Antiwork

I’ve been fortunate to have a desk job for most of my life: I was surprised when my friend told me their retail job keeps them part time but “oncall”. They explained the time while oncall is unpaid but must be available in case a manager needs to backfill empty shifts. This effectively makes scheduling a second job hard because they have a part time job which occupies 60 hours of their week. Is this common in the service industry now? I’m disgusted by the practice and think it needs to be abolished immediately. If you ask for a person’s time, you must pay them. If a business doesn’t want to pay people to be oncall they should staff their shifts with enough people to accommodate call outs.

My job currently pays me minimum wage for my 10 minute breaks instead of the wage I make when I’m “actually working” and thinks giving me 1 free month of BetterHelp is sufficient payment.

I work in Quality Control. Our business has 1 QC Tech scheduled per shift and between shifts the tech prints out paperwork for various samples the next shift will test throughout their shift. I noticed that one of the batches had the numbers transposed incorrectly by having the last two digits swapped. This is unusual because our system doesn’t allow for paperwork to be printed without a batch number being generated previously. So if XY is already in the system XY paperwork will be able to be printed. However if YX is not in the system then YX paperwork doesn’t exist to print. We have a schedule and YX isn’t on it so the paperwork shouldn’t exist and shouldn’t be able to be entered into the system. On top of that all our instruments are set up by the proceeding tech and the wrong batch number was also inputted. I…

Had a meeting with my boss last week where she described the ways she wants to continue to evolve our team’s “perception” across the business. She doesn’t see us as the internal IT department, we’re the “Customer Service Solutions” department. We were told: Our office door needs to be kept open so people can feel free to walk right in with problems. Apparently it's our fault for not hearing when people knock lightly on the door. Doorbell wasn't an accepted alternative. We need to help with anything people ask at any time, even if someone lost their name badge (which we don’t provide in the first place) or doesn’t know where the cafeteria is. The business has enough covid precautions, we don't need to be afraid of people coming into our room, remoting into someone’s computer shouldn’t be our primary method for working with our “customers” (coworkers), etc etc. She’s…

So, I’m about to graduate with my master’s in health administration in a couple months. I have 5 years of relevant experience, and I applied for an “administrative specialist” position at a top university/research institute in the country for a specialized surgery unit. The job required at least a bachelor’s degree with experience, and it described high-level administration responsibilities. Perfect, exactly what I’m looking for. I went through three rounds of interviews, all of which required me to take time off work at my current full-time job, and all of which were intense behavioral-based interviews but luckily were conducted on phone/Zoom. The interviewers could only give me vague descriptions of what they thought the job would be, but I assumed that was normal since it was such a “catch-all” type of job. I get invited to a final interview, which is in-person and over an hour away from me. I…

So applied for a job and got an email back asking me to answer some questions about myself. One of them was asking if I could “please” confirm what my current annual base salary is? So question to you lovely people, how would you answer this? Should you even answer it? I'm getting the feeling like they're trying to get out of paying what they actually can, but I'm not sure.

I know that I probably shouldn't care but after committing myself to my company and working my ass off for 10 years for my bosses. I feel insulted that they just forgot about my 10 year work anniversary. It wasn't until the next day did I actually say something through our internal online messenger and had one boss reply with “Thanks for your commitment and being a part of the team. We appreciate all that you've done.” Which I appreciated but all my family and friends seem baffled not only at the fact that my bosses actually forgot but that I didn't get any kind of reward for all my years of service. My brother in law got a gold watch for his 10 year anniversary, my sister got a paid vacation, my mom got a 3 month paid sabbatical, my mother in law got a huge bonus and a…

Moreso a rant than anything, but I'm exhausted. They cut our hours in the new year “because there are no hours to give”. People aren't buying clothes and things, which makes sense—milk is five fucking dollars now. But how are people supposed to survive? A close friend and coworker of mine can barely pay rent right now. Another coworker hasn't worked in nine weeks, going on ten. For me, personally, I feel like I'm dying. The shifts are getting longer but my wage only went up .65 cents just in time for 15/hour to no longer be liveable. Luckily, I'm still at home so I don't have to worry about that aspect too much…but my mom is super worried about me. It kind of makes me sad, because outside of work, life is pretty alright right now! But even that is being affected by my sleep and stress level for…