NC for this in case my employer is on here.
I work for a relatively small company with about 100 full-time staff and around 50 part-time staff on site. We are a customer-facing company and apart from a few back-office staff are dealing with a few hundred clients face to face every day.
In times of Covid, I am not feeling that enough thought has been put into making our workplace safer.
- No PPE has been provided; we were all given a window of about 5 days to get our own face coverings made to company specification (a certain colour, two layers min) so many of us who had already got some face coverings needed to find the specific ones with very little notice.
- The only "protection" we have is a bit of tape on the floor, which, in many cases, is less than 2m away from where our customers sit facing us. The company have said it's the best they can do because there is only so much physical room available.
- Even though we can wear face masks if we wish (and do so in communal areas like the staff canteen), this is strongly discouraged when we actually deal with our customers. Our employer argues that it hinders effective communication and better sales are made if customers can see our faces because non-verbal communication is so much clearer and more persuasive.
- There is no upper limit on the amount of customers indoors; we can each deal with anything from 5 to 35 people in the waiting area - and waits are long; they last, on average, an hour, but can sometimes be up to two hours. That means each customer-facing member of staff is in a room with many clients, very few of whom wear masks indoors as they don't have to (it is specifically stated that they can remove masks once they have passed through the entrance).
- Our customers often don't socially distance at all. While there are physical restrictions that make 2m social distancing impossible indoors, many brush past each other in order to look at items, often sharing their use without a second thought given to cleaning items first before passing them on. I have witnessed a number of customers tapping others on shoulders or backs to get their attention and sometimes they huddle over the same items to get a closer look. Our employer say they can't afford more items to be put on the shop floor during sales hours.
- Staff move offices regularly. We have nowhere to keep our personal items, so have to take them and our sales equipment with us when facing customers. We often end up in 3-5 different offices over the course of the day to deal with customers.
- Naturally, customers are getting annoyed. We are having to deal with verbal abuse regularly and on occasion items have been thrown and fights broken out, which we had to intervene with as security is sparse and can take up to 20mins to cross site to get to us. We only have 1 member of security staff on duty to cover all of our offices.
AIBU to say that these conditions are not safe? What can my employer do? Should we continue working in those conditions?