Hello friends! Throwaway account as my main would easily identify me and getting sacked is the last thing I need at the moment.
So, I'm in Australia (based in Sydney) and I work retail. It's a family owned business, and most of us who work there are young students, with a couple coworkers who are older. We all make minimum wage.
The problem is, pretty much all of us feel that we should be paid more than what our current hourly rate is. This is for a couple reasons. First, there are similar jobs at other businesses (as well as jobs in food and bev) that offer better hourly pay. Like, it's laughably obvious. But we're still being paid minimum wage (which did increase in line with the recent nationwide increase, but apparently one of my coworkers hasn't even received that). More importantly…we are very short staffed. My boss has been trying to get more people to apply, but it's likely that they aren't applying because there are better jobs with better pay that applicants choose instead. As a result, we are doing the work of two, sometimes three people compared to our usual role…for the same pay. We also have a group chat that we engage with even when we're not at work; I constantly get calls and messages on days when I'm not scheduled. I'm also frequently called and being asked if I can come to work on days when I'm off, and sometimes this has happened each day in a single week (or beyond that) that I'm supposed to have a day off. It's been like this for a while, and was especially bad when people were sick left and right with COVID, and now it's happening again with people getting the flu.
Now, here are some of the other issues with the business. First of all, we don't get proper pay stubs that detail hours, hourly rate, etc. We get our pay through direct deposit, and we can request a list of our hours from our boss, but we don't get them automatically and so many of us have no idea what our pay rate actually is after taxes and things like that. One of my coworkers keeps saying that this is required by law, but we don't have access to them. We use an app to clock in for shifts, but we have to send our hours to the boss so we're essentially keeping track of them.
The biggest thing for me though, hands down, are the blatant safety hazards. There's mould in our store. Black mould in various locations, that we're exposed to constantly. I've noticed that I've been prone to headaches more frequently since I started working there. The back hallway that leads out to the bins is always obstructed by cardboard, which we have to break down when we receive orders. We have to walk over it sometimes to access the bins and the toilets, and I've almost slipped and fallen at work numerous times because of it. We also don't have a fire extinguisher at the store; in fact, someone who came to check the fire extinguisher the other day was told by my boss to come back as we were “too busy to show it to him then” (but after he left, told us that the fire extinguisher wasn't there at all and that they had to “go find it”, and it's probably at bosses house). Strata has also stopped by in regards to the mould, but my coworker who dobbed it in said that she's been trying to get them to come and address it for two years, but there's never been any follow up.
Now, when I learned all of these things, my immediate thought on our pay situation was “We need to gather everyone together, come up with a plan and number and call a meeting with our boss so that we can demand a raise”, because I've been at jobs before that weren't paying me what I was worth, and it was a disaster. I mentioned this to my one coworker the other day, and she said, “Yeah, I thought the same thing, but apparently Other Coworker (who has been there the longest) said that people have tried that before and it didn't go anywhere”. I'm not sure when exactly this happened, but I feel that it probably occurred long before the current wage environment, but as a result, nobody wants to join and say anything. As a result, we're still underpaid and our health seems to be at risk.
Several of us, myself included, are contemplating securing other jobs first and then giving notice. The one obstacle though is that despite all of these things…our boss is still a nice person and we feel bad leaving them to fend for themselves when they're already short staffed, and would essentially be down to like two employees (at best) if we all left now. I know, I know…”If they're under paying you and having you work in those conditions, they're not really nice people”. I think it's just a problem with us needing to be more assertive and putting ourselves first. We're all aware to an extent that we've internalised a lot of bullshit being in a system that tells you that you should be grateful to your employer even if they don't do the bare minimum.
Whew that was a lot to type lol…but, what do you think I should do? Should I just go get another job, or should I try to come up with another plan for a raise? How should I go about dealing with the health violations? Thank you!