20 years ago, I moved from the east coast of Australia all the way to the west coast to marry a nice girl, and needed a job. Found warehouse work, initially as a picker/packer, then moving onto forklifts, into inventory control before I got sick of the place and bailed.
Head office was back in the eastern states, close to where I came from, so supervision over in the west was sporadic and intermittent.
Adventures had / lessons learned:
– One new manager tried to crack down on visible tattoos. In a purely warehouse environment with zero customer interaction. Which you might write off as her prerogative, except he himself had bad prison tattoos visible at all times on his hands (swallows between his thumbs and first fingers).
– This same manager decided to take to our workplace agreement with a marker pen to change anything he didn't like. The most memorable was to cross out 'black or blue pants' under our uniform standards to leave only black. Why???? No idea.
– Useless new lackey started sleeping with manager and was suddenly promoted to team leader position, with zero experience, competence or confidence.
– Selected staff were given a 1 day forklift training course. All performed sufficiently well and were deemed competent, except of course for managers' new fuckbuddy, who after 2 full days of training was still unable to complete the most basic task, yet were given a ticket and set loose to wreak havoc.
– This manager caused quite a bit of upset, so a HR person was sent all the way over to sort things out. They invited everyone to a meeting in order to listen to our grievances, and promises were made that our agreement would be respected and everyone relaxed a little bit.
– Until the following week when the HR person left and things went back to how the local manager wanted to do things.
– Of course everything flared up again and HR came back. Only for them this time to deny in front of 60 people that they had ever promised anything. I have never seen a more bold lie told.
– A number of us turned to the union that was supposed to represent us, only to learn they were a bunch of useless toadies and would most likely take the side of management. It was much later that I discovered that unions can be useful and effective.
This all happened within 3 years, and I class it as the most valuable education I have ever earned.