First, a PR puff-piece:
Burly binmen are getting rid of their bellies and binning their cigarettes with the help of personal trainers at a workplace “wellness centre”.All good stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Worker's perks, and all that...
Waste management company Veolia opened the health centre on site in Croydon to help staff get healthy and rehabilitate workmen injured on the job.
The pilot scheme is the first of its kind in the country and includes a health clinic to give refuse collectors advice on diet, exercise and quitting smoking.
But now, the reality:
The report released this week notes there was not enough good quality salt to effectively grit the roads and not enough notice was taken of severe weather warnings.You might ask just what sort of training is necessary to operate a shovel, broken or not...
Poorly trained staff were forced to shovel snow off footpaths with broken shovels.
Veolia, the Council’s street cleaning contractor responsible for the salting of footpaths had problems with less than 50 per cent of their staff able to get to work on February 2 and 3.
7 comments:
Training to operate a shovel: fifteen minutes. Training to operate a shovel in full compliance with current health and safety regulations and with special regard to third party risks: two weeks.
Ditto, on the training, plus broken shovels? It's not like there's a lot of grey areas here. It either shovels or it doesn't, and who keeps a locker through of non-shovelly shovels?
You might ask that, but not if you've ever working in modern industry, let alone the public sector.
Nothing can be done without the appropriate boxes being ticked, no matter how obvious or simple.
Slightly o/t, but I read somewhere that US cities introduced much stricter rules on waste disposal (i.e. you can't just chuck it in the river) ten or twenty years ago, so it had to be disposed of properly and of course the process is more expensive and was put out to competitive tender among private bidders etc etc. (people like Veolia).
In the end what happened was, the Mafia won all the contracts, collected the big money and threw all the rubbish in the river.
"Training to operate a shovel: fifteen minutes. Training to operate a shovel in full compliance with current health and safety regulations and with special regard to third party risks: two weeks."
That has the sad ring of truth about it...
"...who keeps a locker through of non-shovelly shovels?"
It's probably another contractor who has the job of fixing them!
"Nothing can be done without the appropriate boxes being ticked, no matter how obvious or simple."
Indeed!
"In the end what happened was, the Mafia won all the contracts, collected the big money and threw all the rubbish in the river."
Lol! :)
They were fit and healthy when they had to carry the dustbins...
Good point!
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