Warning this is long. Several weeks ago my car quit working. I am a single parent and had been looking for a job when this happened. I am not well off but have never been completely without a vehicle in my entire life. No job and no car, I was scared shitless.
There is an industrial park directly behind my apartment complex so I decided to see if I could find something with one of those companies so I could walk. All in all I had three job offers and ended up taking two. They all paid shitty except for the one I want to talk about.
This place hired me as an administrative assistant. It is a company that makes and packs frozen hamburger patties for food service and grocery stores. In the interview they told me the woman who had the job was on vacation and that they wanted to fire her as soon as she got back the Monday morning after her vacation and have me start as soon as she was out of the building. They claimed she had just been making too many mistakes. This sounded incredibly fucked up to me and made me feel like shit, but I desperatwly needed a job and they were offering higher pay than the other places. They asked me how good I was at various things such as excel. I let them know I don’t have much experience with actually making spreadsheets, more just adding info into them. They assured me that was just fine.
I ended up starting the day after the lady was fired. On my first day I learned the production workers were making $14 an hour. This is a physically demanding job, working in cold and wet conditions. I was shocked. The HR lady told me that they had to take what they could get because the pay was so bad and the job so bad. “Nobody wants to be cold and wet working around meat for $14.” This woman actually said this to me.
One of my duties was to update the powerpoint for these TV screens they had in their break rooms with info employees would need. One of the slides gave the info for the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities. The HR lady told me they provided this info because the employees were “Always having issues” and “Sometimes we feel like social workers because they always have something going on.”
She went on to tell me that most of production lived at the halfway house, emergency shelter, was homeless and/or just out of jail. This was when she told me they had to take what they could get.
On my first day I was supposed to take a drug test onsite. Her words were “I don’t think that is necessary for you….but them out there, definitely.”
The line went down for about twenty minutes so they sent these people to pick up cigarette butts from the parking lot.
They had a game going on for the workers and the prize was priority parking near the entrance. However they told me most of the workers rode the bus so they couldn’t use the prize anyway.
I realized quickly that absolutely no one had a clue what the admin assistant did or how. I found very detailed notes that she had made herself. Another office employee told me she had done that so nobody else would have to learn with no training like what they had done to her. Yet they swore this lady sucked so bad at her job. They made shitty remarks anytime they could. The entire thing was incredibly unprofessional.
On my third day I was told I had two hours to make a new version of this several page spreadhseet the old admin had made, even though I had told them previously I couldn’t do that. I walked out.
I felt sick to my stomach knowing I was being paid $21 an hour while the other people were making shit and being treated like garbage. I cannot understand how the CEO can sleep at night knowing employees have to be provided with charity info because they don’t pay enough for basic necessities.