Today the Royal College of Nursing has launched a campaign drawing public awareness to the plight of nurses who are lone workers - those who work among the public outside a medical facility - and the appalling rates of assault and harassment that these professionals face.
The phrase “lone worker” always brings back painful memories for me. My very first job in Scotland was an admin temp job which I took through an agency while job hunting for a full time role. The employer apparently told the agency that I would be working for one of her companies in a gorgeous Glasgow city centre office. And I did, for four hours. Then she took me to the “headquarters” of one of her other companies. It was an empty, undecorated domestic flat in a residential neighbourhood away from the city centre which I’d never been in before. And that’s where she left me.
I spent what felt like one of the longest months of my life commuting on two trains plus a mile walk every day to work by myself in this dark, empty, unfurnished residential flat. To give you an idea of how isolated I was, this flat had no phone line or telephone. I saw the woman no more than 20 minutes a day at most. Some weeks I’d go days without seeing her at all. When I did, she’d breeze in, try to appear busy and important, occasionally look at me while talking to someone else on her bluetooth, and then fly out the door to one of her mysterious other companies. Occasionally she’d bring people over for a meeting (held in the living room on a manky old sofa with a throw over it) while I stayed safely out of view in the “office” - a deserted room illuminated by one light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Whatever else she was doing with her days, it seemed to involve spending an awful lot of time moving money between multiple accounts at multiple banks. Hmm.
I’d moved to the UK six months before, and had charged into the workforce with the highest hopes of picking up my career where I’d left off in the states. Instead, I was on my own in a strange house in a strange neighbourhood, with only my personal mobile as my “company phone” (unreimbursed of course), no first aid kit, no idea where I’d go for help, no idea where the hell I was really, and no one from any of her multiple companies checking in on me. My work was strange, menial make-work that I could have done when I was 12 years old. And although one of her companies was located just a five minute ride from my home, I was commuting to a downtown house eight miles away to sit on an old 386 and email with people working within sight of where I lived. What the hell was going on here?
And you want to know what the real kicker was? This woman’s alleged business was - wait for it - health and safety. She was getting paid to advise businesses on laws and regulations which she was deliberately violating.
I can’t tell you how deeply your blood boils when you’re sitting alone in the 4 PM darkness of a Scottish winter, typing up a handout on the lone worker laws for your boss’s client, and you realise that what you’re typing sounds like a description of your day. You’d like to discuss it with your boss, but she’s never here, and you’ve never seen nor met anyone else from the company you’re supposedly working for. Lunatics, abusive bosses, incompetents are one thing. Lying hypocrites are quite another.
I finally fled her company - literally, running as fast as I could - when she crossed another ethical and safety line which confirmed to me that she was genuinely mentally unbalanced. No joke - this woman had tied herself into so many knots with her lies and deceptions that she was disintegrating at the seams, and was hellbent on taking me down with her. Simple administrative work should not trigger the “fight or flight” instinct, but I shudder to think what would have become of me that day had I ignored it.
In fleeing, I had to beg my temp agency for another job because I’d left the role without sitting down for the full discussion process that they had outlined on their lovely letterhead. The fact that the employer had casually changed the contract to have me working for a different company doing different work in a different location with no human contact was news to them. When my contact at the agency related the story which my employer had said in her defense, I was aghast. It was as fictional as any drama storyline, and it was the blatancy of the lies which astonished me. It was utter manipulative rubbish told shamelessly - even as I was able to discredit her tale line by line with facts and backup. It was only then that my contact finally understood how unstable and dangerous this woman was, and still, they did all they could to avoid casting blame on the manipulative fruitcake who had conned them as well as me.
A week after running away from her, while sitting at my desk at my new temp job, my mobile rang. It was one of the co-workers from the woman’s company asking me which meeting room the 2 PM discussion was being held in. Part of me wanted to laugh my head off, and part of me wanted to throw the phone into the wall and shatter it into pieces. She was still lying, to herself and to her staff, by pretending that I still worked for her.
I’d lost a month of my life to a stressful, unpleasant, and frightening temp job, and I had nothing to show for it except for a supply of bitterness and cynicism that shouldn’t have stemmed from a simple admin role. And as this was my first job in Britain, it set the tone for me of what are considered normal working practices here. It told me I was in a part of the world where the local branch of a worldwide employment agency could send me to work for a visibly unstable employer at what appeared to be a front business for money laundering, and when things went past breaking point, they’d bend over backwards to defend the liar. Welcome to the UK indeed.
…
In the UK, we are constantly reading about workers’ entitlements, safety, publicity campaigns, legislation, and the ever increasing awareness of employee rights. When I see things like these, as I did this morning with the RCN’s report, I can only roll my eyes. There is a massive army of workers out there who have no rights, no recourse, and report to people for whom legislation as well as ethics mean nothing. (If they were interested in being good employers who live by the law, they’d take you aboard permanently and directly, not order you a la carte like office supplies.) And with many companies now sourcing all their staff as contract temps for years at a time as a means of avoiding paying living wages and benefits, the problem will only get worse.
My husband has been in his job since October, although he is technically a contract temp. He does not earn holidays, he does not earn sick time, and when our baby was born, he could only take three days off unpaid. Aside from those, he has not been able to take a single day off, not even bank holidays. His job is only contracted through to March 2008, and because of a hiring freeze at his company, he can’t be taken on as a regular employee. He’ll have given every day of his working life for a year and a half with nothing to show for it.
It’s bad enough having no holidays, no sick time, no pension, no employee security, and no future in the job you report to at all. But even if your employer isn’t stark raving mad, you are still a second class citizen, and make no mistake - many agencies and recruiters enjoy lording their power over you. When I was pregnant and temping, my agency docked my pay for attending midwife appointments, when by law regular employees can take off the whole day for a midwife appointment if needed with no consequences. Docked pay? Would it really have killed my arrogant cokehead recruiter to allow me two hours to make sure my baby was okay? My baby was more at risk from me running from the midwife to the train to the office to get five precious additional minutes on the clock.
Until the level of discrimination and disenfranchisement against temps is recognised, I’ll continue to sniff at calls for employee rights and awareness. A call for fairness which ignores a measurable percentage of the workforce is worse than none at all. There’s no worker more “lone” than the one isolated in the dark without the right to defend herself.
Edit and update, 27 August: Last week while on my way to a meeting, I found myself walking past the “gorgeous Glasgow city centre office” where I’d first been sent to work. All traces of that business are now gone. A quick online search reveals no traces of her other businesses, or of the individual. And I’m sure she has a perfectly believable story to explain it all.
