Antiwork

I recently started working at a clothing retailer in a small Utah town, this is a big corporation, but I’ll just leave the company name out of it. Our manager has an expectation that we are always on our workplace communication app, we are required to download it on our phones, and she sends us messages constantly wether we are at work or not, if we aren’t reading and responding to her messages outside of scheduled work hours, she gets upset with us when we are at work, that we aren’t volunteering our time out of work to stay caught up on communication, the app itself when we sign in gives us a message we have to accept to log in, that says if we are caught using it outside of work hours the company will discipline us, up to and including termination. Aside from the companies communication app, the…

I'm almost 40 and just keep coming back to the same conclusion. I don't think I can ever be happy when the majority of my days/waking hours are spent doing something I do not want to do. There's a deleted scene from the very end of Office Space when Peter is outside, at his new construction job, and his new boss walks up and is basically the blue-collar version of his previous boss. That kinda gives the movie a totally different spin and you wonder if Peter will ever actually be happy. ​ ​ I'll be starting a new job soon. I've been in my field for over a decade and, comparatively, the offer is objectively great. Better environment, significant salary raise, better benefits. When the opportunity came up, I was a little blinded by it – partly because of the pros of the job but also because it distracted…

Instead of doing whatever I want during an unpaid break we were all ushered into the conference room so we could eat lunch while gawking at the boss for being a year older. The other employees spent money on gifts but I refused. I'm contemplating demanding another break or pay for that time since I didn't feel that a had the freedom to do whatever I wanted during this unpaid break.

Hey, so I found this random paper at work and it got me thinking. It was all about how working a full eight-hour shift is way better than working a four-hour shift. At my job, we usually work for four hours and forty-five minutes with only one break, which honestly sucks. According to the paper, if you work eight hours, you're supposed to get a 12% break time per hour worked, but if you only work for four hours and forty-five minutes, you only get a 5% break time per hour worked. Like, what the heck, right? That means full-time employees get 65% more break time per hour than us part-timers. It got me thinking that maybe this is why our store hires so many part-time employees. It's cheaper for them because we get fewer breaks and work longer without taking any time off. Plus, they don't have to pay…

Noticed this reading 42nd parallel (novel with tons of socialist themes), when a character gets a job its always “x amount a week,” wages are never talked about like that today. I think it's partly because youd realize how little youre actually making per week.