A bit of transparency before I start, I'm not 100% sure this will be the case, but after a talk with my office manager (she's against this too), it sounds highly likely.
About 2 years ago I started working for this private medical company. It's a small knit group, everyone knows everyone from outside of work, and I am the outsider. I initially started out as basically a gofer, scanning and filing medical documents. This, depending on the stacks to file I was receiving, was a lot for me to handle due to my autoimmune disease. However, I busted my ass off and now I'm proudly in the office standard receptionist/assistant role. The pay is worth it for the comfort of a desk chair, I love the work most of the time, and my office manager has been amazing with accomodating my schedule.
One of my colleagues will be taking maternity leave in November, and my boss has decided to have one of our work from home staff, who I'm pretty sure is a friend of my boss, come in and assume her role. However, it sounds like she may not be returning to work from home after my colleague returns, and instead will take on the easier half of the responsibilities of our normal position. My office manager warned me that this has happened before with this specific person, and that last time it resulted in one or two people being kicked back into the scanning and filing job. I'm lowest on the totem pole here, so I'm the prime target.
I wouldn't be taking a pay cut, but I'd essentially be going back to the office gofer position I worked my ass to get out of, all because my boss wants this woman to work in the office again and take on half of my position. She won't be doing any of the traveling or external in-person interaction, which is the more strenuous part of my position. That would still be part of my responsibility, which means I'm going to have a lot less of a clue of what's going on, since I'd be removed from the admin side of the office.
I know it's a pretty common experience to get fucked over for your hard work, but I thought this company was going to be different. I know I was never going to reach the top of the food chain due to how small we are, but I've still been making some real progress in gaining a skill set, and it's been really rewarding. I really enjoy the work I'm doing now for the most part. I'm going to be fucking miserable sitting in the back by myself, scanning and filing papers again. My office manager doesn't care if I put on YouTube while I work, but holy fuck is it boring and understimulating. On top of that, the physical part of filing really tires me out. Back when I was doing that work, I had zero energy left at the end of my shift and I could not take care of myself in barely any capacity. This shift in job responsibility gave me the ability to have a life outside of work again, and now that's potentially being stripped from me for something completely irrelevant to my performance.
Time to dust off my resume lol. Hopefully someone will bite for decent pay with only 2 years experience in clerical