This is going to be a bit of a long story so bear with me. I (33 NB) have been working at this small hospitality business (literally five employees or fewer at any given time) since I graduated university in the summer of 2013. I initially worked for the original owner who was and is a longtime family friend, who hired me not just because she knew me and could trust me but also because I was/am overqualified for the job(s) I perform and do them with incredible efficiency and quality. A few years ago, that boss retired, and my current boss/his wife took over.
I didn't know this at the time, but the new boss dropped the wages of pretty much all the other employees down at least $2/hr and left mine the same ($13), which when I found out, I told them they needed to raise the housekeepers back up because that was ridiculous. They begrudgingly did so, until those housekeepers quit, and the new ones are only being paid $11 again. I now make $13.50 after asking for a raise and only receiving it at the start of this year.
I do the jobs of at least three people. I am the front of house manager, social media/website manager, I bake, cook and serve breakfast when asked, write and design the monthly newsletter, do all the design for our printed materials, of course do all the concierge services, and in general do all the front-facing day-to-day operations my boss doesn't want to do. When my boss goes on trips and vacations (which is… often, I'll get to that), I run the place entirely. I'm the only staff member with a set of keys to the doors. I live less than ten minutes away from the place, so if there is an emergency, I am the first line of contact. On longer “boss vacations,” I feed and take care of the goats and cat, and if needed, even my boss' pets (their house is also on the property).
The biggest reason I'm thinking of leaving is my boss' utter lack of care surrounding things like COVID. For the second time this year, I contracted COVID because of their negligence and misinformation given to me regarding COVID among the staff, and when confronted with this, they firmly denied I could have caught the virus at work despite the fact I literally do not go ANYWHERE else thanks to this area's complete disregard of communicable diseases. I am immunocompromised, and in addition to that, I had a surgery scheduled for August 29 that I had to cancel because I began showing symptoms/had a fever of 100.5/had a positive COVID test the day before. This happened because a coworker whom my bosses were aware had COVID was in close quarters with me and I was under the false impression that she had tested negative twice before being allowed to return to work, because those were the conditions stated to me by my boss. I saw her coughing but tried not to freak out because I foolishly trusted my boss and what he had told me. Less than 24 hours later, I was having horrific body aches (which I initially wrote off as a flare up of my chronic pain condition until other symptoms set in). I had been working an extra shift as a favor to my boss while they were on one of their quarterly cruises and cooking breakfast for them. The coworker with COVID was helping me cook and serve food to people!
Not only did I have COVID at that point, my coworker also had COVID and was contagious, and my boss insisted when I texted him about this that it wasn't true, but he was “sorry that I had COVID.” I took a week of taking paxlovid and somehow that got me over it (I had the new variant, hooray), rescheduled my surgery, and went in to talk to my boss in person about me continuing to work there because I was super upset. They again insisted that I probably got COVID somewhere else because there are “300 million people in America” and other such nonsense. They did apologize for “miscommunicating” about my coworker and her COVID and said they would start making people take tests if they're sick/making them stay home, but they should/could have done this in the first place!!
I'm disabled, can't drive, and don't have pretty much any job options available to me. I can't work full time, I live in an extremely rural area, and all the WFH jobs I've seen have been sales and full time or data entry and full time. I've been trying to find something else but it's just been a real struggle and I don't know if I can quit this. I also don't know if I can safely stay there and risk further permanent damage to my already disabled body.