I’m a little confused here, as I thought that was illegal? Anyways, here’s how the story goes.
Since I started the job a while back at this grocery store, they’d let us get free bottles of water from the damaged bottled water packages that came in that they couldn’t sell.
Suddenly, the store managers and corporate got a giant stick up their ass about it, and last shift I went up to grab my water, working hard and working up a sweat, and was told no. When I asked why and when that became a new thing, I was told – quite angrily and with a very unnecessary amount of attitude – that the store manager no longer wants us to be able to have the water. If we want water, we have to buy it.
There is no water bubbler, no drinking fountain. There are hand-washing stations, but they’re all so disgusting there are literally gigantic deposits of god knows what green sludge built up around the nozzles. Management has even explicitly told us not to drink from them. I could be wrong, but I’m in Massachusetts and thought the law was that they have to have a drinking fountain or provide bottled water to us free of charge? Some light googling seemed to essentially confirm that. Am I in the wrong about it?
If I’m not in the wrong, any ideas on who I might contact and what I might be able to do? If it’s the law that they need to provide their employees with water, I want to do everything in my power to make sure their arm is lawfully twisted into making sure they do so. We employees put up with way too much abusive, gaslighting, greedy, cruel, callous scumbaggery from this company in question as it is.