I'm in Canada. I work for an hourly wage of $17/hr plus commission.
I am a salesperson. I sell furniture for my boss' company. This and some other tasks are in the job description i.e handling claims and complaints, calling and managing deliveries/delivery company, cleaning the showroom, cleaning and organizing the filing cabinets. All reasonable. But now he's asking me to do graphic design/web design work.
Previously I did some website work for this company under the guise that I would only be doing it from home as to not interfere with my sales at work. I ended up doing it all at work because I thought why not give them a taste of my skills and it was fairly quiet that week. Recently I highlighted in an e-mail to my boss that this was not our agreement and that he would have to review our agreement and give it to me in writing if he wanted me to move forward with any web work.
I feel extremely disrespected because of the way he treats me in terms of the design/site work. Even though I entirely overhauled that sketchy mf website and created ads for him, as soon as I put my foot down on being exploited, he starts shit talking to my coworkers that I am lazy and blames me now for the pre-existing broken links (his 16 yr old son created the site originally) which I alerted him about before I started working on it. I have university education in design that I know he wants to exploit, I don't think this request can be labeled as another menial task when he wants me to comb through the entire site and fix the framework of it.
He entirely ignored my e-mail and will not speak to me directly aboiut this, instead goes through my colleagues. Just yesterday he sent an email telling me to make specific changes to the site. Like how tf does he suddenly trust me to do work on the site after complaining that I allegedly fucked it up to my coworkers? And yeah I have proof that I didn't touch what he's complaining about.
There is no HR. The company is basically run by him and five other employees, including me (all salespeople). Two people quit just last week because they were overworked and doing the job of two people and way out of the scope of their description.
I honeslty do hope to get fired from this awful place because all the mismanagement, toxic environment and lack of respect and direct communication from my boss is driving me nuts. And maybe this will be my out, but I'm not sure if I can file for unemployement if I refuse to do a task? Even if its way out of my scope and payscale.
Appreciate you listening to my rant. Shitty businesses are everywhere.
TL;DR my boss is assigning me, an hourly employee salesperson, to do graphic design/ web work at work after disregarding our previous agreement that I would only do that work from home and giving unwaranted passive-aggressive backlash for the work that I previously did on the site.