Washing through the pandemic – Fishers
The last few months have been an extraordinary time for all of us. In fact, looking back as far as the 2020 Thistle Awards in March, when the industry got together to celebrate the best in Scottish hospitality, the storm clouds were gathering. Since then of course, so much has changed and continues to change.
The UK laundry sector directly employs 23,000 people and accounts for around £800m of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Its fortunes are inextricably linked with the hospitality sector which accounts for nearly 60% of laundry income, the balance being split between industrial workwear and healthcare.
As lockdown began and people sheltered in the safety of their homes, Fishers, like many laundries, had a double challenge. Our hospitality-driven demand fell by more than 95% creating an unprecedented financial challenge (helped, but not completely solved, by furlough). But at the same time we had to stay open for our many healthcare clients, leading the scientific fightback against COVID, and industrial clients essential to the maintenance of the economy and food supply.
More than 400 of our staff endured all the hardship and uncertainty of furlough for three months. A further 100 beat the challenges of health concerns and childcare to come to work every day to provide essential services for key workers. We are grateful to both these cohorts of staff.
There were some very dark moments in lockdown. Understanding that furlough would not last forever (nor even as long as the pandemic) we took the heart-breaking decision to close our Perth plant, at least for the foreseeable future. We made 84 great staff redundant, but the closure was necessary to balance our capacity and protect our service for the long term. We continue to maintain the plant and look forward to the day we can consider re-opening.
As tough as lockdown was, a ‘slam-start’ for laundries has been just as difficult as we had to get going once again in mid-July from almost zero to a million pieces. Most of our staff were keen to get back to work and we were thankful to see business returning. However, it wasn’t easy. Many hotels remained closed (often with our stock still in them) and all of our routes and delivery frequencies had to change. We got some things wrong and made mistakes along the way but it wasn’t for the sake of trying. I am sorry for the occasions when we failed to deliver right first time in the early weeks of re-opening, but we have tweaked delivery schedules, invested in more textiles and switched back to seven day working at our laundries to get our service to a good place.
Of course, the safety of our staff and customers is our top priority and as we came back to work, we had to do so safely, protecting our people and those with whom they meet with sanitiser, face masks, gowns, perspex shields, temperature checks, one-way systems, staggered breaks and physical distancing.
Equally important is the safety of our linen products. Fishers’ parent company (K-Bro) is Canada’s largest healthcare laundry provider and we consider ourselves to be experts in laundering potentially infected linen safely. There has been a lot of discussion in the industry about wash temperatures, but it is unclear that 70C alone is sufficient alone to kill the Coronavirus. We want to provide the maximum assurance and have switched to an Ecolab accredited virucidal detergent system. Although this has nearly doubled our wash chemicals cost, it is important for us to be able to provide this level of reassurance and maintain low temperature washing which is so important to our sustainability agenda.
As busy as we’ve been, we’ve still a long way to go to reach pre-COVID levels and we, like you, have some difficult months ahead until the pandemic is finally behind us. Whatever comes our way, be assured that Fishers are here for the long-haul, as we have been for the last 120 years, standing shoulder to shoulder with Scottish hospitality to provide the bedlinen, table cloths, chefswear and hygiene assurances necessary to your own success.
