Not long ago, Cheryle, a Primark worker undergoing chemotherapy, launched a petition on Organise.

While seriously ill, Cheryle was being hassled to attend repeated capability assessments. She was pressured to come into meetings while still in active treatment, and offered no mental health support at all.

She started the campaign because, in her words, “I don’t want anyone else to go through what I went through at Primark.”

Now signed off from work due to ill-health, Cheryle decided to speak out, and her courage sparked a wave of public support. Thousands of people signed her petition, shared their own stories, and helped shine a light on what was happening behind closed doors at Primark.

As Cheryl’s campaign gained momentum, more Primark workers came forward. Many shared their own experiences of being pressured to work through illness, called into meetings they weren’t well enough to attend, or feeling completely unsupported by management while on sick leave. Their testimonies showed this wasn’t an isolated incident, it was a pattern.

On the 5th December, Cheryle and the Organise team met with senior Primark bosses to present the campaign directly. In that meeting, they admitted:

“We should never ask someone to come in for a meeting if they physically can't.” This was a really important win, and they acknowledged that Cheryle's treatment was not acceptable.

Primark has now also confirmed that big changes are on the way.

Here’s what Primark has committed to:

• A full review of welfare and capability processes
• A more compassionate sick leave policy
• A new personal wellbeing team
• Better training and mental health support for managers

Primark called it a “big change”, and it wouldn’t have happened without Cheryle, or the thousands of you who backed her up.

This is what worker power looks like

One worker stood up, hundreds of other workers came forward, and thousands of us backed them, and now one of the UK’s biggest employers is changing the way it treats sick and seriously ill staff.

But we’re not done yet. These changes haven’t been rolled out yet and we’ll be keeping the pressure on to make sure they become a reality.
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To keep up the momentum, we’re flooding Primark’s inbox with messages of support for Cheryle, and we won’t stop until the new policy is confirmed.

👉 Add your message of support for Cheryle now.
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Together, we’re making sure that no other Primark worker has to go through what Cheryle did.