Apologies if this does not belong here but idk where else to put it.
My last job (also my first job) was for a family run restaurant when I was 16.
It was an absolute shit show. Everyone else was related to the manager and it was painfully obvious. The sanitation was horrible. Just a disgusting place to eat, it felt immoral to serve the food. Everyone there was making 7.25 or less if you were a server.
My best friend, who’s the hostess there was being pushed out of the company because she was trans. She faced constant discrimination from coworkers. Recently she was told that she couldn’t sit guests of different races together. In other words segregate the restaurant and the manager insisted this was legal???
I was sexually assaulted in the kitchen and the manager told me her nephew would never do anything like that. I left that same day.
I’m 18 now and have been afraid to get another job because of this experience. I decided it was finally time to get once since I’ll be going to university soon and some money would be nice. What can I do in the future to avoid a bad workplace? Or at least make a bad one as good as possible. I really don’t want to end up in a similar situation. Any advice is very much welcome.