I’m a bartender in a very high volume restaurant. There have been some pretty major corporate shifts and mismanaged transitions have staff morale at our location at an all time low. They finally staffed up our management team, but one of the new managers is just awful.
She ends up having to apologize to people almost every day because she is just incapable of kind and professional delivery I guess, always snappy and short and rude. She’s only been here a month and there have been many complaints. She regularly talks bad about the other good manager to anyone that will listen, talks shit about staff members to each other, asks us all to basically spy on each other, it’s a mess.
I’ve tried to just be good and deal with it, I am in the process of starting my own business and only work part time so I really just need this job for a bit of steady income while I find my feet. I haven’t complained or questioned decisions, even the ones costing me money as a tipped employee and I’ve helped wherever I can.
I politely brought up an issue to the entire management team, basically that sometimes the bar gets swamped and we just need a few minutes of help to get back on track and what signs to look for that indicate we may need help because where the bar is situated and the lack of flow control makes it really hard for one of us to leave and find somebody. Her response was that she “refuses” to even pay attention to us if the bar is fully staffed and will not come help us unless expressly asked.
This is only the latest in a month long string of regular insulting behavior, with several favor requests peppered in, so I told the GM. He seemed to be on my side that it wasn’t supportive or kind or professional how it was handled, and assured that with my experience in the industry and at that specific restaurant I was a valuable asset to them and deserve to be treated as such.
Then, my schedule got posted by the bitchy manager and she had knocked me down from 4-5 shifts a week to just one. I could barely even cover my food and gas costs for the week on one shift. I really can’t decide what to do, the rest of the managers have been supportive in trying to get me more hours but our best manager is quitting, we’re super over staffed now and I’m worried about my stability there. However, there are no decent or comparable jobs being posted anywhere right now.
I haven’t taken this to HR yet, but I’m wondering what my best course of action is knowing that I don’t want to leave my job but I don’t want to fight for hours under a shitty power tripping manager either.