Anyone who has been unlucky enough to suffer a head injury & then PCS will probably be able to tell you about trouble at work. From bosses who don’t understand or care to those who try to understand yet fail miserably, it is one of the worst minefields on the front battle of the individual’s war for correct treatment.
Invisible illness will always be a bugbear for companies in the UK as our culture doesn’t readily recognize the sufferer’s plight. Many negative media stories appear about the few cheats who play the benefits system, taking monies which they aren’t entitled to & allowing tabloid rags to tar all sufferers with the same brush. We see that people are easily ‘wound-up’ by such emotive issues & the attitudes that prevail lead to further persecution & misunderstanding.
I’m not just taking about the average man or woman in the street who repeats what they’ve seen on TV or read in the daily ‘scandal-mag’ & easily parrots the media view into a safe, black & white opinion of all invisible illness; no this is something grained into the very fabric of our society & public services, including health services where I & others have experienced some of the most disturbing & obtuse attitudes.
So we have the situation, you’re back at work after a couple of weeks off, maybe longer or more frequent absences have labelled you as a ‘regular absentee’ or a ‘troublemaker’ to your supervisor or bosses. Now you probably don’t have the knowledge or language to be able to explain to your boss, colleagues or anyone for that matter about your PCS. You’re expected to carry out a responsible role, maybe involving careful attention or accurate calculations in order to maintain your position. What do you do? Get a doctor’s letter? Who do you call for help?
Well I can say from my own experience that by this stage your card is well & truly marked UK employment law is so flimsy that the grey areas don’t even touch around the edges of this scenario! Due to your reduced cognitive function & poor concentration it will be hard to navigate the situation to your advantage, even if you are a union member they can’t really claim to know what you’re going through either. You are sailing alone & under fire!
I’ll tell you my own story, what happened to me back in 2006-2007; I was working in a role for a well-known high street mortgage provider, one which has just recently hit the news again for yet another fraud/fixing scandal. At the time I was new to the job & was unaware of the chequered record of said bank, they sold themselves as professional & benevolent but as I soon learned the opposite was the truth. My role was a fairly complicated one which involved lots of inter-woven financial calculation, computer input & telephone work. I’d trained elsewhere to do this job & as it was a wage for me at a difficult time I made the difficult choice to keep working despite everything.
I was good at my job & competent enough before my MTBI, yet afterwards I struggled daily with pain, poor focus, memory trouble & headaches, compounded by staring at a computer screen all day under artificial lighting. Sometimes I felt like a battery hen under a hot bulb, struggling just to stay upright. The PCS had affected my work rate & people were starting to notice my change, several informal ‘chats’ were had where I was reminded of my responsibilities & as time went on things came to breaking point…
My GP wrote a letter to my employer which stated that I had a diagnosis of PCS & that my condition should be taken into account with my work. This didn’t make any difference to my team boss, an inhumane character who revelled in ripping people to pieces for the fun of it. I had more time off due to the stress of the situation, being bullied despite my illness & that put another nail in my coffin. I asked to move teams in the office & eventually it was agreed.
I had booked a holiday for the New Year period & when I returned I struggled so much that my symptoms buried me & even moving my position to another, more sympathetic boss I was unable to carry on doing the same job at all! The trouble came as I had a meeting with my new boss & his boss, whereby we all mutually agreed that I would temporarily move to an administration role, on a lower wage until I’d had the chance to recover from my MTBI. This seemed like a good deal but sadly I was being set-up in order to get rid of me when the time was right!
I went into the junior’s office, stamping letters, opening mail & making tea for the staff & bosses there. I had to commute to work each day by bus, a 28 mile round-trip which in itself took its toll. More than that I now had to start at 7:30AM each morning to suit the office hours. For months I carried on doing the same mind-numbing stamping & sorting of hundreds of letters every day, hoping for recovery & the chance for my medications to kick-in & provide me some relief. I worked damned hard, worked extra without pay everyday & yet was still treated with no respect by even more foul-mannered, hypocritical bosses who not only hated their jobs, but despised the enthusiastic young people who work beneath them!
About 5 months passed & I was making my recovery work, I asked to see my new bosses about my future. I told them about my agreement to return to my full role once I was feeling better, they said okay, to leave it with them & it would be looked into…
I waited two weeks before I decided to ask again about my future, they kept avoiding me, ducking my gaze & I felt that things weren’t as they should be. I was eventually pulled into a meeting & told that if I wanted my old role back (as agreed) that I would have to reapply as if an outsider applying for the first time, go through the same training & exams all over again! I protested that this wasn’t agreed, but of course the bosses I had made the agreements with had conveniently moved locations & were unavailable to comment! I’d been screwed basically.
Well I had little choice but to keep my head down, carry on as I was struggling financially. I felt betrayed & was sure that like so many other employees, I would be dispensed with simply because I had an illness, i.e. I was no longer any use to this corporate machine, an unfortunate human casualty. I did not answer the challenge put to me or say a word thereafter; instead I tried to hold it together & tried to get some employment advice. This was a dead-end as I had barely a leg to stand on under UK law!
So the outcome was that I was clinging on by my fingernails, I knew I probably didn’t have long. They waited until my birthday to do it; I was tag teamed by two of the bosses they took me into a meeting & produced a fictional list of mistakes, misdemeanours & basically whatever flimsy lies they could compile in order to ensure I would be suspended without any choice in the matter!
I went home, marched out of that awful place like a criminal, unable to say goodbye to my work friends & that was that! My depression at this point was savage, as I would surely now lose my home of ten years & be out of work for the first time in my life. The worst part was that nobody could help me fight this multi-national corporate beast & my word counted for nothing, I had no fight left anyway so after 11 days I was then forced to accept my fate. The cruelest part was yet to come, I was owed 6 weeks wages at that point which I had worked for yet they refused to pay me, even refused to discuss the matter. I was instructed to write a letter requesting my owed salary by a legal advisor but this was only met with nonsense responses from the same people who had burned me at the stake. They had beaten me down & won!
That is what happens here, we accept that unless you’re wealthy enough to afford a good solicitor, then you can forget any access to those golden employment laws that exist solely to serve the better-off few. The system here is outdated & big companies will always trample all over anyone who no longer benefits them as they ignore any ethical or moral responsibility.
The bank in question, as I said is well-known now for its corruption & bad practice, it’s the royal family’s bank, having recently been fined by US & UK governments for fixing interest rates, as well as funding bombs for dictators, genocide in Zimbabwe and Darfur & betting against food prices, therefore keeping over 50,000,000 people worldwide in food poverty. They have a blue eagle as their logo, I’m sure you’ve worked it out by now? Well it was an important lesson for me & an expensive one too as the 6 weeks wages they stole from me led to me falling behind with my mortgage payments & then losing my home later that year!
The moral of the story is that unless you work for a humane boss or one who is willing to work with you (not against you) then you’re going to need legal advice, a union may help sometimes, plenty of money & support from some good friends & family before you can avoid losing more than you hoped to lose! That’s Great Britain folks….
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