I am a waitress at a bar/restaurant in a very popular area. I began working here almost three months ago, and I am good at my job. I have received nothing but positive feedback from management and coworkers other than minor service notes that I’ve listened to and improved upon, and I work hard and pull my weight. I know that my performance actually cannot be part of the issue here. For the past 2 months I’ve been working 4 days a week, typically scheduled for around 24 hours give or take. It’s a tipped position and there’s often cuts so it’s hard to measure exactly.
As of a week and a half ago, we changed our hours to no longer stay open for lunch on Fridays so I lost that shift, but I didn’t say anything beyond a brief conversation with my manager and was fine with three. A few days later my manager took me off my one consistently good shift, which I explicitly asked her not to do, but she made it seem like her hands were tied and it was the only way to get everyone enough hours. I was frustrated but didn’t say anything beyond what I had already said about wanting to keep the shift and she promised me two weekdays to make up for it, so I would still be working 4 days.
As of today, a coworker of mine was talking about how she all of a sudden was only on once a week. I told her to go talk to the manager because that’s obviously not okay. So she did that, and afterward my manager approached me and explained that she made a mistake. My coworker had said she “was okay with anything” for her shifts when they were reworking the schedule, and for some reason my manager took that as a go-ahead to only schedule her once a week. I think it’s pretty clear that wasn’t what she meant, but I digress. My manager explained that she had offered me those shifts under the impression that my coworker didn’t want them, but now that she does she apparently has a claim to them because of “seniority”and I will only have two shifts per week, cutting my hours in half, effective tomorrow. I was caught really off guard by this considering my performance has been good, and I didn’t really advocate for myself in the moment because I felt like I was about to cry. She offered me a hosting shift to make up for it but I’m not a hostess, I’m a server and she hired me to be a server. Even if I did take the hosting shift this pay cut is still crazy. I can’t live on this. I need to find another job but I start school in a month and won’t be able to work as much. I really needed this month of work to save up and I don’t have time to find another job where I could do that. I just don’t know what to do and any insight or advice for how to navigate this would be amazing.