BENEFITS OF WORKING AS A COVID, COVID, COVID...
This month we welcome Mark Jennings, local GMB representative from Southend, and Company Secretary of
the Southend Taxi Co-operative Ltd, Trading as 333444 Taxis. Mark gives us an insight into the effects of Covid on their local co-operative… and it’s refreshingly and optimistically positive.
There we were, chugging along nicely. Then Wham!! March hit us with an enormous bang.
We were all sent into a spiral of doubt, speculation and worry. with a lot of people running around like headless chickens. I for one honestly thought we were done for, game over player one - please insert a new coin.
But - and it was a big BUT - we had to start making decisions. The government stepped up to the plate and started handing out furlough payments. Thanks Rishi, you certainly took the edge off, and we in our little taxi/private hire Co-op had to react accordingly.
Here in sunny Southend we took a decision to cut our monthly rent down to £200 a month from our usual £250; not much of a drop really, but a lot of you would have noticed that in comparison to a lot of cab firms across the country, this is cheap to begin with.
Then we decided that all the radio rent paid in until the end of what we know now as the first lockdown, would be made into a loan to the Co-op instead of radio rent. This is officially known as a formal loan agreement, or an FLA for short. It’s something we are allowed to do as a Co-op: it means that our members/drivers can lend their own company money; in this case, to keep it afloat and ride out the storm of the pandemic.
We took the decision to keep all money paid in under an FLA; this we kept going from April through to August. Ahhhh, do you remember those two heady months, August and September this year, when we actually made some money driving a cab…happy days.
AS I WAS SAYING…
I digress. The local council handed out grant money to keep us going. which I have to say really helped in the early days, with paying our staff wages etc. We have ten staff answering our phones 24/7, so you can imagine the wage bill is not a small one.
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We applied for our bounce-back loan which thanks to the Co-op Bank we were awarded without a hitch. This will probably be returned before the year is out to be honest; as will become clear, we didn’t need it.
We even made plans to answer our phones (which weren’t ringing much) with volunteers if we had to; this is what we did when we started the company, and we were fully prepared to go back to our roots and start again.
The biggest factor in our survival was our members - the ladies and gentlemen who drive the cabs and contribute their monthly rents. But this time they were under no obligation to pay. We made the decision that if they carried on working they would be expected to pay something; if they could manage the full £200 great, but if things were that bad, we simply asked them to contribute anything they could.
For those who were self-isolating we gave them a choice: If they could pay something, that would be fantastic, but we fully understood if they were unable to pay anything. We couldn’t expect anything from anyone, and anything we did get to help the survival of our seven-year-old co-operative, we were extremely grateful.
There is something about a Co-operative company that fuels a fierce commitment amongst its members. It may be because they own the company; it may be because they can make their own decisions in the running of the Co-op; it may be simply that they don’t have to pay a circuit owner’s profit; it may be because no-one can tell them what to do. Or it may be simply that all profit is kept in their pockets only and no-one else’s, but whatever the reason it certainly brings out the commitment in people.
DECEMBER 2020
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