Amandeep Kaur, 29, a Hermes courier from Leicester, was in the back of an ambulance rushing her seriously ill son to hospital when she first felt the pressure to get back to work. It was two weeks before Christmas, one of the busiest periods for Britain’s booming parcel delivery industry, but Kaur’s six-year-old, Sukhmanjeet, had collapsed at home and she could not make her deliveries. A few hours later, with her son about to undergo surgery, she rang her manager.
“I said my son had had a cardiac arrest and I can’t come in,” she recalled. “I don’t know how long for, but he is my priority right now. [The manager’s] response was ‘Oh, it has come at a very busy time’.”
Even as her son’s condition worsened, she felt pressured to get back to work as soon as she could or risk losing her round.
Over the coming days, Kaur said she called her manager with updates about her son, but as a self-employed courier with no employment contract, she felt her job was under threat.
One one occasion, she said, after Sukhmanjeet had a leg amputated, “the response was ‘OK, I can try and help you for the next few days, but I can’t make any promises [going] forward’.
“[The manager] was saying ‘Come back in two days or there’s nothing we can do. We need to give your round up because it is a busy period’.”
Her son died on 19 December 2015. Kaur has spoken out for the first time about her experience to outline what she feels are some of the problems with the UK’s fast-growing but precarious self-employed gig economy. Kaur, who also has a six-year-old daughter, has worked for Hermes for four years. She makes deliveries seven days a week and works an evening job in a pizza takeaway.
“It was pressure on me because I was scared I was going to lose my round,” she said. “My son had had his legs amputated, so I was thinking I will need to get wheelchairs, a new car. I was looking at it financially and relying on Hermes. If I didn’t have my round, how was I going to afford all this? Unfortunately my son didn’t make it.”
Kaur said she went back to work 10 days after her son’s funeral, which she said was far too early.
“I was told there were conversations happening at the depot that they couldn’t keep my round for too long,” she said. “I was under pressure. I wasn’t ready.”
She recalled how colleagues were asking “why the hell was I back at work. People probably thought I didn’t care about my son, that I went back to work so early, but I was in that situation where I needed my job”.
As a self-employed courier, she received no pay during the period when she was looking after Sukhmanjeet. Her colleagues set up an online collection that raised £750 towards the funeral costs.
Aside from her field manager, to whom she talked about covering her round, Kaur said she never heard anything from Hermes.
“I think they treated me awfully,” she said. “If they had to go through that, I would hope they would be treated much better than that.”
In a statement, Hermes said it had “every sympathy for Ms Kaur”, but did not accept her claims.
It said an inquiry found that during her son’s illness and in the months afterwards, “the field team did everything they could to support her … by helping to provide alternative cover during this difficult time”.
Hermes said: “We have continued to be supportive to Ms Kaur. This December 2016, we also helped her to find cover for most of the month as she felt unable to work during the anniversary of her son’s illness and tragic death.
“As part of our commitment to ensuring sympathetic and fair treatment, we have new guidelines for our field teams on how to respond to couriers facing exceptional circumstances, such as family emergencies or personal issues, which may result in unplanned notice.”
