I didn’t have enough money to pay all my bills and started to borrow money from Pay-Day loan shops. I heard that a legal firm which led the case against taxi giant Uber is also representing seven drivers who alleged that agencies used by Amazon are mistreating them. Simon went on to state that many of the parcels he delivered were from Amazon but that is where the link ends. Amazon uses outside agencies to organise and run their delivery system, so it will be the agencies that face the courts and not Amazon or any other online retailer. Agencies and many of the leading UK and international household names are getting away with it. It was recently reported that Maria Ludkin, legal director of the GMB union said: “Employers might not like paying the minimum wage or giving their workers the protections, they’re entitled to in the workplace, but it’s not optional. We don’t get to pick and choose which laws we adhere to and which we don’t like.”
A lot of media coverage is aimed at Amazon probably because they are the biggest and Amazon’s US founder Jeff Bezos, 56, is the richest man in the world who last year made £1.6million an hour (yes, this isn’t a typo, £1.6 million an hour) so he perhaps he could afford to pay a decent wage to everyone who is part of the Amazon family. I bet if you asked a thousand Amazon customers if they would pay an extra £1 so that the people handling their order could be employed by the company and given the legal rights they deserve, I think the majority would say yes.
Modern Day Slavery
The government needs to act on this ‘new way to shop’ as the likes of Amazon will eventually close all high street stores and delivery to your door will become a way of life. Governments can blame the international banking crisis for missing the start of the revolution and maybe Brexit and Covid-19 for currently taking up their time but sooner or later they will have to do what the electorate want and that’s to offer a fair deal for all.
It was reported in the daily Mirror at the end of January 2018 that DHL drivers were told to take a £2,000 pay cut or lose their job. This is from a company who made a £41 million profit in 2016. DHL deliver for some of the UK’s leading companies such as M&S, House of Frazer, O2, eBay, Argos and KFC. With regards to KFC perhaps I should say that they are supposed to deliver but hundreds of KFC outlets had to close down as DHL failed to deliver on time.’ Only in this country could you have a chicken outlet without any chicken. I wonder how many of these top companies’ clients were aware of the shocking action taken by DHL. I think the name DHL must mean Delayed HandLing. It worries me that if these drivers/couriers are pushed so hard they will be forced to speed to cover the ground and as they are so tired from working long hours that a fatal accident is just waiting to happen.
IMO it needs an independent body set up under the Health & Safety department to test whether it’s possible to deliver 200 parcels safely in a day. To me one of the biggest challenges facing UK workers is the ever growing number of people having to accept a zero-hour contract which is a type of contract between an employer (or its agency) and a worker, where the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours, while the worker is not obliged to accept any work offered. The employee may sign an agreement to be available for work as and when required, so that no number of hours or times of work are specified. Depending on jurisdiction and conditions of employment, a zero-hour contract may differ for casual workers. They are often used in agriculture, courier companies, hotels and catering, education, and healthcare sectors.
A Channel 4 documentary employed secret cameras in Amazon UK's Rugeley warehouse to document worker abuses and claimed that Amazon used "controversial" zero-hour contracts as a tool to reprimand staff and were "tagging" employees with GPS and subjecting them to harsh working conditions. Of course, Amazon said that many of those on zero-hour contracts were happy and denied that the company were reprimanding staff. You may be surprised to learn that Amazon are not alone as many of the country’s largest retailers use them. Wikipedia stated that Sports Direct, a retailer, has 90% of its workers on zero-hour contracts. J D Wetherspoon, one of the UK's largest pub chains, has 24,000 staff, or 80% of its workforce, on zero-hour contracts with no guarantee of work each week. 90% of McDonald's workforce in the UK – 82,000 staff members – are employed on a zero-hour contract. Burger King Franchisees and Domino's Pizza operations in the UK extensively use zero-hour contracts. The Spirit Pub Company has 16,000 staff on zero-hour contracts and even Boots UK have 4,000 staff on Zero-hour contracts. In the UK, zero-hour contracts are controversial.
British business leaders have supported them, stating that they provide a flexible labour market. They may suit some people such as retirees and students who want occasional earnings and are able to be entirely flexible about when they work. Trade union groups and others have raised concerns about the possibility of exploitation and the use of such contracts by management as a tool to reward or reprimand employees for any reason, meaningful or trivial. They also raise concerns about how workers can adequately assert their employment rights or maintain decent employment relations. I believe that apart from the months of December, July and August, zero-contracts should be banned as they can lead to poor working relations between the worker and the employer. Time will tell which way the UK decides now that it’s left the EU but for now it’s wait and see.
Simon sat between a rock and a hard place and he couldn’t find a way out of his current modern day slavery contract and he had heard that several other drivers were also delivering drugs to addresses and collecting the cash as they went around their route. This worked well and he was making enough money to repay his parents and to start to build up a nest egg for the next rainy day. However, the police had got to hear about the use of couriers for the delivery of drugs and he was pulled over one evening and found to have drugs ready for delivery and he had over £200 in notes on me. He was charge with supplying drugs and got 4 years.
IMO what needs to be done is that the government needs to set an all-party committee to find a way of saving our shops once the Covid-19 pandemic is under control as many of our high streets will never be the same again. Far too many jobs have been lost with store closures well before the pandemic and many shops will not re-open after the lockdown is lifted. The main two reasons for these closures were the crippling business rates and the high rental cost. The government has given a business rate holiday on some shops, but not all. The high rental/lease cost have been too high and based on retail vales some 10-years out of date. The Nottingham Trent University wrote in its Expert Blog dated 6th of April 2020 stated “Intu, the owner of, amongst others, the Trafford Centre in Manchester and Nottingham’s Victoria and Broadmarsh Centres, and which has £4.5 billion of debts, was on the brink of collapse even before coronavirus took hold”. Intu own about 20 of the UKs’ top shopping centres and it’s not sure Intu will survive. Smaller store owners in British High Streets are also in a financial mess and the future of our shops is unsure.
Local councils will be strapped of much needed cash and many will increase parking cost to try and get in much needed cash but IMO they may well be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
During Covid-19 many people have switched to shopping online and this will only increase even after the lockdown is lifted. What IMO needs to be done is for the government to introduce an online delivery tax of £2 per order and the monies raised to permanently cut business rates, make parking for shoppers free for 4 hours and to give the local councils funds to compulsory purchase empty shops and rent them out at a more manageable rent. The council could also modernise the accommodation above the shops and rent these flats out to needy locals including rough sleepers.
Currently, home delivery isn’t being monitored or regulated and anyone with a car or van can become a delivery driver for the likes of Amazon or its agency. The problems created by zero contract drivers and the gig economy has been covered by many TV programs as well as the latest Ken Loach film “Sorry We Missed You” which is worth watching. All media alleges that drivers don’t have time to s
top for a toilet break and rely on a milk bottle and many work exceptionally long hours without a break. Tired delivery drivers are a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode and It could be one of your loved ones being killed in the crash.
Some of the cars and vans used to deliver parcels don’t have proper insurance for business use and many speed to ensure they hit their delivery target. Many older readers will remember the carnage caused by lorries being driven by drivers falling asleep at the wheel, prior the introduction of tachographs in the late 1970’s. Since 1978 lorry drivers can only drive for four and a half hours before taking a 45-minute break. The government should ensure that deliveries should be made in vans owned by the company and that the van is correctly insured, are serviced every 20,000 miles and driven by a named driver and the van fitted with a tachograph.
Any person involved with deliveries within the UK should be fully employed by the company and not be part of the gig economy. It’s not as if the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos can’t afford to pay the minimum wage, holiday & sickness pay, along with PAYE to the people who make him richer, as he is THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD.
In an article shown on Labour List in June 2020 by Philip Ross it summed up this modern-day slavery when it stated “There is no guarantee of work, thus no guarantee of an income. You will find it harder to get a loan and buy a home if that is your goal. There is no holiday pay. Time between work isn’t a holiday, it is just time you are working looking for work but not earning any revenue. There is no boss to pay into your pension, no sick pay, no death-in-service benefit. No side benefits, nobody will offer you maternity or paternity pay, nobody will cover your pay if you are called up for jury service”. The article went on to state “In recent years, for those who haven’t made it to self-employment but instead live for the long-term in the precarious world of temporary work, we have seen the growth of zero-hour contracts. It is a throwback to the dark days of the 1930s and the depression. Margaret Thatcher legislated such that employees would attain no real employment rights until they had work for an employer for two years. No right for unfair dismissal, no maternity benefits, etc: it was low-rights employment”.
Simon was released a few months before I was forced out so I contacted him via the usual mobile phone method and he agreed that he would be available for the heist in Bedford as he couldn’t get work and could see it as the only way out of his current nightmare. Simon Westdale will be my second guest for Team A.
Chapter 27. From hero to rough sleeper to inmate
Alan Frazer was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after leaving the army. Alan was a likeable chap who since leaving the army in 2010 he had been sent to prison no less than 3 times for mainly petty theft where he was trying to get money for booze as he said it did help to keep him warm on the cold nights when he was sleeping rough. The countries homeless figure continues to grow as extraordinarily little is being done to correct the situation. I strongly believe that homelessness/sleeping rough should be seen as a health problem and every town in the country should provide suitable accommodation to suit the individual’s needs. Those that don’t follow the rules and continue to sleep rough should be sectioned and forcibly place in a shelter.
The Guardian newspaper reported in February 2020 that “the government has been accused of dramatically under-reporting the scale of rough sleeping following council data showing numbers almost five times higher than Whitehall estimates. On the eve of the housing ministry’s annual snapshot of rough sleeping, which last year said that 4,677 people slept outside, the council data showed almost 25,000 people slept rough in 2019”. As a country we are failing dismally on the problem of homelessness but it need not be like that. HuffPost reported in February 2019 that “Finland’s much-lauded “housing first” approach, which has been in place for more than a decade.
The idea is simple. To solve homelessness you start by giving someone a home, a permanent one with no strings attached. If they want to drink, they can; if they want to take drugs, that’s fine too. Support services are made available to treat any addiction, mental health and other problems, and to help people get back on their feet, from assisting with welfare paperwork to securing a job.
The housing in Finland is a mix of designated standard apartments sprinkled through the community, and supported housing: apartment blocks with on-site services, built or renovated specifically for chronically homeless people. A Salvation Army building in Helsinki, for example, was converted from a 250-bed emergency shelter to an 81-apartment supported housing unit. If Finland can do it then surely Great Britain which is the fifth richest nation in the world, could follow suit.
IMO all addictions should be treated as a health problem, as placing these people in prison doesn’t work and never will. It also cost around £43,000 a year to keep them in prison. On Alan’s third visit to prison he fell under my wing and I worked with him to get him off the booze and hopefully keep him off it once he was released. Alan had seen service in the Bosnia war and Iraq. He was a highly trained bomb disposal officer and what he didn’t know about making and dismantling incendiary devices wasn’t worth writing about. He was happy when he was tinkering about on a project and I put him on a course that could see him partly trained as an electrician’s mate before leaving prison. There is a shortage of electricians and he should have no trouble getting work once he left but having been sent to prison three times will put a lot of employers off.
Within a matter of days of me leaving the prison service Alan was released and before leaving I had found lodgings for him in Newport Pagnell. He had tried to get work for about three weeks when I contacted him, and he was again down in the dumps but thankfully was still sober. I sent him a welcome invitation and spoke to him within a matter of days. We agreed to meet up at the coffee shop in Olney and discuss what we could do together. We met up on a rainy Monday afternoon and I told him what had happened and how let down and angry I felt. I said that I had a plan that wasn’t legal but could bring us a nice financial reward and a great sense of satisfaction. I asked him if he would be interested and he said that he would be pleased to help as he really had nothing to lose. If he got caught, then he knew he would have a roof over his head and would be fed well and kept warm for the next ten years.
I explained my brief plan to him and said that he would be responsible for the small explosive device I need to kill off the towns CCTV’s and the 6 dummy timer boxes which we would be leaving behind after every bank. I also explained that we would need an incendiary device for the old house in Clarence Street. I said that he would have to be careful on buying in any of the explosive devices as we didn’t want it coming back to any of us. He said that he still had mates in the forces who would supply anything he needed if it was for cash.
I explained about my idea to kill the CCTV cameras which was to gain access to the control box and place a small incendiary device that would be triggered by a mobile phone call and when it exploded it would spray liquid mercury across the terminals and short circuit the system. I also said that apart from the mobile phone activating the small bomb he needed to find a way to trigger the device if by bad luck someone checked on the box between the time the small bomb was planted and the true time of detonation. He said that that sounded simple enough and could easily be made without causing any unwanted attention. I told him that the device needed to be as silent as possible as we didn’t want the police being drawn to that part of the town as someone had reported hearing a bomb go off. Alan said that he would look at it and get back to me. Before parting I handed him a £2,500.00 under the table and said that there was plenty more if he needed it. He should keep in touch but only via the phone I gave him. I asked him what means of transport he had, and he said that he had his motorbike which he had stored up at his mother’s farm whilst he was inside. I said that was good as I maybe having a few courier jobs that need to be done soon and the cover of his helmet would be of help. Alan Frazer will the third member of team A.
Chapter 28. Underage sex and incest
Barry Swift was in his mid-50's starting to lose his salt and pepper hair, but he had kept himself in shape and looked considerably younger than his years. He was married with three grown up children who had all left home and his wife for 31 years was standing by him. I obviously had a description of what he had been convicted of, but in all my consultations I like to take my patients right back to their childhood as this is where most disorders start. Being a prison counsellor I saw a wide range of offenders whom I had to try and help them understand what they had done was wrong and to try to find a way to put them on the straight and narrow, so that when they were released they had a good chance of never reoffending. Although we had to deal with the inmates that were allocated to us, I never liked dealing with sex offenders that had done terrible things to incredibly young children and even babies. I had to spend time with them, but I didn't have to listen to them.
So, tell me Barry, when did you first become aware of sex? Barry said that he first became aware when he was about 8 years old. He lived in a house with his large family of mum, dad, two brothers and 6 sisters. The house had an exceedingly long garden with several sheds and a lot of fruit trees in it. Barry said that one of his older sisters had invited some of her school mates around to play in the garden and the game they played turned out to be doctors with a lot of show me yours and I’ll show you mine. He remembered that his older sister had persuaded one of her friends to show me her privates in the hope that I would show all the girls mine. I took a good look at the young girl who was very pretty and had lovely long golden hair that went a long way down her back, and she had started to blossom with her tits just beginning to show. I was too young to get turned on, so I never showed them my bits.
The Bedford Heist Page 13
