Work at a minimum wage food job. The place I work is very popular, corporation, shitty food, shitty work, shitty pay. The works. I put up with very little b.s. from places like this because I know there is another minimum wage job that’s desperate for workers literally EVERYWHERE. Recently I’ve been very unhappy with the management here. Most of them slack off and let the regular employees (i.e not a supervisor/manager/anything above standard) pick up all the weight including during big rushes where we need the most people.
Our place recently issued an “Employee of the Month” program to “increase moral” even though most likely it will go to the managers every time. The real reason is the job is so awful our turnover rate is incredibly high, unsurprising. Meaning they keep having to repeatedly replace workers and train them and they can’t afford to lose anymore employees that actually know what they’re doing. A coworker and I were on our break talking about how stupid it was and was clearly a scam when our manager walked out and happened to overhear me saying that with her. She asked me to come talk to her for a second, my coworker and I just looked at each other but I followed her. She sat down with me and told me that she didn’t appreciate how I’d been bad mouthing the company recently and that it reflected badly on me. She told me that she thought that the employee of the month program was a great idea and it would give people more incentive to work harder.
This is where I got angry. The following conversation went as so.
Me: “What do we get if we earn employee of the month?”
Manager: “What do you mean I don’t understand the question?”
Me: “What do us as regular employees earn by getting employee of the month?”
Manager: “You get a small plaque on the wall that stays up for a month until the new employee of the month earns theirs.”
Me: “So what I’m hearing from you is I get no compensation or pay for extra work and more hours.”
Manager: “You get the plaque and it reflects well on you if you want to continue working here. Recently because of your comments and attitude you are at risk for a formal write up. If you don’t change your attitude towards the company we have to look at more serious issues.”
Me: “That’s unfortunate to hear. You know now that we’re discussing it I haven’t been very happy with the management here. I understand we have been short staffed on experienced employees so I thought that my mangers would of course assist us in whatever way they could in these difficult times but it seems I was wrong. I have been considering looking elsewhere for work.”
Manager: silence
Me: “My break is almost over so I have to get back to work, but for future reference I would prefer it next time if we needed to have a chat that it wouldn’t be on my break. Thanks so much for sitting down with me.”
And then I walked out and went back to work. I haven’t gotten anything saying I’ve been fired or let go so far, and even if I do I don’t regret what I said or how I handled it. If you wanted us to work harder and give us incentive you should offer bonus’s or an increase in pay. I get paid shit, and I’ll work accordingly.
TLDR: My boss didn’t appreciate me criticizing the management and the company and I successfully and respectfully threatened to leave them even more short staffed