I'll do my best to tell this story, but there's a lot and I won't be able to include it all.
So I worked for a new beverage manufacturer for a little over a year. I was brought in because I'm an expert with the QMS (Quality Management System) that the company uses. I tried to negotiate as you do when you start a new job, but they wouldn't move at all. Fine I thought, I'm not going to turn the job down over that. I found out later that my boss had asked them to pay me $7 more per hour than what they offered me. I was pretty upset but whatever, I like my coworkers I'll make it work. They had another guy doing the same job as me that was useless, I basically did his and my job, so my boss fired him. She told me part of the reason that she fired him was because he made so much more money than I did despite doing way less work. Okay, now I'm getting angry.
A little while after that a manager from a different area approached me about taking a job in their department because I was damn good at what I did. It would come with a good raise and an opportunity to learn some more things. I said I would be interested, but it was very informal and just more of an exploratory discussion to see if it was even worth them pursuing. So we both agreed to keep it to ourselves until there was something serious. Somehow, just a few hours later my boss started messaging the other manager about me wanting to switch to their department. We were both completely confused because neither of us had said anything. We had no idea who had told my boss. Turns out it was the head of our HR department. As I came to learn she loves to lie, manipulate, and stir the pot. She lied to my boss and told her I was trying to leave because I didn't want to work for her, she said all this because we needed to hire more people and she was trying to use it as an excuse to deny us getting more employees. These are the kind of people that are in charge at this company.
So months went by and I never heard from HR on the potential job, but I had been hearing from the hiring manager for that other department all along that HR was twisting the position and changing it from what it was supposed to be. Keep in mind this was a position that was created with me in mind. Well by the time HR was done with it I no longer qualified. Someone else got it. I was floored that a job created for me somehow went to someone else. A few days after the job was offered to someone else HR finally called me in to talk about it. They denied any responsibility for how things played out, outright blamed the manager of the department who I was friends with, and told me they'd never lie to me (as they were lying to me). They finished it off by telling me I was free to leave if I was unhappy with how things played out. They were not interested in giving me a raise or doing anything to make things right.
So now fastforward a month, my boss, her boss, our quality manager, sanitation manager and projects coordinator all quit within a week of each other. Our entire quality department was gutted and we lost hardworking, well liked, knowledgeable people. Our HR department loves to tell us how we're all replaceable, people finally started calling their bluff. Now, an important point here, my boss and I are the only two people that understand how to use the QMS. The QMS is what allows them to track what they make for regulatory purposes, it's where we store documents for making products, all the way down to records I created that literally walked production through a step by step process of how to make something. It is a vital part of the company. Okay, with that established: I get called into HR and they feed me all this BS about how I'm valued and they want to show me that. When just a month prior they had told me basically to go f*ck myself. At this point I was done with them, they would have had to pay me a lot of money to be interested in staying after everyone I respected and liked left, and how disrespectfully they were treated during the process. I only stayed as long as I did because I didn't want to abandon my coworkers.
These MFers still tried to play hardball with me. They offered me a “raise” that actually was just the amount I made with OT over the year, but they wanted me to switch to salary. At this company when you're on salary, you work everyday and you're always on call. I disagreed with them that this was a raise and showed them numbers, at one point she actually said “we wanted to make sure you didn't lose any money….” I'm sorry, but how would there be any way for me to lose money with a raise??? I was told to counter by my old boss for at least $8k more than what they offered because that's how much they paid the other guy that got fired. I only asked for $4k more per year which I thought was more than fair, they refused to come up even $1, so I declined the offer.
That all happened on a Friday, I came in on Monday just to give them one more chance to change their minds and negotiate again, they didn't. So I sent my resignation and went home. I wasn't going to stick around and help clean up their messes and teach someone else how to use the system after all the disrespect from them. Not only that, but a couple of people put in two weeks and were walked out immediately even though we needed that two weeks to try and cover gaps. They did this because they're petty assholes that would rather cut off their nose to spite their face. So they didn't get two weeks from me, a little bit of payback for my friends they treated like garbage.
Last I heard from people I'm friends with that work there is they were in a meltdown and didn't know how to make anything anymore because no one else knows how to use the QMS. Brings a smile to my face every time I hear it.
I apologize if this is hard to follow, I had to leave out a ton of information to make sure it wasn't even longer than this, there's a lot more I'd love to say.