Worse things than death ! well almost !

Weekly rant number 1

My old man was a very hard worker, he became an engineer after a spell in the Royal Marines during the WW2.  One of his many sayings that is repeatable on a public blog was"I'd rather be worked to death than bored to death" I agree with him. When work is really interesting and stretchers your mind constantly, the hours fly past. I remember working 12 hours plus on many occasions and almost begrudged stopping to eat or have to sleep, such was the interest and challenge.

Over my working life so much has changed, so many jobs are mind blowing, boring, the pay is awful and the hours long. A good example is reading about Chinese factories, where nets up being put up around the buildings, to catch workers who have thrown themselves off the roof. I can understand this, a twelve hour shift in a despised job would be torture to me, but that is how millions have to live. The problem is here in the UK. So often I say to Graham "we were so lucky, we had the best of what this country ever had to offer a man, who was prepared to work hard and use his brain" those days are gone and I do not believe they will ever return. I hate what this country and most of the world has become, a rat race to the bottom. Most of my working life I had bargaining chips, I had skills companies paid good money to acquire. When looking for a new job, for me there were various factors in my decision. First the job had to pay more money, second the work had to be interesting, and as a bonus they had to have technologies that were leading edge. Now, we are a nation of shopkeepers and warehouseman of foreign made goods.

So much has gone, so many workers on zero hour contracts, with money so low they have to be subsidised by the tax payer in the form of tax credits. Instead of the customer is always right, the customer is there to be lied to and ripped off. Everything is cheaply made junk, made to last a year or so, then discarded for the latest piece of techno-crap. Very often made in some third world crap hole by virtual slaves and slave labour children, this is the future, and it ain't none too bright. Check out this BBC story today and tell me I am wrong.

A BBC investigation into a UK-based Amazon warehouse has found conditions that a stress expert said could cause "mental and physical illness".

Professor Michael Marmot was shown secret filming of night shifts involving up to 11 miles of walking - where an undercover worker was expected to collect orders every 33 seconds.

It comes as the company employs 15,000 extra staff to cater for Christmas.

Amazon said the safety of its workers was its "number one priority."

Undercover reporter Adam Littler, 23, got an agency job at Amazon's Swansea warehouse. He took a hidden camera inside for BBC Panorama to record what happened on his shifts.

He was employed as a "picker", collecting orders from 800,000 square foot of storage.

A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped.

"We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.

More on this story here.

Eddie