Nursing Home Employment - Yet Another Social Injustice!!
The social injustices in this country just keep on coming. Yesterday I was confronted with the news that my girlfriend had been sacked from her job for no apparent good reason. It seems to me as if some people watch the apprentice a few times and think they can get away with behaving like the man on the left. Well to be honest I’m sick of people getting away with this bullying behaviour in the work place - it really gets to me that people can behave in such a childish caveman like way.
I’m not going to give away the name of either my girlfriend or the nursing home she worked for in case she decides to take her former workplace to a tribunal.
My girlfriend started working for her previous employer about a year ago - she had declared that she had a mild learning difficulty on her application form and that never stopped them taking her on. Quite rightly so, but as you will see as I get to the end of the story, they were quite happy to use her disability to get rid of her in a round about way.
In any case she enjoyed the job at first, even though the night shift never suited her but at the of the day having a night shift job is better than having no job, right? She was bringing home a wage; she could pay her bills and put food on the table. However things soon turned sour....
My girlfriend had noticed that a member of staff had been sleeping on her night shift - That is a sackable offence in a care home, but being the nice person she is my girlfriend was in two minds as to whether to report her or not but in the end decided to do it anyway because of the idea of having her workload increased because of some other lazy member of staff eventually made her mind up to report it.
During the course of my girlfriends’ employment she also reported the abuse of an elderly patient - one of the women who were in charge waved her pinkie finger at an elderly male, inferring that he had a small penis. The woman she reported denied this off course and locked my girlfriend in a room another member of staff against her will and proceeded to ball and shout while pointing her finger right in her face, claiming she never done such a thing. This disgraceful act of bullying upset my girlfriend to the point she was burst in to tears and left the building to where the smokers usually go to calm down. It was these incidents that partly led to her employment being terminated, but I’ll get to that later.
It should also be noted that in the course of her employment my girlfriend was left to work on her own with no support from other members of staff despite the fact that she had declared to them she had a learning difficulty.
Now I’m very sorry, but when an employer takes on someone with any kind of disability they must have someone closely supervising them at all times to make sure there are no mistakes being made, especially when it comes to look after the elderly - some of whom can be very challenging to work with. But this was unfortunately not the case and my girlfriend had to work many shifts on her own whilst there was hardly any staff on shift, leaving her to do a lot more work than she should have been doing, unsupervised off course. This led to a lot of undue stress, which led to a non-existing social life consisting of starting at 10pm, finishing at 8am before going to bed 9am and being too tired to rise out of bed again until 8pm before getting ready for work again. All with no thanks as it turns out.
As you can imagine leaving someone with a learning difficulty with so much stressful work unsupervised only led to mistakes being made that could so easily have been avoided if the management had done their jobs right, but it was these mistakes that also contributed to my girlfriend losing her job.
Eventually at my girlfriends disciplinary hearing my girlfriend bravely fought her corner but eventually the bullies won. The way my girlfriend was bullied makes me sick to my stomach, she stood up and told the truth about some of the things that happened in their. The bullies say they had to let her go because of her mistakes, but how dare they use that as an excuse when they knew all about my girlfriends learning difficulties. If my girlfriend was making mistakes, her employers should have been giving her more support, not using it as an excuse to get rid of her. They also gave the reason that my girlfriend left the building after the incident in which she left the building. She did indeed leave the building – she went out to where the smokers go for their nicotine hit, so are they going to sack all their chain smoking employees as well?
I think we all know the real reason for the sacking though - the bullies didn’t want the truth getting out in the open, jobs were at stake and it was either my girlfriend, or them and it really angers me that these snakes can get away with this but that just seems to be the ways of things in this country. Basically it amounts to discrimination of someone who has a learning difficulty.
The social injustice doesn’t end there though! When my girlfriend went to sign up for jobseekers allowance she was told she would have to use her savings first, even though she has worked since she was 16 and has never scrounged of the state and has paid her taxes and national insurance. Since when was there a penalty for saving your money? Why is it people who stick needles in the arms get everything going, yet when someone decent gets in a bit of bother they are left to rot? What kind of society allows this to happen??
So what is the answer? Should we all stick needles in our arms and get the government to stump up the cash? Or should we just kind on we are mad by running down the streets naked with a fake parrot on shoulders shouting "pieces of 8!"? You might be put in the nut house at first but least you would come out to your rent and council tax paid for, a care team making your dinner, and a brand new 16 grand motor every 3 years that you can’t even drive yourself.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to get ahead in life then send your answers to me on a postcard!
