I worked at Walmart from age 16 to 19. I started as a lawn and garden associate and then became the department manager. When the astronomical workload became too much I switched to CSM (customer service manager) and that was much worse. So much worse in fact that I quit without notice and taped a 2 page complaint to the store managers office and then sent everyone a copy of it so no one could deny or misconstrue my exact issues with the place. I could go deeper into my issues with walmart but I'm sure if you're on this subreddit then you are very familiar with the abuse and neglect that occurs as the bottom of the pyramid.
When I got a job at a tiny flour mill, I thought to myself “wow. I did it. I escaped retail”. I was horribly wrong. I didn't know that when I started so I gave it my all every single day. I did everything anyone asked of me and I did it perfectly. I became the production manager. I milled 1000s of pounds of flour. I mixed, bagged, weighed and sealed every single product that we sold. I am single handedly responsible for making ALL of the product the customers buy. I clean the whole building and even stayed 4 hours late a week to clean my managers offices and the employee breakroom and bathroom because they asked me to. I have 2 employees (one of which just beat cancer and is on restrictions) to help me make 1000s of bags a day. All of the machinery is second hand and falling apart. The amount of flour they want made is more and more every month because it's been not stop promotions to keep bringing in new customers.
So that's the job. Now what do the managers do to take care of their over worked and exhausted employees? Well the elderly company founders are going senile and are completely disconnected from the needs of the business yet they still can over rule any decisions made by any other manager (they use this power frequently). The general manager sits in his office all day with headphones on staring at a computer screen doing god knows what. That's expected I guess, I'm sure he's doing important work in there. Since those three are so disconnected from their employees, they've recently hired an “operations manager”. His job is to tell us that we are inefficient at our job. He's very good at that. He has completely reranged and changed the way we do every single thing into a much more tedious and time consuming process (this is a result of him being hired last month so he has no idea how the job ACTUALLY works but he thinks he knows more than the employess that have done the job eveey day for 2 years) and yet tells us that it's our fault that we are stressed out because we just arent doing things “efficiently”.
I recently had a breakdown in front of him and their solution was to reward us with a monthly bonus! They revealed the bonus to us after a few weeks of trying to figure out what we deserve. This is the genius bonus they've come up with to reward us for lining their wallets and doing all the back breaking labor and destroying our lungs. A 100 dollar amazon gift card that we can only earn by increasing efficiency enough to lower the cost to produce each bag from the previous month. Currently we have to get the cost of each bag below 26 cents (which they then sell for over 20 dollars) to earn our giftcards.
I make 20 dollars an hour, and my employees make 15. My managers all make 6 figures at least. None of the money comes back to the employee in any way shape or form. I haven't gotten any new machinery in a year even though I'm down to 1 functioning scale, 1 trustworthy auger, and 1 large mixing machine. It's enough to make one product at a time and slowly. Yet we are still working hard enough to get the customer their product no matter what. I haven't gotten a raise in a year, I heard that I would get one with my yearly review but that should've happened in October so I guess not. They refuse to hire another employee even though I've been begging for help for well over a year. I was reprimanded for getting over time. Oh and also the reason that our bonus is a amazon gift card is because they get discounts on them.
The moral of the story is that every job is the same. It doesn't change. American business is built on treating your employees like shit.