TLDR at the Bottom.
Backstory,
I'm in Eastern Canada and last year I was let go without notice from a prominent printing company because the high stress environment caused by my manager aggravated my IBS and she was pressuring me to take less bathroom breaks.
After my contract ended I was let go and spent the last year looking for work. I'm in Canada and I had one year of Employment Insurance which ended March 11th
All throughout my unemployment I looked for work and tried to find literally anything but no one ever called me back. I even went to a temp agency and they ghosted me.
Finally about a month ago I landed a job at a bakery as a cashier.
I was trained in Food and Safety previously and this place was full of red flags.
Washing dishes in dirty, cold sinks, they had me working before filling out paperwork, trained by a regular worker who also wasn't properly trained.
I worked three shifts and in that time I saw cross contamination, mold in the handwashing sinks, product that should have been discarded sold, clean dishes handled after taking out garbage and people mixing food buckets on the floor and then putting them on the prep tables.
Their professionalism was also awful and they used Google chats to discipline and bring up issues publicly, which is humiliating.
On a Monday someone complained that I hadn't mopped the floor properly so I brought up my concerns.
The owner of the company then offered to put me in touch with his lawyer and when I asked him to clarify if he was threatening me with legal action for bringing up sanitation and health concerns I was removed from the chat and fires via email twelve hours later.
I took the information to the local news and reported them to the health and safety department, but because I live in a small city they wouldn't touch it because the owner is a prominent member of society.
So I went interviewing again and eventually I was called by a call center and offered a work from home position with benefits.
I accepted it but a week later was contacted by a hardware store owned by a very prominent family with stores all over the Atlantic provinces.
It was less money and no benefits for a year but it was a management position.
The job offer emailed was department Manager.
So I declined the call center job for management experience and took the pay cut.
I get hired, find out it's a supervisor position, not manager but figure no biggie it's still management experience.
This company is VERY big on safety. They had a death occur at a store in the 90's and wanted to try and prevent further deaths so they began hyper focused on safety.
I thought this was a great sign.
Orientation ends and within my first two hours of being trained on cash I'm being told to do something I KNOW is wrong, but I didn't take it to heart, I let it go.
Now, the cashier's have been there for YEARS, but the supervisors have only been there six months to a year and the cash manager is moving departments.
Lots of tiny red flags, but I let it go, my trainer is a “good ol' girl” type that doesn't do things I was told in training to do, snaps, doesn't explain what she's doing.
Fast forward to yesterday, they ask me to sign a PCI compliance form.
They do not train cashier's on PCI compliance.
They hand you paperwork and tell you to read it and sign.
They are not in PCI compliance.
They had me take a credit card payment over the phone without the card-against their own policy, they don't lock up the terminals-against their policy.
But it's more than that.
Not only do they NOT FOLLOW the procedures, they are actively “correcting” and preventing me from doing it.
So then I do digging.
Every department has a stool for when you're not busy but cashier's.
There's no training documents anywhere.
The current supervisors don't know where to find policies and procedures.
On top of that the older woman training me went above the supervisor's head to the manager who isn't even working in the department anymore who started scolding me without even asking what happened.
At this point I'm panicking. I gave up a decent job to work here and I'm being told to do one thing but signing paperwork contradicting it.
So I spoke to the store manager and explained the problems.
Not only did he agree with me, he called the woman in charge of auditing who wrote the policy and she ALSO agreed with me.
So I thanked him for listening and left.
That was yesterday.
Today I go in. First, they schedule the cashier at 7 and tell you to be there 15 minutes early.
What they MEAN is you need to be clocked in at 6:45 to count the cash because the store opens at 7.
So according to them, I was late.
Then the payroll lady comes in and doesn't even say hello, immediately cuts into me about the debit machine, which I had gotten permission from the store manager to put away when not in use AS. PER. THE. POLICY.
Payroll lady then berates me for a half hour, on the floor, in front of my trainer, in front of customers because they follow the policy.
But they don't and she said she would have to read it, so she doesn't KNOW the policy.
She then tells me she is shocked that I am talking to her like a district manager and I explain, I was talking to her like a HUMAN BEING and that I had genuine concerns about my job.
She proceeds to tell me because she has been working their for 20 years I don't know what I'm talking about, then she walks away and continues to yell at me, infront of the morning employees who by that time had gathered for the morning meeting.
Then she makes fun of me and laughs with other employees where I can hear her.
So they pulled me up to the office and told me I wasn't a good fit.
This is why people stop caring.
This is how you create a work environment where people “just do their job and go home.
You can continue to ask your employees until you're blue in the face what you can do to make their jobs easier and to improve the workplace but if you fire people who actually speak up why are you even bothering?
And now I am most likely going to end up homeless.
Tldr:
Bakery doesn't like it when people point out that they're violating health concerns. And I wasn't a good fit for a hardware store because I actually wanted to follow their rules.