Amazon offers flexibility to parents

Amazon Daventry has launched an innovative new contract that offers parents, grandparents and guardians of school-age children the choice to work term-time only.

The new contracts, available at the Daventry fulfilment centre, guarantee time off for the six-week summer break, as well as the twoweek Easter and Christmas holiday periods, without affecting the comprehensive range of benefits they receive, including private medical insurance and life assurance.

The contracts, aimed at better supporting family needs, were successfully trialled at three sites following employee feedback, and are now being phased in for employees in Daventry and across all Amazon’s fulfilment centres – the places where Amazon store, pick and pack items for sale.

They will be rolled out to sort centres and delivery stations across the UK later this year.

Josh Vause, site leader at Amazon in Daventry, said: “We’ve listened to our employees’ views on flexible working and I’m really proud that we’ve introduced new and innovative options based on their feedback.

“Both of these contracts put a really important emphasis on work-life balance and I’m certain they’re going to make a positive difference for many of our people.”

Marlec are lighting up bus shelters across the Isle of Man

Lighting up bus shelters

Solar powered lighting created by Marlec is helping to make bus shelters safer on the Isle of Man.

To accommodate the growth of tourism on the island and the need for better transportation, the company, based in Corby, was asked to create a design to help make bus shelters even safer on dark nights.

Marlec opted to use their intelligent LC101 controller as the brain of the system. Marlec’s Spectralite S panel has been mounted onto the shelter’s roof and wiring runs from the panel and LED to a battery box housing the controller and battery. The battery stores power during daylight hours to provide electricity to the LED throughout the night.

The LED light is positioned in vandal-proof housing and will only illuminate when a motion sensor is activated from dusk to dawn, depending on the client’s required setting.

Marlec have worked on solar lighting in bus shelters since the early 2000s when the company designed a wind and solar hybrid bus shelter on behalf of a Scottish council.