So I’m a retail supervisor at one of the largest Zoos in the world. Recently my department was bought out my a huge merchandising company that runs a bunch of other Zoos, but ours is by far the biggest they’ve ever worked with.
When they bought us out I was promoted from an associate to a supervisor which is basically just an associate who has to fill out extra paper work. Everyone also got a three dollar pay raise including associates which was nice.
When I was hired I never got formally trained. I just shadowed one of my coworkers for about half a day (she didn’t really know anything either because of all the new policies our parent company introduced) and then for the second half of the day I was told to watch the main gift shop by myself because they just didn’t schedule a supervisor to be there that day.
Then they started introducing a ton of new responsibilities for us. I expected some new stuff after the pay raise, but they keep adding on to it and just the new stuff alone basically takes up our entire day. They also way underfund our staffing and constantly yell at us that we are over budget even though we’re using significantly less staff than we were before they bought us out. I’ve had days where I am the only one in my store (AKA no associates) which is incredibly difficult.
But now for the good (and probably illegal) stuff: I work way, way overtime and I get nothing for it other than my usual pay.
I’m currently out of college after getting my associate’s but I want to go back, and this is my only job, so I have open availability. They definitely take advantage of this. I’m working five or six full shifts (8:00 or 8:30 to 6:30 or 7:00) every week. Sometimes I’m given a 1:00-7:00 though, but they’re pretty few and far between. I end up working far more hours and many more days than my managers every week who are salaried and get benefits. Supposedly my hours are also going to go up during the Fall since the people who are still in school won’t be there. I also end up staying late a lot of the time because our stores won’t be able to fully close or there was an issue I needed to fix at my store or something. This week we have a register that doesn’t scan anything so every night I need to manually put in every single sale made that day and it takes about 40 minutes. Keep in mind this has to be done after the store closes.
Luckily we are given (or should I say forced to take) a thirty minute break every day. However, since we’re forced to take it and some days I just don’t have time considering I’m the only supervisor- sometimes the only employee- in the store, I’m worried that if I bring up how much I work overtime and how little I’m given for it, the company can just say something like “His hours are so high because he didn’t take a break this day,” so I don’t really know what to do. Plus even if I did take a break every day and left on time every day, I still would be scheduled either over hours or just at the limit.
And the best part about all of this? The company’s limit for hours-per-week is 38, so it’s actually lower than the legal limit.
Anyway I don’t really know what to do. I don’t want to get any authorities involved and I can’t really afford to leave my job right now but I’m so tired all the time. I’m working eight days in a row right now (only two days left!) and then I only get one day off before it starts up again.
Anyway sorry that’s my rant about my job I guess.