WASTE RECYCLING
JOHN CRAWFORD
JOHN trained at Saltcoats Burgh in the late 60s. After a decade he moved to PD Beatwaste Ltd/ Wimpey Waste Management Ltd. He then joined the Civil Engineering Dept at Strathclyde University before posts at Renfrew, Hamilton, Inverness and East Ayrshire Councils. A Fellow of CIWM, he served on their Scottish Centre Council from 1988-2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland and was their President between 1991-92.
WASTE RECYCLING
And your bonus is …
MANY of our national retailers are struggling to survive, never mind pay their employees a bonus this year.
I’ve always been in two minds about bonuses: when we were paying refuse collectors around £16/week in the late 60s, one of the companies installing the new UK gas distribution network was paying labourers £100/week, the only issue being that £90 of their wage was bonus payments. So any holiday pay was a tenth of their usual earnings, and with there being no sick pay scheme, it was clearly a job for fit young men.
We were also building a new municipal swimming pool at the time and the tilers were on a lucrative bonus scheme. But many of them were often out working for nothing on a Saturday morning to replace tiling that had earned them a massive bonus for laying so many in their 40 hour shift, but had afterwards been rejected for poor workmanship.
So I bore all this in mind when Wimpey Waste decided that part of the 1979 Wage Settlement with the GMBU (we had a Closed Shop Agreement) would be a new bonus scheme. Every driver was to get a £2/day fall-back bonus, but managers had to negotiate a specific incentive scheme for each individual depot. The idea was that ‘X’ loads would qualify for the £2 with every load thereafter qualifying for an (increasing) additional payment if it was completed in the eight-hour shift. It hadn’t dawned on Head Office that our drivers considered the £2/day as ‘guaranteed money’ and if expected to work harder, the next load had to have sufficient value to be an incentive. But we agreed on a deal that worked for our depot: one worthy telling me after we’d signed it off: “I’m going to make a fortune Big Man.” My reply: “If you do, so will the company!’
With the mechanics we agreed that they’d get 100% bonus if the overall fleet vehicle availability was 90% (to allow for routine servicing, repairs, MOT preparation, etc) with a sliding scale of bonus for under 90%. On paper, paying mechanics a bonus for doing less work, but subject to adequate supervision and identifying driver abuse. Our bonus schemes were overt, measurable and easily understood.
Elated by this progress, the company then offered a prize for the depot manager who could return the highest bottom- line figure for June that year. I was quietly confident since it was one of our best trading times of the year, and was a bit annoyed when we were beaten by another (smaller) depot. But the next month all Hell broke loose: the ‘winning’ depot had apparently held back some of their June operating costs, and invoiced some of their long-standing customers in advance, so their July performance was a break-even by the time the quarterly figures came out. After that, there were no more bright ideas from Head Office!
For me, the best bonus was simply keeping my job!
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