A worker at a warehouse supplying Australian supermarkets says managers were not prepared for the Omicron onslaught, resulting in long shifts and stress among workers covering for absent colleagues due to the pandemic.
The employee in the supply chain serving Coles, who asked not to be identified due to fear of reprisal, said about a quarter of staff were off work due to Omicron.
He said most of those had Covid-19, rather than being forced to isolate due to being a close contact of a positive case.
“A lot of pressure is put on us to try and pick up the slack,” he said, which involved “longer hours and weekends” as well as morning shifts that start earlier.
“For instance, we usually start at 6am but a lot of the times … a lot of the staff start at 2am.”
High levels of staff absence in supermarket supply chains, coupled with high demand due to panic buying, have emptied shelves of staples including some meats, vegetables and medical supplies including painkillers.
Coles’ chief operations officer, Matt Swindells, said Coles did plan in December by recruiting more workers and buying additional stock but the impact of Omicron was “materially greater than the contingency plan anyone could put in place”.
“The sheer scale and rate of impact of Omicron, even with all that mitigation in place, has been the single biggest disruption that the industry has seen through all of Covid,” he said.
The supermarket group had about 110,000 staff before Christmas and has increased this to about 130,000 in a recruiting program that has included asking former Coles workers to return and streamlining training to speed up getting people on the floor.
The secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Sally McManus, said workers across the country were going into the third year of the pandemic “under incredible stress, and are dealing with higher rates of infection and more colleagues being sick than ever before”.
“It’s an incredibly difficult and dangerous time in Australian workplaces,” she said.
As a result of the crisis, conditions within the warehouse were the most difficult seen so far in the pandemic, the warehouse worker said.
“There’s been more tension, I think, more anxiety in people – that I’ve never seen before, including myself. Because so many people around me that had Covid … and then they ring me up the next day and said all, you know, I had Covid, and then I have to worry about my family.”
About a month ago health and safety officers warned management “that they will get to be in a position where they need to furlough out a lot of people”, he said.
“They said, well we’ll get to that bridge when we get there, and we’re there now. And they’re in the shit.”
He said the situation was far worse than during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, when panic buying stripped supermarket shelves of toilet paper and other essentials but warehouses were close to fully staffed.
“When we went through the panic buying that was just insane, because we really didn’t need to do it,” he said.
Workers in the warehouse wear masks for their entire shift while doing the physically demanding job of picking goods and packing them on to trucks.
They are also required to take a rapid antigen test every morning and to re-test if it is positive because RATs are less reliable than the more time-consuming PCR test, which has to be performed by a medical professional.
This can result in being tested up to three times a day, the worker said.
They were previously required to isolate for a week if a close contact tested positive.
However, last week, Scott Morrison said governments had agreed to loosen the rules for essential workers, including those in the food supply chain, in a bid to reduce staff shortages and get goods back on retail shelves.
Unions opposed the move, saying it put the health and safety of workers at risk.
The Coles supply chain worker said he did not think it would work anyway.
“Not in my opinion, no, because of the fact that all the people that I talk to when they give me feedback, they’re all positive.”
Swindells confirmed that about 90% of those off work due to Covid had the virus.
The warehouse worker said that in addition to staff forced to stay away because they had Covid, several were staying home because they did not want to get vaccinated.
“They’re dipping into their long service leave and their entitlements – they can’t access sick leave because they’re not actually sick,” he said.
Swindells said the number of people off work because they refused to get vaccinated was only about 2% of the workforce.
He agreed that the Omicron wave was the most difficult yet and said it was difficult to know when it would peak.
Coles learned to cope with panic buying during the first wave in 2020 and dealt with staff absences concentrated on 12 locked-down local government areas in NSW during last year’s Delta wave, he said.
“In Omicron, it’s just an absence of team across the entire supply chain,” he said.
“We’ve never had that before. And that’s really what’s probably caused a a bigger problem that’s going to run for longer because the recovery from that requires multiple parts of the supply chain to get things together.”
McManus said new health and safety assessments were needed in all workplaces “to ensure that everything that can be done to stop the spread of Omicron is being done”.
“Once the federal government can secure a useable supply of rapid antigen tests we will also need these provided free to workers in the vast majority of workplaces,” she said.
“These tests are the key to keeping people safe and reducing the burden on our healthcare system.”
