Stealth sacking

Now I don’t know why I bothered.

This company was the best I’d ever worked for. Everyone marched to the same tune. But then came a shock. Due to group restructuring, I had to move to a neighbouring region in March 2002. I gamely joined this office looking forward to another successful year. But my spirits dipped when I met the regional manager. He was sitting behind his desk, puffing away on a cigarette and cynically pouring cold water on the company’s efforts to improve quality, health and safety.

I thought he must be having an off day. How wrong I was. When I started on the site there was no accommodation for site operatives, offices or toilets. Then began a programme of almost continual undermining of my authority. The contracts manager, visiting the site only when I was not there, among other things told the forklift driver he could go off road if he wanted to, though it’s strictly against company policy. He removed trades from site without consulting me. He also managed to delay the site accommodation by four weeks.

The final straw came when I had to remove a groundworks foreman from site. He was one of the ‘good old boys’ and did as he pleased. The ground workers had continually breached guidelines. As well as the normal safety issues such as leaving keys in stationery vehicles, not wearing hard hats and hi-viz vests, there were more dangerous events such as turning a road roller on its side, sending a man down a 3m trench without any edge protection and allowing non-licensed operatives to drive vehicles.

When I removed him from site on safety grounds, my contracts manager allowed him straight back without even a phone call to me asking what had happened. These people then had the green light to do whatever they wanted and they made the most of it. I walked off site as all authority to control these operatives had been removed from me. Armed with a suitable excuse, they sacked me.

Companies are only too happy to put site managers on the front line, send them over the top to face customers, contractors, police and the courts and when it goes wrong stab you in the back.

Hours are spent in boardrooms figuring out ways to slide responsibility onto the shoulders of the site manager. It’s about time forward-thinking managing directors opened their eyes. The relics are not interested in safety, just their own little empires.

In the meantime, as I’m not allowed to build good houses safely here, I’m off to Ireland to work for myself. Slainte!