I'm going to apologize in advance for the spelling and grammatical errors.
Back December of 2017 I had been offered a groundskeeper position in a low income housing in upstate NY. Everything was going great. I got along great with everyone and I worked my ass off for 15 an hour. After my probation was up I had been promoted to maintenance with a slight raise not bad. I was happy and if something needed to be done I got it done. I had results.They hired out painting and flooring. Which seeing was done and how much it cost. I ended up taking over as it cut the cost by over half and It looked alot better.
The director of the housing authority had decided it was time for her to retire and we ended up with the assistant as our director, and that's where things started to turn. Her first act as director is taking away the maintenance departments benefits. (Hour paid lunch, health insurance got significantly worse along with our paid time off) all of these changes didn't affect the office as they would affect her also. Finally at March of 2019 the supervisor had enough and retired and the other maintenance staff had resigned. I was also planning to resign but because I was the only one left I was thinking about our tenants. How it will be bad for them if I left too and how without a maintenance staff they would have had to close the buildings down and tenants would have to be moved. So I put up with it and stayed. I pulled the cleaner that was ready to move up and learn and started training him. Because of my quick ability to adapt and overcome this obstacle i had been promoted to supervisor. We worked well into November with just the 2 of us taking care of tenants and there 216 apartments. I referenced one other person that I knew back in my construction days and had hired him shortly after. Things were tolerable then. Shortly after we hired a new cleaner and we all worked well as a team to start catching up.
At the same time most of the office staff had resigned as the director was never there and the board had resigned as they understood what was happening and didn't want any part of it anymore. I worked well with the one office worker to do everything that I can to keep the buildings open.
Since then there were 8 times in the last year the the director had not paid us on time and when we did get paid. We couldn't count on our overtime being there because the director failed to do her job. Our entire personal policy had changed and we lost even more benifits like holiday pay is now straight pay and if we use our time to take a day off and still get called in its straight pay.
6 months later the mayor of our town appointed our new board and they came in and started going over every fine detail of our jobs l which is fine for my department but not for the office. The director started shifting the blame to every one of her staff and wouldn't take any responsibility on her own actions. That's when the happiness that I did have got sucked out of me. My team and me continued to keep going to get caught up when a tenant had came up and started talking about his work experience. The director without talking to any of hired him through penski knowing he didnt have a drivers license which is a requirement for this job as we have to drive work trucks. After working with him it was very clear that he was not a good fit for our team. Within a week he had stuck metal in an outlet to test to see if it was still working causing breakers to pop. Within 2 weeks he has caught screaming at a tenant. And within 3 weeks he messed with a panel box shutting down the whole highrise. The 3 of the maintenance staff at separate times had went to the director explaining how he wasn't a good fit, unsafe, and a liability to the job. 3 months go by of this guys liability and she just flat out hires him fully. Going against our personal policy and the requirements of being a maintenance worker.
Well in the middle of that we decided to try try to go union. And that's when I become a target to the director. She had ended up pushing one of my maintenance workers into resigning putting us under the majority vote for unionizing. Promoting another guy to my position without even telling me and trying to have him micromanage me. After that I finally put my two weeks in Wednesday. To where I got a phone call from the union rep saying how he received an email saying I was a bad employee and I came up with the Union plan to avoid discipline. I gave up so much of my life to this place to take care of the people that needed me. And this is just a little bit of everything that has happened.
Sorry again for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Also sorry for the lengthy post. I do really appreciate this subreddit and the ability to vent. Thank you