Well actually it was yesterday but I had it confirmed today. So although I thought I lost my job yesterday, I lost my job today too!

I will write about the last fifteen or so years one day but not today. Today I want to write about losing my job. The job that came at a bad time, I’d just lost my father back in the UK. My partner told me that he didn’t know whether or not he wanted to say with me, so I’d better be on my best behaviour. It was not a good time.

With my kids still at school which finished at lunchtime, and childcare very scarce as well as very expensive, I needed to be able to work from home. I was inspired by a well qualified friend who worked online and so on examining my skills, I registered with an online agency and a few, quite a few, applications later, I was picked up and hired by the people who have just let over half their team go. I got in during the early years for a company, in my opinion, just a sliver within the law and managed to hang on for almost nine years because my kids needed to get through school and then university. My ex husband barely contributed to their educational and other needs so it was up to me to do my best for them.

The first version of the work, customer services for an Amazon, Ebay and other platforms power seller from God knows where (not Italy where I live) lasted six years before it started to implode and even though they tried to blame my incompetance in stock control (I was a customer service agent!), they moved me to the “new venture” started in 2020 as the original company floundered. By now of course I’d managed to secure jobs for my daughters. One who had been going through university and who used her small part-time salary to help fund her studies, and the other as it suited her lifestyle.

With my move to the new venture, they secured my job for two years. The first time that I’d had any guarantee since 2014 when I started. I never knew whether I’d have a job one month to the next and I always worked, every day, seven days a week, no holidays. I did manage to get a trip or two to France and had a wonderful opportunity to go to Thailand with a friend to stay with her Thai sister in law, but I had to work, every day often into the early hours.

Along with me to the “new venture” came one of my daughters, the other, as she had just graduated, was let go, only to be re-hired for customer services when the number of complaints increased.

I was put onto a mind numbing work categorising products as there was a backlog and my mother tongue was English. Or at least that’s what I was told. The “new venture” instead of selling extremely cheap, tacky products had scaled up to expensive products some in the thousands, drop-shipped from China from Ali Express. Bought sometimes for only a few dollars (the currency used) but sold on for hundreds!

Anyway, let’s fast forward to yesterday. One of the platforms complained and closed down all of their shops. So they sacked over half of the staff. The ones that they didn’t think mattered, including me! I didn’t know at first what was happening as there was a group message on Whatsapp, sacking one WhatsApp group and keeping the other. As I was still working on the running down of the “old venture” I was in the dark about if I was carrying on or not. So I carried on with the old work.

Today, later in the evening, I finally got my “personal message” which the elite group had received yesterday, no particular feeling there, faked sympathy and false promises to be re-hired in the future. The company isn’t really interested in their online sales. They are trying to raise money for luxury real estate ventures in Portugal. They don’t care that five days before Christmas, they could have ruined the futures of 14 families. I know because I saw the email from the selling platform which closed them down. I know why and I saw the subsequent fawning appeal from my ex. company. We, ex. staff are no longer considered useful and so we’ve been “expired”.

My ex. company told me that there was nothing they could do. They couldn’t pay us, they were sorry. If they had not tried to flaunt the rules and regulations of the selling platform, treat their customers badly and to promise that which they couldn’t deliver but to tell the truth and have decent principles, then we’d still be in work. Families would have a future and customers would be happy and contented.

By the way. We don’t get any severance pay. We were told to stop with immediate effect. We haven’t got any workers rights as we were forced to click to agree to a fake contract to let the employer do what they wanted (they were employers who wanted us to be called freelancers). We had to click to agree or we couldn’t log into our work and we wouldn’t get paid. My rate of pay was less than £5 an hour so we weren’t compensated by high wages for working every day of the week. In case you wondered, the blame for failure this time was put onto the lowest common denominator workers instead of the Quality Staff, and instead of the owners taking responsibility for being slack with training and staff management.

Anyone who says unions are bad, think of conditions where you have no rights and can be left high and dry without a future, because the employer didn’t care either about their workers or their customers. My daughters have been kept on, thankfully, doing the same work but with a 50% pay cut. Strike, walk out? There’s nobody to co-ordinate it and hey’d just hire someone else. This is online working, or is it modern slavery?