From Saturday 7 February a three-person crew works at the Kerava distribution centre between 06.00 and 12.00. The client extended the contract by two years at the same time, which is the part that actually made the decision easy.
The site has been on our books since 2021: 11 400 square metres of coated concrete, cleaned six nights a week between 21.00 and 01.00 while picking is stopped. What changed is that the client added a Saturday picking shift last autumn. By Monday morning the aisles were carrying five days of grit instead of four, and the machine passes were taking longer for a worse result.
What the Saturday shift covers
- Machine scrubbing of the main aisles and the dispatch lanes
- Dock levellers, bay floors and the area behind the strapping machines
- Staff areas: canteen, changing rooms and the two upstairs meeting rooms
- Grit removal at the vehicle doors, which is the whole point from November to March
The Sunday-to-Friday night schedule is unchanged. Nothing was moved off the weekday shifts to pay for the Saturday one; this is added work, added hours and three more people on the payroll.
Who is doing it
Two of the three come from our own Vantaa round and already know the site, which is the arrangement we prefer: a Saturday crew of strangers on an unfamiliar floor is how machines get driven into racking. The third started with us in January and worked four weekday night shifts on the same site before the first Saturday.
Saturday work is paid at the collective agreement rate with the weekend supplement on top, and it is voluntary. Everyone on the crew asked for it.
Why the extension mattered
We do not hire people for work that might last a quarter. A three-person shift is roughly 940 hours a year, and taking that on without a firm end date in the contract would have meant either agency labour or a short-term arrangement, and we do neither. The two-year extension made it an ordinary hiring decision instead of a gamble.