This post is the culmination of a series of events happening in relatively rapid succession at work. We got a new Assisstant Director (AD) about a year ago, and she is making life hellish at best.
For context, I work in a very large vaccine company. The nature of our work means many coworkers, and I work double shifts (totaling 16 hours a day) most days of the week. Many of us are assigned mandatory overtime if not enough people volunteer for double shifts. Our previous AD gave everyone leniency on what time to show up for extra shifts, as long as we were on time for our normal shift and communicated that we would be late for [insert reasonable excuse] a day in advance. Excuses ranged from I need time to catch up on sleep to everything under the sun.
Her first move was to remove managers' ability to give shift flexibility to any of us. Every little request now goes through her and her alone. She followed up with removing coming in late to shifts for any reason and increased all our workloads. Within the last 2 weeks, here's a list of AD's morally incomprehensible decisions:
A manager went to the hospital due to a suicide attempt that's being contributed to imbances cause by working insane hours and nightshift. The managers doctors are demanding she be on a normal schedule until they figure the situation out. AD refused to accommodate and put the manager on a termination plan. The manager had to find a new position that met her doctors requirements within the company within 90 days or be forced to take leave of absence. If the manager can't find an accepting position before her LoA runs out, there's a good chance she will be fired/laid-off.
A coworker cut his finger while working on his house. He went to the doctor to make sure he didn't do any other damage. His doctor cleared him to go back to work and avoid aggravating it for a few days. The coworker went to the company's health services (glorified nurses station) to see if he could continue making the vaccine. Health services cleared him for all work, not in direct contact with the vaccine. AD freaked out and started acting as though he had a broken finger and refused to listen to anyone. She forced him out on disability leave, and the company that handles disability claims couldn't even file his paperwork since his injury didn't meet the requirements. Everyone started arguing for the coworker to be allowed to do the paperwork aspect of our job for the couple days until the cut healed. The AD refused and said that he could only return to work when he was cleared to enter asceptic spaces. He lost 3 days' pay over the AD'S over reaction.
We are severely understaffed. 4 coworkers forgot a testing step at the end of making the vaccine. The step only pertains to making sure the sterile filters didn't break while the vaccine was being filtered. This does mean that the batch may not be able to reach the market, but that will depend on the results of emergency tests we have to do now. Without any investigation or fact-finding, the AD sent the 4 individuals out on suspension as soon as she found out. None of us know if they will come back, but now all of us have to work more hours to cover their shifts.
Our site needs to make extra batches of the vaccine to make up for other sites having issues. We ourselves are having a lot of equipment failures and are severely understaffed. Her response is to tell us all that no vacations can be approved for the rest of the year, and we'll work straight through Christmas if we have to.
I love my job