5,000 in jobs shake-up as Asda shifts online
FIVE thousand Asda workers have been told their jobs are at risk in a huge shift towards online shopping.
The supermarket giant says 3,000 mainly back office roles will go.
However, bosses plan to create 4,500 separate posts in Asda’s online operation and they hope to hire those facing redundancy.
The shake-up will result in a net gain of 1,500 jobs.
Staff in cash and administrative work are particularly affected following a slump in non-card transactions during the pandemic.
Asda chief executive Roger Burnley admitted the changes were “unsettling” for employees.
He said: “The pandemic has accelerated change across the retail sector, especially the shift towards grocery home shopping, and our priority is to serve customers in the way they want to shop with us.
“The last 12 months have shown us that businesses have to be prepared to adapt quickly to change.
“I am incredibly proud of the way we demonstrated our agility and resilience through the pandemic.”
The roles of 1,100 managers will change to support online operations.
Home shopping centres in Dartford, Kent, and Heston, west London, will shut, hitting 800 jobs.
The UK’s third-largest supermarket was bought by billionaire brothers Zuber and Mohsin Issa and private equity firm TDR Capital in a £6.8billion deal earlier this month. The takeover is awaiting approval from competition regulators.
The shake-up came as Boots said up to 300 jobs would be axed in restructuring at its Nottingham HQ.
Boots said sales had dipped in the pandemic and it had to adapt as customer behaviours have “changed for ever”. Meanwhile, the owner of Vauxhall is considering closing its Ellesmere Port factory, affecting 1,000 jobs, unless the Government offers financial help.
It is understood that Stellantis wants incentives to produce electric vehicles and is seeking post-Brexit commitments on the trade of parts.
LADY Gaga has offered a £356,000 reward after two of her bulldogs were stolen by gunmen who shot her dog walker in the chest.
The singer has offered the cash for their return with “no questions asked”.
Ryan Fischer, 30, was walking French bulldogs Koji, Miss Asia and Gustavo in West Hollywood on Wednesday night when he was targeted outside his home.
Last night he was in a “serious condition” in hospital, though doctors insisted he was recovering well from the attack.
Lady Gaga yesterday set up an email account for the stolen dogs – Koji and Gustavo – asking anyone with information to get in touch.
Police said it was too early to know if the attack was a robbery by opportunists, or related to local gangs.
Video at the scene showed a man on the ground still clinging to one dog, Miss Asia.
Mr Fischer appeared to be alert and talking after the shooting, although struggling to breathe.
Later, home surveillance emerged capturing the moment he was shot.
The footage shows Mr Fischer strolling with the pets as a white, fourdoor car pulls up alongside.
“Give it up,” yells one of two men who get out.
“No. Help me,” screams Mr Fischer as he wrestles for control of the dogs.
When he refuses to let go of the dogs, one of his attackers raises a semi-automatic handgun and fires a single shot, leaving Mr Fischer injured on the pavement.
They then take Gustavo and Koji and escape in the car.
Mr Fischer had been caring for the dogs while Lady Gaga is in Rome working on the new Ridley Scott film, Gucci.
Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that they were searching for a man who “fired a gunshot from an unknown location and struck the victim” on North Sierra Bonita Avenue at 9.40pm. A
“possible suspect” fled towards Hollywood Boulevard, they added. Police are unsure if the dogs were targeted because they belong to Lady Gaga, 34, or if they were taken because of their breed.
French bulldogs are among the most sought-after breeds in America, with healthy puppies selling for an average of £1,400. But those with an exceptional breeding history can fetch as much as £7,060.
Previously, Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, has posted pictures of her dogs on social media.
Her pets have followed her to the American Music Awards and her 2017 Super Bowl half-time show. In 2014, she posed with Miss Asia on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, saying that her pet had “really shown me the importance of living in the moment”.
The Poker Face singer added: “She loves to sit with me when I record jazz. She never barks or makes noise; she just looks at me with her big ears.”
The singer’s father issued an appeal to catch the robbers yesterday.
Joe Germanotta, who described Mr Fischer as a friend of his family, said: “Our whole family is upset and praying Koji and Gustavo are not harmed. “Help us catch these creeps.”
IS THERE any word in the English language that is so abused as “diversity”. What it means in practice is ticking all the right boxes on an ethnic or gender monitoring form – while ensuring that everyone thinks in exactly the same way.
That is certainly how it is at the BBC. Read the corporation’s “diversity and inclusion plan” and you would think that it almost perfectly reflects modern Britain.
It reveals that 48.3 per cent of staff are female (against a target of 50 per cent), 15.1 per cent are BAME (target: 15 per cent) and 8.8 per cent are LGBT (target 8 per cent).
Yet where is the real diversity in the BBC’s all-too-predictable output?
You know whenever Brexit is mentioned it will be portrayed as an act of national harm.
You know whenever a Tory MP features in a drama – as in David Hare’s Roadkill – he is going to be a greedy, corrupt public schoolboy.
You know every current affairs show – whether it features the economy, Trump, climate change or whatever – will kowtow to the Left-liberal consensus, and any conservative commentator invited to make up the balance will be presented as an oddball.
NOR are BBC staff – or at least the presenters – nearly as representative of modern Britain as the BBC claims.They might tick the right boxes in terms of gender, race and sexual orientation, yet in reality they are mostly from the same pool of middle class people educated at a small group of universities.
Just listen to the words of Mike Sweeney, a DJ on Radio Manchester. He has had a pretty ordinary life as far as British men of his generation are concerned. He left school in 1962 aged 15 with no qualification other than a cycling proficiency certificate. He worked as an engineering fitter, coal miner, docker and van driver.
Millions in Britain are like him but on the BBC he stands out like an anthropological freak.
Before joining the BBC he worked in commercial radio, where he says he was accepted like anyone else. But after seven years at the BBC he says it still seems to him “like a gated community for the privileged”.
To give credit, the BBC’s new Director-General Tim Davie has recognised his employees are disproportionately from betteroff, well-educated backgrounds.
But his solution to the problem fills me with despair – he is going to instigate yet another target, for employees with working class backgrounds.
In future, job applicants will be asked where they went to school, whether they qualified for free school meals and what their parents did for a living.
How depressing to create even more bureaucracy. And it will count for nothing if the BBC continues to treat Brexit voters as idiots and Tories as callous fools.
The BBC’s target for LGBT staff just shows how ridiculous the whole business of diversity monitoring is. Five years ago it set itself a target of 8 per cent. Where it got this from, given that the Office for National Statistics says only 4.6 per cent of the population fall into this category, is anyone’s guess.
However the BBC hit on its target, it has been exceeded. Apparently, 8.8 per cent of its staff are LGBT.
BUT rather than concluding it doesn’t have a problem with discrimination against gay and lesbian people, it has demanded that 50 per cent of its LGBT staff be “out” to their manager.
In other words, it doesn’t want its gay staff to be in the closet. But what business is it of BBC managers? If people want to keep their private lives out of the workplace, so be it.
How about doing away with all targets and instead employing a revolutionary approach: that BBC jobs be given to people who demonstrate they would be best qualified to do those jobs, irrespective of where they were brought up, where their parents were brought up and who they sleep with?
It isn’t really revolutionary, of course – just common sense. But so obsessed have the BBC and other public bodies become with “diversity” and with ticking boxes that it seems truly radical merely to suggest it.
Of course, discrimination is wrong but in trying to counter it we have turned up a dead end where our gender, ethnic and socio-economic identity has become more important than who we really are.
To misquote Martin Luther King, the BBC seems to run along the principle of: judge not an employee by the content of their character but by their value to your department’s diversity monitoring returns.
The sooner the BBC stops obsessing with identity, the sooner it will truly represent Britain.
‘It still seems to him like a gated community for the privileged’