Functioning on a sea of disposable workers
Pros
If you manage to find a secure niche, you manage not to get sick, have a personal crisis that requires absence or consideration, or many employee needs such as disability, physical or mental health problems, then they'll keep you in a job. So long as they don't lose a contract and need to lay off high volumes of staff.
Cons
Ingram Micro (previously Anovo), has no comprehension of how to value workers at the bottom of the ladder. The levels of incompetence, disorganisation and mismanagement are legendary. Management are picked on their ability to endure their position for longer than anyone else with few sick days or mistakes, and NOT for their professional competence or management skills. Managers and senior staff commonly have few computer skills and little idea of management responsibilities or how to carry them out, and have been known to try to misrepresent performance information to clients when their performance is poor. Senior management and HR have an extremely poor track record of caring for staff. Almost everyone is an agency worker until they earn a permanent contract after over a year of consistent work, and people have been let go because of illness, mental health issues and family crisis. Even after earning a permanent contract, there is almost zero opportunity for job progression unless you're willing to befriend management and get yourself noticed and liked when vacancies come up. Even then you could be passed up for a vacancy in favour of someone hired from external to the company with no relevant knowledge or competence for the position. When the minimum wage increased, any workers who were previously earning above minimum wage only had their wages increased to the new legal minimum, including management. It took over a year for people to negotiate their wages back to an acceptable level, and some have never regained their wage increase. If you want an example of how this company operates, in the current Coronavirus pandemic the company has made no moves to transition any but a few very vulnerable staff to working from home. Over a hundred office staff are still expected to work from the site for no appreciable reason for this risk. This phone repair business has classed itself as 'Essential Telecommunications Infrastructure' under government guidelines and told all workers, factory and office alike, that they are key workers and their children can continue to go to school, as they have no apparent intention of placing employee safety over profit. Further to this, they outlined their initial response to the pandemic to staff by calling all employees to a mandatory meeting of several hundred people at a time onto the factory floor, asking them to "squeeze in together" in order to hear the site manager. This was before the point that they sent any immune compromised staff home. They have also instituted mandatory body temperature checks before staff can clock in so that anyone showing a fever can be sent home, except that the hardware they are using to measure temperatures is not designed to measure body heat; it's designed to check the operating temperature of machinery. On the first day of usage staff were being measured as having a body temperature of 35-36 degrees Celsius (in some cases close to what would be classed as hypothermia). There is doubt among staff that the devices are physically capable of identifying someone with a fever, or that the measures are in any way able to protect anyone. This company is consistently dishonest, incompetent and has little but disregard for its employees. It under invests in training, staff facilities, safety, wages, hiring practices, human resources and sourcing appropriate management and individuals with necessary skills.
