Post
by
kit » Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:45 pm
On paper it says I do a 40 hour week - well that's a joke. It apparently works out as 40 hrs each week in a month - but it is always an absolute minimum of 6, 7, 8 and even 10 shifts in a row and it drives me mad. We also have daft shift turnovers where you do several night shifts on to a 6pm start time finishing at 2am and then back on for 2pm that same day. Well it's enough to drive anyone mad and ill - there are several people off long term sick and I am myself fed up of always feeling ill and shattered. This will be made worse early next year when we move 60 odd miles to another place due to a recent merge - at the moment I live literally just behind my place of work.
I now have a couple of options - get out like lots of other people have done - but this would mean a dramatic drop in salary. The other option is to ask to go slightly part-time. Several staff have asked to do this, and if they get enough people to drop one shift a week then they would recruit one full time person and I have been asked if I want to do it. At the moment we are still trying to work figures out because we get shift allowance on top of wage and we don't know if we would be entitled to the same 25% as the others or if this would go down. Although at first glance it may seem a luxury to ask to go part time at a time when we are trying to pay off our debt, I have good reason for this suggestion, I have been looking at other jobs and because I wouldn't get the shift allowance, I would be looking at a minimum £6,000 paydrop if not nearer to £8,000, compared to a £3,000 to £4,000 pay drop if I got rid of one shift a week.
If I discussed this with my IP what do u think he would say? We currently pay £1100 per month into the IVA and are just into our second year, with my current take home being £1,200 (it's a joint IVA and we have a joint bank account - but it works out that my partner pays the bills etc and I pay the IVA).
Thanks, Kit
