Joe Dennis
Organiser
You come in to work every day on time for your shift. You do what is asked, no questions. You meet all your targets, you take your allocated meal breaks and are back at work after the allocated time. You have been working this way for many years. BUT when it comes to a toilet break you only have a lousy eight minutes for your entire work day. Yes eight minutes, and Probe (operating the PTV Call Centre) get away with this by calling it “personal time”.
Members who have severe medical issues only have eight minutes to use. This issue was addressed with management and I was told this is not the case and members had it wrong. However in the last two weeks I have received a flood of emails from staff telling me otherwise.
Staff are afraid to take any longer as they are constantly being told that they only have eight minutes “personal time” to use. If they do take longer than this, their managers are alerted of it. Managers are then using the old “duty of care” excuse to go looking for the staff. This is a concern as it is an invasion of privacy.
Management have now formed a “work force management team leader” to monitor this. If a member is late by 30 seconds this “task force” will track the member down and tell them to return to work.
On top of this, while Probe finally agreed to having a union notice board in the workplace, the first thing that was put up on that board was torn down by management. The Delegates at Probe have now been advised that anything that goes up on the union board first needs to be approved by management.
I honestly cannot believe that this type of work place is still around in 2018. Members continue to come to work under these conditions and I applaud each and every one of them for putting up with this every day. We will continue to fight to improve the conditions for staff in 2019, and with their EA up for negotiation it will make for some interesting times ahead.
