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Antiwork

Got fired for Speaking up against my employer’s malpractices and Scamming of the customers

I will try to make this as short as possible, there are 2 things that are important for the story. That I live in a European country that holds a high standard for workers' rights. that I am a Muslim. back when I first graduated from highschool I decided to take a gap year and work before pursuing college education. A family friend has offered me a job to work in a Halal meat production factory. The pay was absolute shit (less than 5 USD an hour) and I would work non stop for 10 hours, 6 days a week. Needless to say that the minimum wage in the country that I live in is 4 times as high so he refused to give me a contract and said it was “part time” when I was worked 10 hours a day, also there wasn't an overtime pay. I was young…


I will try to make this as short as possible, there are 2 things that are important for the story.

  1. That I live in a European country that holds a high standard for workers' rights.

  2. that I am a Muslim.

back when I first graduated from highschool I decided to take a gap year and work before pursuing college education. A family friend has offered me a job to work in a Halal meat production factory. The pay was absolute shit (less than 5 USD an hour) and I would work non stop for 10 hours, 6 days a week. Needless to say that the minimum wage in the country that I live in is 4 times as high so he refused to give me a contract and said it was “part time” when I was worked 10 hours a day, also there wasn't an overtime pay. I was young and dumb to accept but I really needed the cash. I worked in that place around 3 weeks and got harassed on day 1 when a coworker slapped my bum when I was pushing a cart. It was incredibly toxic to work there tbh.

Now during the 3rd week I noticed that there was an injecting machine and what it basically did was injecting chicken breasts and thighs with a water starch mixture to make it look bigger and add more weight/batch. it increased the weight over 30 kgs/150kgs chicken batch. I didn't like that, So I went to the manager and the owner of the factory (who is also a Muslim) and told him that what he was doing is Haram (prohibited) and I will not be partaking in that particular activity because our religion prohibits Scamming people. I showed him that I'm willing to work in any other field except for that one particular field. The owner was incredibly defensive and pissed that I dared to tell him that. he waited until the end of the shift to tell me that my services were no longer needed.

At the end when I was supposed to be paid what I was owed, I found out that this guy deprived me from (50 USD) (a full day's pay) because I was sick and couldn't come to work. the next day I went and wore a mask the entire day when I was working there whilst I was sick n having constant headaches, so yeah, I'm grateful to this experience because it taught me so much about toxic workplaces in such a short period of time.

I promised to make it short but I ended up not fulfilling my promise. Sorry about that 🙂

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