(Background)
I work at a small grocery store chain that's owned by a mid-sized food distributor in the US, (which essentially makes it impossible to unionize or organize ourselves in any way, because even if we fully unionized every single store they would simply shut down the entire chain). I'm a pretty young person and haven't worked that many years, and have only worked at this job for about 3 or 4 months. I get paid $10/hr like all the other employees, and my duties mostly include cashiering, but also includes things like bringing in shopping carts, cleaning the store, “facing” (making stuff look pretty for customers), and stocking. I usually close the store with a CSM (regular employee who gets paid the same but also more responsibility), and work from early afternoon until 8 or 9 PM. All in all, aside from the pay which is low even for the area, it's one of the best jobs I've ever had in terms of working conditions, mostly due to it being relatively chill mostly because of management rarely being there at that time of day, meaning there are less people breathing down your neck and yelling at people. The store runs on the definition of a skeleton crew and has a relatively high turnover rate, with maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the workers it used to have pre-pandemic. It has maybe half of the workers it needs to function at a minimal level. Entire sections of the store like the deli or the pizza place inside get shut down for days or even weeks due to no one wanting to work for such abysmally low pay. There are rarely more than two cashiers working total, and this is in a medium sized store.
(Point of the post)
Anyway, here's the problem: they have told us many times that we don't work hard enough, and that at absolutely no point aside from our 15 minute break should we not be working cleaning, facing, helping customers, etc. Every job I've ever had has told me the same thing, and this isn't the issue although it does suck of course. For a couple months it's been alright, I just come in, work usually until we close, then go home. I usually avoid talking to my coworkers since most of them are much older than me and have little in common (not that I don't talk to some of them of course). Now they have decided that simply telling us isn't enough, and that every employee must send live updates about what they're doing, in photo or video form. Since I can't afford a cell or data plan and we don't have access to the store wifi, I am allowed to send it in at the end of the day, but we are supposed to be doing this. I know this isn't the worst thing in the world, but there is no way in fucking hell I am doing that, and unfortunately every other person at my job seems to be doing it pretty consistently. I am probably just going to not do it until I get scolded by my bosses, but I'll probably have to start doing it eventually.
Is this normal? I have little frame of reference. I realize this isn't the absolute end of the world and I'm sure it's very commonplace around the world but it still really sucks. It really feels like they're slowly tightening the noose week by week, and I'm sure they desperately want to go back to how they ran pre-pandemic, when they could pay $9/hr (the minimum wage here) and still have 50 workers, turnover rate be damned because everyone was easily replaceable. While wages didn't rise as much as other parts of the country from what I can see, the going rate then was $9-11/hr, now it's more like $11-14/hr, sometimes even $15. Idk I'm already starting to not like this job, and we've lost approximately 30% of our workers since I started here in January or February. While this isn't as bad as my previous job, where I became one of the most senior employees after 6 months, but yeah. I heard we might get a new employee soon but I doubt she'll last long, and it's nowhere near enough.
I don't know, this was a long rant, what do you think I should do?