Hey peeps, this turned out to be much longer than I expected and I just kinda needed to vent. Hope that's okay.
Background: I work for a big electronics shop that runs its own delivery service in western Europe. Delivery is done by bike, it's hard physically demanding work in wind, rain, snow, heat etc and bikers are expected to be available weekdays, evenings, and weekends. The company does not pay anything extra for working evenings, or weekends, or even holidays. The company does award a slight performance based raise every year ranging 3 to 5% but there are no other financial bonuses for good performance. Not even in the shop where sales are made. The shop employees are often induced to get as many sales as possible by getting them to compete with one another for who can get the highest number of sales. The reward for adding all this extra value to the company? A few minutes extra break time. Because the delivery job is physically demanding very few people if any do the job full time. Because of the limited hours it's not really enough to get by on without a second source of income or very low costs of living.
Lately the company has been implementing all sorts of new processes and setting new much tighter targets as well as bike maintenance cutbacks to reduce the costs of the operation. There was a pay raise a little while ago which the company pretended was an act of generosity, but it was because there was a national minimum wage increase coming a month later they would have fallen below if they had not done that, so the supposed generosity was entirely fake.
Bikers have become wary of all these changes, they're often implemented hastily with the promises that should the changes result in worse working conditions they can be easily reversed. When it becomes clear the changes do result in worse working conditions, such as constant overtime, breaks being messed etc, it takes weeks, if not months to badger management into undoing them. They're also keenly aware everything is done to extract more labor and more value from them, more time on the bike, more parcels, for the same pay. This has made them predictably cynical and they're not buying into the fake clap-happy corporate “we're such a big happy family!” nonsense that the company tries REALLY hard to placate its low-wage employees with.
When another such change predictably fucked up (which both me and the bikers saw coming a mile away) and messed up with biker's break times I kinda lost it. I was mad, they're my team, when I started there I was doing their job, I know how much it can suck. And I let people know I was pissed off.
It was then that I got a call from one of my own supervisors asking why I was being so hostile and negative. And that I was sabotaging my team's morale and setting a “negative tone” and that I was failing at properly selling all the new changes to my team.
I told them I can't fool these guys and girls, yeah they're young but they're not stupid. They look right through the corporate bullshit and see that it's all about extracting more from them for the same pay. This made him quite mad and he began wondering out loud whether or not I am committed to the company and if I shouldn't look for another job. I told him I was committed to my team and I saw trying to protect them from management's overreach as one of my most important roles. This…did not go over well and he took it as a personal insult. Thankfully because this is western europe they can't fire me easily, but I bet they're already starting to build their case. Next week's meeting is going to be fun 😛