PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
When we were young
Mike AldousMCIPPdip, AFHEA, CIPP tutor , remembers his early days in the payroll profession, recalling the world of payroll in the 1970s
I joined the payroll profession in July 1972 when at the age of sixteen I was appointed as a junior clerk with the then County Borough of Ipswich Council. At that time many employers added young and inexperienced members of staff with the aim of training them to become valued employees by moving them from department to department so they understood the business and could see what aptitudes they had and how best they would fit in! My first department was Payroll, Creditors and Superannuation; and my first tasks were – yes, you guessed it – in the payroll part of the team. It seems that just after my arrival the local Government Act of 1972 was published, which meant Ipswich was to become a district council with effect April 1974. Why did that affect me? Well, the movement around departments ceased and I remained in payroll – and so began my long payroll career. In the first part of my first week, my mentors – Ernie, Cliff, Harry and George – introduced me to the delights of weekly timesheets. I was sorting them into order for my mentors to complete, then batching them ready for the data prep team to key them on to tape which was then fed into the computer for processing. So the payroll was run, and now it was
time to get ready for payday. The weekly task of making up the cash packets ready for distribution, required thimblelets (see image) at the ready to count the cash and fold the payslips. I can still clearly recall sitting under the stairs at the Education Department on that first Thursday waiting for the schools’ caretakers to arrive. They would line up and sign for the packets we had prepared to go back to their schools and pay their assistant caretakers, cleaners, and the canteen staff. ...made do with a penknife and would carefully scratch the paper to remove the error... It was rather surreal in that on that morning some six days after leaving school there I was paying the caretaker of my old school. At that time, we provided a pay on-site service which was the first of the pay-rounds for the week. This was followed by other pay-rounds in the afternoon and on Friday; paying the weekly staff at their places of work such as the
cemetery, old people’s homes, painters/ decorators, refuse collectors, and the rest of the building trades. Can you imagine being asked now to undertake these pay distribution tasks by being driven around in the town in a taxi? The one that sticks in my mind was a Robin Hood taxi which stood out as it was a Ford Zephyr Six Estate painted in green and white squares! Today, should we make a mistake we can always turn to correction fluid to paint over the error and correct it, but in the early 1970s it was either not available or just not allowed. So, we made do with a penknife and would carefully scratch the paper to remove the error as best we could to write over it. Those years were plagued with strikes – none more so than those affecting the supply of electricity. Prime minister Edward Heath introduced a three-day working week, and there were scheduled times when you were without power for up to three hours daily. As you will imagine it proved difficult to continue producing our weekly payroll, but the council was fortunate to have its own generator to keep the mainframe running. This meant the payroll team camped in those rooms making sure we completed the timesheets and of course produced
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | May 2020 | Issue 60 14
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