I've been crying on and off all day. They had issues last month too, but I absolutely can't believe they're doing this to us.
I'm a substitute teacher for a large US school district (so, you know, already an underpaid essential worker). We're paid a daily rate on monthly paychecks. Once you've hit 70 daily assignments in a school year, you get bumped up to a “Step 2” pay rate, about $40 more per day. I hit this benchmark mid-January. Our union also signed a new contract in January that guarantees us an extra 10 sick days for COVID and an immediate substitute pay raise ($50 for Step 1, $60 for Step 2).
Problem is, the district just switched over to a new payroll system, and it's completely broken. EVERYONE is having huge problems. We're not being given anything we were promised in the new contract. My Step 2 raise is also missing. This means that for regular days, I'm being shorted approximately $100/day.
HOWEVER. I also got COVID at the end of January. I needed a total of 8 sick days for it (a few on January's paycheck, mostly on February's paycheck); I had 1 left in the regular allotment (out of our extraordinarily generous pool of 3 per year, fuck me for fainting on the sidewalk one day I guess) and used an extra 7 from the new allotment. (COVID also ruined a bonus I was supposed to get for long-term subbing for the same classroom, and prevented me from teaching a bunch of stuff I was looking forward to for weeks and months, but that's beside the point. Fuck COVID, though.)
January's paycheck was already rough, most of which I was expecting, since we're not paid for winter break, but without the raises/sick days I was promised (plus some dumbass emergency expenses that came up this month, because of course they did), it was worse than I'd thought. I made it work all the usual ways, you know how it is, sure that this month's would be better. I was checking my bank account last night, seeing if I had enough money to finish my laundry without overdrafting, and saw that it had been deposited… and it was the same. Damn. Size. As January's paycheck. Not a raise in sight, and my COVID case might as well have been a second winter break. I did the math and it's literally 60% of my paycheck that they're holding captive, just because their stupid new payroll website is a piece of shit that could have been built better by one of my 7th grade computer classes. You know what 40% of my paycheck covers? Rent and utilities. And maybe, like, a sandwich.
From the union newsletters/announcements, it sounds like this kind of thing is happening to hundreds of us. I sent an email about this to payroll and my union reps, like we were told to, and if Monday isn't too rough a day at work I may try to call the district as well. But it's so widespread that I don't know how we're all going to get through this. I am always horrified at how the world treats teachers, but this is too much.
tl;dr school district's shitty payroll website eats my raise and sick days, fuck me for getting COVID I guess