Layoff-happy Capita charges staff to use cutlery in canteens Times are tough for Capita, or so it seems. The outsourcing giant is squeezing extra margin from its employees by charging them to use cutlery, cups and trays in the canteen. Our insiders tell us that call centre workers in Bury and Glasgow who decide to eat their own food in the canteen are forced to pay to consume their …
to the OP, I sincerely hope you don't run your own business, 'cause if you do then tell us the name so we can steer the hell away from it. Seriously, they are charging people for plastic disposable cutlery. What next? Toilet roll? Water fountain? Air con?
When I used to work at Time computers even THEY weren't this miserly.
One part of the problem would be that the cost of managing the sale of crap cutlery to the staff and the discussion of same in meetings would far exceed the cost of giving the cutlery away for free.
Crapita are so used to charging their customers for badly miss-micro-managing their work they've now started to eat their own shit.
... for those of us who don't have a canteen at all ...
It does seem petty to charge for cutlery, but most canteens these days seem to be run by catering firms. If that is the case with the canteens on those sites then it's hardly surprising that the firm(s) decided to stop giving cutlery away.
Canteens can be run by catering firm and still subsidised, was working on a site last year, full english about £1.20 for breakfast, a big lunch was about the same and used to visit it for dinner as well, my food bills were quiet low for a coupla months. Food was adequate - occasionally pretty good, they had a load of warehouse workers emptying loads into cold storage, so getting them well fed probably was a bonus because thats a calorie using job. Unsuprisingly the canteen was well used.
Well, a spoon really does add value to scalding hot bowl of soup.
Although I'd personally prefer to introduce that PR person to some e-re-training, via a multi-disciplinary agricultural/business crossover methodology - utilising a bovine stimulation prod device.
Or decapitatated her boss with a spoon
And no evidence to be found - we know there is no spoon :).
This definitely sounds like something cooked up by an accountant who was asked to squeeze a few extra cents out of the catering company contract, and was told that the catering company wouldn't budge unless they started charging for staff to use their stuff. Some things look great on spreadsheets but don't play out in the real world. See offshoring, sneaking in reduction of a product's package size instead of raising the price, and many others.
I imagine this kind of thing is felt more in Europe than in the US. I work for a European company in the US, so I have a lot of experience with lunchtime in both places. The US lunch is either a hurried affair squeezed in between meetings, nonexistent, or involves driving somewhere. Most European workplaces I've been to treat lunch as a shared meal among the staff, and the food in the canteen is actually decent. But, telling someone they can't have a plastic fork without paying is the literal definition of nickel-and-diming them.
But then this is the same company that bought the largest and reputedly most litigious private parking outfit in the country, notorious for suing their customers en masse when they don't pay up for disputed "parking charges". Why would you expect them to be all cuddly towards their own call centre staff?
Wankers - the lot of them.
The only consolation was the fact that when the unnamed local council in question had had enough of being butt-fucked at every turn and finally pulled the plug on Capita's IT services contract, all those ruthless wanker Capita managers we had had to deal with suddenly found themselves adrift and at the mercy of even bigger, more ruthless, and wankier Capita managers higher up the chain than them.
Those that live by the sword....
(and did I mention that they are all wankers?)
You have an organisation that has (hopefully) a non-core process.
Capita is an organisation that takes an existing process and does it cheaper using knowledge you have and it's own knowledge.
This will work just fine for a while, but inevitably costs can be cut further by moving the job to $cheaper_country, or innovation.
The thing is that Capita is uk based and so a company based in $cheaper_country can undercut them and capita does not innovate - it is a process based organisation.
Inevitably it will fall behind, one symptom of that is this, as margins get tighter the managers look to get the money back _somewhere_
The trouble here is that the company is - along with many others - overmanaged.
Those who do work on assigned tasks 100% of the time. There are a few people who have the job of mining innovation.
The thing is this is not generally the best way of working. those paid to innovate will not see the small opportunities those at the coal face see - the bread and butter of Capitas existence.
Some c-stores and coffeeshops here in Amurka will knock a nickel or dime off your beverage price if you bring your own refillable cup (reduce landfill, save trees, yadda yadda yadda), and these C[r]apita folks couldn't even pretend to have a better motive than parsimony? Yeesh. Hope the employees are able to find new jobs at better companies.
... that the first people to do will be the people who are the first to get a job elsewhere... which usually are the people who actually know what to do.
So essentially what Capita is doing is to start a program to lower the quality of their services. This may sound bad, but effectively is what outsourcing is all about anyhow.
BTW we are talking about the sort of call-centre job that can be outsourced. Those typically are just data entry jobs. If web developers would be a bit smarter, there would be simple and secure ways to just make the internal interfaces available to the user so there wouldn't be a need for such people.
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"Where workers regularly eat meals at work, suitable and sufficient facilities should be provided for the purpose. Such facilities should also be provided where food would otherwise be likely to be contaminated. Work areas can be counted as rest areas and as eating facilities, provided they are adequately clean and there is a suitable surface on which to place food. Where provided, eating facilities should include a facility for preparing or obtaining a hot drink. Where hot food cannot be obtained in or reasonably near to the workplace, workers may need to be provided with a means for heating their own food (eg microwave oven). Canteens or restaurants may be used as rest facilities provided there is no obligation to purchase food."
and
"An adequate supply of high-quality drinking water, with an upward drinking jet or suitable cups, should be provided. Water should only be provided in refillable enclosed containers where it cannot be obtained directly from a mains supply."
So... the cup thing is bang out of order unless they have fountains. At first, I thought "fair enough; if they only have plastic cutlery, which is shitty anyway, in the canteen what's the problem charging if people are using it for home cooked meals - bit mean, but able to be reasoned". Then I thought about it a bit more, and yeah, bunch of tossers.
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