Hello all,
As most of you, I’m a very vocal anti-corporate advocate with friends and family. This can be a bit awkward since I grew up in a country in which there’s a very strong culture of “just being thankful you have a job”, which results in a lot of company ass-kissing by employees (which makes me sick). Anyway, something that my acquaintances have brought up from time to time is that it’s easy for me to be like that because I’m in computer science and have had great jobs, and great prospects for future employment (which is a fair observation). But I want to tell you today a story of one of my first jobs in high school.
I was 17 and working for a big chain of big retail stores. Working conditions were atrocious as per usual for such jobs, but there are two incidents that I remember often. Firstly, we were required to show up 5 minutes before our shifts started. This was unpaid time of course, and they often said showing up on time was showing up late (🤮). The consequences for this, however, were unclear. You only got written up for a warning, and when I asked what that meant, I was told “I didn’t want to have those on my record” and that was it.
Naturally, I consistently showed up at exactly the minute my shift started and got written up all the time with no consequences. That is, until one day the guard at the employee entrance denied me access. He said I had accumulated too many warnings and I couldn’t come in. I, of course got mad and asked him who said he could do that, and he just kept citing the warnings. So, I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote the events, signed it and asked him if he was willing to sign it, and he was!
I changed clothes at the mall, came back at opening time and asked a friend to give the letter to my boss and went home. My boss called me and asked me to come to my shift, that the guard had been reprimanded. I asked if I would be paid for a full shift, and he said they wouldn’t pay me at all because the system wouldn’t allow them to, since I didn’t clock in on time! So I told him I would see him the next day.
The second event is from the day I quit that job. The company had a weird policy that if you forgot your employee badge, you wouldn’t be able to work your shift. However, they would allow you RENT a temp badge for the price of half a day of work. If costed them nothing to let you borrow it, but they wanted us to learn our lesson. So, they say I forgot my badge was the day I quitted that job. I simply refused the humiliation of paying them for the privilege of being allowed to work my shift.
For context, I really needed that job, my family was not doing well back then and the money really helped, but I refused to be complicit in such exploitative practices. So, I guess I was antiwork before I even had the luxury to be 🙂