time when my star was still in its ascendant. I was the manager of a manufacturing department in a blue chip company which employed many temporary staff as cheap labour. It was routine to employ them right up until the time when they either had to be taken on as permanent or released, and then let them go. I hated it, because some of them were bloody good trained workers and deserved full-time employment. What made it worse was that we’d replace them with more temps a few months later.
One year, I was told to tell all the current temps in the department that they were being let go a week before Christmas. They weren’t at the end of their contracts on this occasion. It was purely a financial move to fix the departmental budget. I’d pleaded with my arsehole of a manager to wait until the New Year – it was only a few more weeks, after all – but his manager was an even bigger arsehole and the deed had to be done. I’d even suggested to my manager that he do it given the timing, but his attitude was that it was my job. No prizes for guessing why he passed up on the opportunity – he was just a stinking coward.
I’ll never forget that night. It was around 8pm and freezing cold outside. My manager had gone home to his warm middle-class house and ever-loving wife, of course.
That year, I screwed up Christmas for all those temps – and for myself, even though I couldn’t do anything about it. The temps (and certain other staff) hated me for it thereafter, even though I managed to get a few of them back later the following year. They didn’t have a clue what I’d tried to do for them (to be honest, it wouldn’t have mattered if they had). And with hindsight – literally, it just occurred to me as I wrote this – my feelings on the matter and the resulting staff perception probably had some impact on how my career panned out later.
How do some people sleep at night?
There are now follow up stories to this topic. Some interesting comments from employees/contractors who probably won’t get paid – some finding themselves £70,000 out of pocket.
At each new development I can see further parallels with the scumbags I had the misfortune to work for. Standard corporate mentality these days seems to be to sub-contract work out (parallels with the “temps” I described above). That way, you can screw people whenever you feel like it without having to worry about employment law coming and biting you in the ass.
Then there is the comment from one of those affected about “lots of layers of management”. Just as I experienced in the rat race, the customer counts for nothing as long as you can maintain an empire that looks good on Powerpoint slides. Quite frankly, the investors probably drooled over those and completely missed the signs early on. You can just see it: most of the actual City Link employees would have been the highly-paid managers, with the important people – the delivery drivers – being mainly sub-contractors, forced to work until midnight every day to make a living wage.
A person connected to the investment firm that owns City Link told the BBC the delivery industry had become too competitive for City Link to survive.
A clever play on words, there. Yes, when you are paying wages to superfluous office-based managers you won’t be competitive. If your business is founded on delivering parcels, that’s where the money should be spent. The industry had become too competitive for City Link as it was being run. The industry in question is actually a huge market 21st century market with money to be made for the right players.
This whole business just gets worse and worse. The latest news is that City Link employees will become redundant on New Years Eve!
Regular readers will know that I have little time for unions, and it’s hard to see what the RMT can do in this case. But one comment is telling, because it once again points to the way firms are run in this day and age:
… [the RMT said] there had been a “truly horrific catalogue of mismanagement” at the firm…
As I implied earlier, far too many managers lining the pockets of those above them.
I also note that the company which acquired City Link, Better Capital, is described as a “restructuring specialist”. I know from first hand experience that these types of company – which includes consultants – do not strip companies from the top down. It’s always from the bottom up – or in other words, the end that does all the work. That’s why they have apparently (according to employees) been contracting out and getting rid of salaried drivers. They’ve been playing around with the low-level workforce, and no doubt introducing layer after layer of extra management to deal with the additional complexity that has resulted. No wonder they’ve gone bust. City Link also has a very low rating of 3.3 on TrustPilot, so it can’t have been run efficiently.
City Link lists revenues of £300 million annually, and yet it still got screwed.
And the final indignity – 2,356 people have lost their jobs on New Year’s Eve. Although it isn’t clarified yet, an attempted buy out by an “unnamed consortium” was refused for being “not acceptable”.
Around 370 staff have been retained for the time being to deal with uncollected parcels, and when they finally go the total of unemployed will rise to over 2,700.
