This is one of my first reddit posts ever so please excuse any errors I made with formatting and such. Now the context; I am a young adult male living in North America. I was recently hired at my first job a few months ago and everything went smoothly for the first few weeks, then the managers started to question my bathroom breaks( most I went was 3 times during 6 hour shift, and normally I tried to go before work as to not even create such a problem in the first place). The managers were run by an absolutely nasty and controlling woman, who used the war in Ukraine as an excuse to treat us like shit(yes she is Ukrainian).
Basically my experience and that of every other employee I knew at my short time there consisted of passive aggressiveness being the norm and God Forbid you dare question her or even worse try to explain yourself when she went into another rage. Now comes the part where I got fired. It started when I wore the wrong kind of non slip shoe to work, my regular kind were extremely dirty so I thought wearing a pair of vans for one day would not be too much of an issue because they are after all non-slip. Long story short the manager noticed this and exploded on me she did not even offer me a chance in the beginning to explain myself. After that nothing major like that happened again but it was more of a series of repetitive passive aggressive insults and actions. for the sake of keeping this post as short as possible essentially I had enough of it after a couple of weeks and began speaking half seriously most about unions, it is important that I never mentioned making a union at that specific location nor did I mention why I would wanna do such a thing I only talked about them as they are and were popular topic. not a week goes by after I had the first discussion with another coworker about unionization I get called into the office before my shift starts and I got fired, the official explanation is that my bathroom breaks took too long they need to explain too much stuff to me and I’m too argumentative. In short basically constituted retaliatory firing; and here is where my situation begins to differ from that of most people. To provide some further additional contacts I was born into a relatively wealthy family and I only took that job as a side experience for my business degree. there were never any downside to me getting fired or any danger to my livelihood so I was able to speak my mind. Unfortunately those who are not financially independent would’ve had a much more difficult time speaking out in my position and would’ve possibly faced much more serious consequences. because of a life of privilege and wealth I’ve always been sheltered from the true reality of things basically but my first foray into the adult world taught me that the rat race was more of a rat circus; the rich and powerful being the spectators and the circus and the rats in the rest of society who get fucked.
for me personally this was a strong lesson and reminder to stay in school and get a good white collar job preferably in a company or industry we’re family and friends are already established. it feels great to have that safety minute but then I thought about all the people who don’t have a safety net we have to make a choice between standing up for the principles and eating. i’ve only had one drawn for a few months and I’m sure there’s a lot of managers that are better than the one I had and I’m sure there’s a lot worse but the fact that my experience has been shared by so many people is proof that there is a problem with the way that labor is handled in America. I know that something needs to and should be done but having grown up in the world that’s so completely separated from that of the average Joe I can say with almost certainty that nothing is going to change unless heads start rolling like they did in the French revolution. Depending on your sense of humor it is ironic, or not that the wealth gap between the political and economic elite in revolutionary France and the working class is less than that of modern day America.
TLDR: I live the life of the average American worker for a few months and it sucked I could not imagine doing it for the rest of my life.