Employment in the UK

My experiences on Employment in the UK

There are a lot of people giving advice about finding jobs in the UK, and I do not pretend n the slightest to have any expertise in this area. I thought I’d just share with you my own experience to do with employment in the UK.

I’m sure you’ve heard horror stories about how high unemployment rates are in the UK, as well as how many Australian/New Zealand/SouthAfrican/Canadian backpackers who come over on a Tier 5 visa return home within a few months of arriving in the UK because they can’t find a job and are too poor to even afford toast! Well I certainly did before I headed overseas, and being the kind of person I am, I decided the best thing to do was have a job waiting for me before I even arrived. Great idea, but in reality it was a little different to what I was expecting...

There are a few companies that will organise for you to have a job, often with accommodation included. They take your CV and send it off to employers in the UK, who will then contact the company back with a job offer, which includes your rate of pay, accommodation description, location etc. The company then contact you with all these details, and if you’re interested, a phone interview is organised with the employer and yourself. This is so both you and your potential employer can ask any further questions, clear up any uncertainties and make all the details a little clearer in terms of start dates, hours per week, types of duties, the feel of the workplace. Unfortunately, this offer may only come through a week or less before you actually arrive in the UK, so you may feel pressured to take whatever offer comes up just so that you are guaranteed employment for at least 3-4 months. Sound great? Well I certainly thought so! Obviously this service is too good to be free, so I handed over about $AU600 of my hard earned cash and hoped for the best...

I was in France when I got an email from the company, with details of a job offer, which was in Reading – a town they said was ‘just outside of London’. I was a little disappointed, as on my application I had expressed that I would prefer a job either IN London, or close to Nottingham (which was where my boyfriend would be studying at Uni). The email also said that I should phone the general manager of the restaurant the very next day at a specific time, which I thought was a little forward, as it was lucky I’d checked my emails that day! I also checked another email inbox (I have about 5 different email inboxes, of which I had originally given the company my uni email address, however had contacted them a month earlier to inform them that I would primarily be using another one while overseas, which they had contacted me through later) to find some quite rude emails from one of the company’s employees I hadn’t ever had contact with before. He had emailed me the Reading job offer a few days earlier to my uni email address, and then sent a few more which became quite rude, with him questioning whether I was going to contact the general manager in quite condescending tones. I emailed back immediately, explaining that this was not my primary email address, of which I had informed the company and I had already responded to another of his colleagues anyway. I didn’t receive an apology however.

I emailed the company asking what they thought the chances would be of a job offer coming up for somewhere in London. The reply I received said that this offer in Reading was probably the best I’d get and that jobs in London were hard to come by. Basically they were pushing me to accept the Reading job.

Anyway, I wasn’t that impressed with the job offer, but rang the general manager (let’s call him Scott, I’ve changed his name) who explained that it was a restaurant/bar and that I would be living on a boat moored on the canal next to the restaurant. I played a lot of sport when I was growing up, and am also a little clumsy. So after breaking my right wrist twice and spraining each of my wrists multiple times, I have weak wrists. This has caused me to get tendonitis in my right wrist, and with repetitive lifting of plates and trays in previous jobs, I get quite bad pains in both. So when I put my application into the company, I specifically told them I didn’t want to do waitressing jobs, but would like to be behind the bar as a bar tender. Scott explained that the position was for a waitress, but that I would be taking drinks orders, and then work my way up to bar tending. I thought that sounded ok, and it kind of made sense to learn the drinks menu and take orders first.

Scott also said that the accommodation was free, and I would be living on a boat with about 9 other employees. He described the room as a little on the small side, and also said they were in the process of doing the boat up, replacing the showers etc. I thought it sounded like a place that sounded ok, kind of... But the thing that really made me say yes was that niggling voice in my head that reminded me getting that job now would mean I could spend the rest of my holiday not worrying about finding a job in the UK or checking my emails daily. So I said yes, booked a train from London to Reading for after I arrived back in the UK, and hoped for the best.

I arrived in Reading about 7pm, and caught a taxi to the restaurant. I left my things outside and hesitantly told one of the girls behind the front desk who I was. They didn’t really know what to do with me, but decided to show me to my room, and told me that my first shift was at 10.30am the next day. The company say that you will have 2 days after arriving at your new place of employment to rest and settle in, which I mentioned to the girl who was showing me around (one of the managers it turned out) who said she didn’t know anything about that, and that I was rostered on and expected to work. I told her I didn’t have any shoes that were appropriate, but she didn’t seem to care, and told me to wear anything. So my dusty black ballet flats that were falling to pieces just had to do.

The room I was given was a lot smaller than I was expecting. There was about 1m² of floor space, as the bed, a bench with sink and wardrobe were each along three of the walls, with the door on the other one. It turns out that it was actually about half the size of the single-occupant cells in an 18^th Century Prison that we visited in Lincoln! It smelt funny and was a bit dirty, but I had just spent that last 14 hours travelling so was a bit too tired to take it all in. I was quite hungry though, but the girl who showed me around said all the shops in town were shut and didn’t offer me a meal at all. So I had a kitkat chocolate bar and some water and waited until morning for breakfast. The showers and toilets on the boat were disgustingly dirty, and I soon found actual fungus growing on the walls (and this was in the shower that had apparently only just been done up), as in the fungus that grows in damp forests! Also the toilet that happened to be next to me made the loudest noises after being flushed that went on for about 5 minutes in the pipes that passed just behind my bed. Only 1 of the three showers worked, and only one of the toilets (besides the noisy one) could be flushed. I later found out that the boat was not linked up to the sewer system, so anything we flushed down the toilet went straight into the canal we were moored on. So I was kind of in a way living in a toilet... not very nice, and very illegal! It was cold on the boat, and there was little ventilation, which proved frustrating as I am not a smoker (of any kind) but just outside my room door just happened to be where a fair few of the staff members would sit for hours at night smoking cigarettes and pot. Neither are my favourite smells.

The actual work was quite crappy as well. Everything was done differently in the restaurant, and some of the procedures seemed inefficient and were frustrating to do. The actual building was falling apart and most of the equipment was broken or very far from perfect working order. I wasn’t given much direction, I was pretty much just tossed into the deep end.

Some of the staff were quite nice, welcoming and genuine people who I still keep in contact with. However some were plain lazy, others just loved bossing people around, but EVERYONE complained about the job and the workplace. Scott even told me a few days after I started that they’d had a few people pack up and leave in the middle of the night after only being there for a few days. One of the chefs had only walked out mid-service a week or so before I arrived. Alarm bells started to go off, but with talk of the business being bought by a quite successful business entrepreneur from a famous and wealthy family, as well as promises of the accommodation being done up in the near future, I ignored them. I soon found out that I would not ever be behind the bar full time, and would simply be a waitress for as long as I stayed there. When my wrist was strained during service, and I had to strap it daily as well as take painkillers constantly, I finally got to go behind the bar after begging my managers to do so to hopefully aid my recovery. But I found that as soon as I went behind the bar, I got yelled at for other peoples mistakes, was treated with disdain and made to feel quite stupid by other members of staff. When I explained to my managers that my wrist wasn’t getting any better, they just told me to take stronger painkillers and get on with it.

Surprisingly, even though I worked my arse off, I was also bullied by some other members of staff. Nasty comments, ignoring and belittling seemed to be the focus of a few people towards me. I couldn’t understand why, as I had been friendly to everyone, and hadn’t done anything that I knew of to deserve this treatment. Approaching my managers, they were sympathetic, but told me I had to confront these bullies myself – and thought the issue was resolved!

Pay was monthly, rosters came out each Sunday evening for that week (so no advance indication of days off or shifts), provided meals were sometimes inedible, and none of the promised improvements were made on the accommodation.

In pain, being bullied, and in a location that in my opinion was a hole, I was miserable. So I packed up my bags and informed my managers before my last rostered shift for that week that I would be leaving after work and never returning. I have never left a workplace with no notice, and am quite loyal, but I felt like I owed nothing to this place. They had not treated me with the respect I know I deserved as an employee and human being, and which I would be able to get working elsewhere. My wonderful boyfriend came down from Nottingham on the train to help my haul all my things back to his college hall room to live until I found a new job.

I had been planning on moving to London even from when I first arrived in Reading. I planned to work for a few months, save up, then apply for jobs in the capital and move before Christmas. I had already sent off an application for a job as a sales consultant in London at one of the UK’s most well-known high street fashion retailers. They liked the look of my application and an interview was arranged for what turned out to be only a few days after I ran away from Reading. So I caught the bus from Nottingham to London and back for the interview, and a few days later they phoned to congratulate me on getting the position, and informed me that I would start about 10 days later.

Everything seemed to fall into place. And now I am living in London, working in a job I love with people that are so interesting and lovely to be around. The group I work for really values its employees and I look forward to going to work each day. No day is ever the same, it’s always fun and exciting. Oh, and my wrists are back to normal now, so no more pain!

I did have some good times in Reading, and it was definitely an experience I have learnt so much from. HOWEVER if I had the chance to do it over again, I wouldn’t pay all that money to the company, as it really wasn’t worth the stress and unhappiness I went through. Also there are so many free recruitment agencies over here that basically do the same thing that I learnt of afterwards. The company actually use these, which makes me annoyed to hear, as it means I basically paid them a lot of money to pass their job off to someone else who does it for free. Talking to other people who also went through the company, they were equally, if not more disappointed in the service and support they received OR the actual placement they ended up with. Even though the actual name of the company includes ‘London’ in its title, hardly anyone actually gets a job through them in the nation’s capital!

Getting a job definitely requires you to put yourself out there, put a bit of time into your application, and a little bit of research into the workplace’s history and background definitely impresses in the interview.

Even though I love my current job, I am not that impressed with the pay. I am getting paid more than when I was in hospitality, but if I compare it to how much I was paid per hour back in Australia for a similar position, it is only just over half of what my Australian hourly wage was. UK minimum wages in the hospitality and retail industries are much lower by comparison than Australia’s, so you may be surprised when you convert your pounds into Aussie dollars!

Also, many workplaces pay employees monthly, which is rarer back in Oz.  I was used to being paid weekly. This does make it harder to budget if you’re not used to it, and many Aussies, South Africans and Kiwis find themselves very VERY poor before payday each month!

The job market is a little tougher than back home, but there are still jobs out there. Especially in the lead up to the Christmas season, many larger retail companies hire a huge amount of Christmas temps, and these positions can turn into permanent ones if you’re hard working enough!

From my own experience, as well other people I’ve chatted to along the way, bar work is not the most stable, nor does it have the best conditions . If you have a pretty face , are young and female you may be luckier than most - but beware of single middle aged male managers, as often they use their positions to employ people they would like to share a bed with in the near future. Formal job applications for some bar jobs (including the one I filled out for the company) ask for your height and weight. A South African 26 year old male I was chatting to in my London hostel was telling me about himself and his work experiences. He was currently unemployed after being let go by a bar nearby in favour of a 20 year old attractive female, even though he had years of bar experience, was hard working and was a really nice guy. His replacement had no experience at all, but a very pretty face. So many people are looking for jobs, especially in bars in London, so employers don’t have to treat staff that well, as they know they’d have a hundred applicants the next day after you leave. However it’s not all bad, and a few of my friends have landed really great jobs in pubs and nightclubs (Ministry of Sound, anyone?), but from what I can see, they got really REALLY lucky!

So to you – good luck, persevere, there are rewarding jobs out there if you look hard enough. BUT if you are miserable, please do something about it. You don’t have to up and leave so quickly like I did. I did talk to my managers about how I was feeling and that my expectations weren’t met from what Scott had originally told me, so they all said it wasn’t a surprise when I told them I was leaving. Talking to your managers may actually change something for you.  Perhaps start putting applications for other jobs in a place you want to be. I did, and I am so much happier because of it! I’m in London, which is pretty darn exciting in itself!