Antiwork

My partner (38m) and I (25f) recently went to our local Dairy Queen. We have had a lot of rainfall in the past couple of days. A lot of our city’s storm drains/sewers have been overwhelmed. 1/3 of the Dairy Queen’s parking lot had been flooded. I see this poor teenage girl, in the rain, clearly a Dairy Queen employee, knee deep in sewage water, in flip flops, with a broken broom, and what I found out in the next coming moments was her attempting to “clear” the parking lot’s storm drain. I felt horrible and I was confused at first asking if she lost anything: DQ employee: Nope, just trying to find the sewer. Me: Did your boss ask you to do this? DQ employee: Yeah… Me: You know you have the right to refuse unsafe work right? DQ employee: It’s fine. Me. Girl, you’re knee deep in sewage…

i’ve posted on here a handful of times about my “part time” job at belk, -if you have any questions about my schedule before this please revert to my profile- but this was THE tipping point for me. • this happened on saturday, i was working for the first time since sunday, and i’d been there for about an hour already. the ac was broken, and im almost six months pregnant now and dont handle the heat very well. there was a lady working in the kids section with me that i hadnt seen before, so i tried striking up conversation with her, “hi, i havent seen you here before, how long have you been here?” she replied saying about three weeks but she worked “full time”. • it was at this point one of my managers tried shooing me to do things and basically get away from her, which…

This is ridiculous. I work one job 6am-3pm, another job most nights 6:30pm-10:30pm, and have on and off gigs from home. I have stable work and some of it is even in a field I really like, but it's… a lot. All this just about gets food in my mouth, a roof over my head, fresh litter in the box, and therapy every other week. I feel so pressed for time to sleep that I genuinely struggle to shower (at least almost) every day, laundry is out of the question except for a short window on Sundays and if I miss it I wear dirty clothes that week. If I miss my meal prep time then I can't eat enough (prepared food is expensive). I owe everything to deodorant and mouthwash, which I can take with me and use on my bathroom breaks. Why is it that when I dream…

He was the owner of a factory (who paid minimum wage, naturally). One summer it was a boiling heat wave. Factory was hot anyway and stunk of glue and oil. He sent a bag of ice cubes round and you could take ONE to cool yourself down. An. ICE.CUBE. And he honestly saw himself as a decent boss. To contrast this, I worked at a place with a strong union. In a heatwave, every two hours a trolley came round with cold drinks, lemonade, orange juice , etc. Join a union.

About half a year ago I got a new job. It was ok, nothing fancy, but it was fair enough, in a fairly popular company. When I was starting out I told my soon to be manager that I was taking a week off in August, since I will be on the other side of the country. He was fine with it. No mention of it for months, I remind him when sending out my schedule request for August, that I will be gone. Insert Suprised Pikachu meme, he says you have to report it earlier. I did. You stupid fuck I did when you hired me. Its not my fault you didnt do anything with it. He told me that I can't take this time off and if I do, we will have to part ways. I said fine, I'll finish this week of work then and I'm going…

Metrics since their introduction into the workforce have been used to underpay, overwork, and extort employees. It is a game that honestly shouldn't matter. Everyday “doing our best” might look different. It also varies person to person. I believe it's time we either stop using it to manipulate and discriminate people or abolish it entirely. I'm tired of hearing that corporations are doing shitty things that have been burning out my closest friends to the point where they don't have time to socialize anymore. We deserve better.