Having sacked 2,000 cleaners, Tesco now expects its other staff to take up the burden of extra cleaning duties as a result of the pandemic.
According to the Daily Star, Tesco has demanded that 1,920 staff in the Tesco Metro and Tesco Express stores are to take on the extra workload of cleaning floors, shelves, fridges, tearooms and toilets.
Some criticism has been made that contract cleaning led to ‘patchy’ standards, yet rather than bring the job in-house, Tesco has chosen to heap the work onto the backs of existing staff, despite the company seeing sales rise by more than 15 percent over the 12 weeks to 12 July according to Kantar, the market research provider.
Of all businesses, grocery stores have benefitted the most since the pandemic began, with grocery sales nationwide growing at their fastest rate since 1994, increasing by 16.9 percent to £31.6bn.
Rather than creating more jobs and supporting the British economy at this moment, the private interests of these giant companies dictate that they are instead sacking staff and adding to the public expense.
Such brazen selfishness and profiteering cannot be tolerated. A nationally-owned system of food supply should ensure that shops are clean for workers to visit during the pandemic, and that excess money generated from the peculiar conditions of lockdown finds its way back into the economy and not the pockets of privateers and speculators.