I can/can’t believe my company is trying to ruin Christmas for employees. We are a manufacturing plant creating specialized medicines for clients. Normally we have a winter shutdown over the typical time frame people go home or travel for winter holidays (last 2-3 weeks of December until New Years). For some reason this year (some BS like meeting number of production lots for contracts for 2023), they have shifted winter shutdown to start in 2024 and continuously produce through winter holidays. They expect workers and supporting admin departments to just support production and emergency production issues over winter holidays. There was absolutely no consultation with affected employees, negotiation or even if people will support. It’s upper management fault we didn’t meet demand because they (criminally) understaff production workers, expecting them to consistently come overtime and still barely has enough people. Now I’m supposed to be on call as a technical SME, but I’m so sick of this shit. Like, I just refuse. It’s so demoralizing that everyone just takes this abuse as if there’s nothing to be done. We have so much power because everything is highly specialized and production workers take a full 3-4 months to train before they can really even start contributing and it costs an obscene amount of money and resources for even one technician. I tell people that you just don’t have to support, but everyone is afraid to do anything. Our company can’t really afford to fire any of us but no one else seems to recognize this. How can we change this?