I really don't know if this is where I should post this.
I'm burned out. I have been in the same field for 17 years now, 14 years of that has been at my current job.
I'll start out by saying I'm not against working but the situation I have been in for the past 14 years has been miserable. When I started here I was told “your pay will be caped out in 10 years at 63k”. I was ok with this because I live in one of the porest counties in my state. The manual labor jobs proceeded to not get raises for the next 5 years because of the market crash in 08. I was 22 at the time and was just happy I was getting paid what I was at the time. It had been a 50% raise from my last job.
When we finnaly started getting raises again in 2012 there was a pay scale increase of the manual labor jobs. I got a really nice raise but it didn't add up to the 5 years of missing raises. Now every year they do a merit raise on top of the 2%-3% cost of living we get every year.
They stopped raises again in 2020 when covid started. Then we got a 1000 dollar “bonus” for working through the pandemic last year. And on top of that, the work place is your normal toxic shift work plant.
I was ok with the pay situation because of how poor our county is I was still doing really well financially.
I got covid in December. The first day I got sick I went to the doctor and had a negative test but was still running a temp of 104°F. I called my boss and he asked if the test was negative and when I told him “yes” he said just to come in to work because I don't have anyone to replace you”. So I reluctantly came to work and sat in a room by my self and watched our plants monitoring system, for the next 12 hours.
The next night I came to work and I was still sick as hell so I called my boss and told him ” I can't do this you have to find someone to cover for me”. He said there was no one to cover and that I would have to stay. After he hung up the phone I called his boss and told him what was going on and he told me to go home and to not come back to work till the next week. Then two days later I lost my taste and smell. That was December 10th and I still don't have the majority of my taste and smell.
About 30 minutes after I got off the phone with his boss, my boss called me and started screaming at me about I shouldn't have went over his head and then he said” I violated a company policy by doing so” still have not seen that in writing. When I got back to work the next week…….I had quit running a fever 16 hours before my shift and was drained, when I got to work he gave me a write up over it. It was even signed by his boss. I couldn't belive it. (for not following the chain of command even though i did) Since then my work life has been a living hell.
It's been a stream of constant BS from my boss and other co-workers because I got their friend in trouble. This place has become even more toxic and just unbearable at this point. I have contacted HR several time and they said “we will investigate it” I never hear anything back from them.
I'm so done, but I just don't know what to do. I don't know anything else and I would have to move or commute 150 miles away to even get close to the same pay in the same field of work. And that's just not possible with the way housing and gas prices are right now.
Tl;DR- burned out from a toxic work place, don't know what to do.
Again sorry if this is not where I should post.
EDIT: I forgot to mention I have had 9 people( friends/family ) die from covid in the past 2 years and mentaly I don't know how much more I can take.