A little under a year ago I took a supervisor position at a warehouse nearby. I was excited to have that position because I feel like it’s time to advance myself in the job market and also I could be the supervisor/manager I’ve always wanted to have and be able to advocate for my team as opposed to strictly overseeing work.
The company pretty much made that impossible. We were a fulfillment warehouse, the entire job was receive/inventory, pick/pack/ship with occasional machine operation (we sold vinyl rolls and had a large slitter machine to resize).
Here’s a list of gripes/policies.
- no talking between staff members unless it is directly work related
- no music, no headphones allowed (silent workplace essentially)
- schedule was 9am-7pm daily
- pay: the actual pay rate was 3 dollars an hour less than the advertised pay rate. Your hourly pay is based on the low number and you receive an “attendance bonus” for showing up, that was 3/hr. If you were late or I excused you would lose the attendance bonus for the entire two week pay period
- basic supervisory duties eventually included installing doors/soldering and wiring breadboards/trouble shooting (and being talked down to because I wasn’t familiar with wiring/radionio chips)
I 100% didn’t enforce some of this. I refused to make a couple nineteen year old kids pick sign holding materials in complete silence for 8 hours. I would absolutely engage in casual conversation if we were working in the same area or if we were slow on orders. Our warehouse was always on time and had the highest shopping volume in the company.
While there I was accused of:
- stealing 10,000 screws from a shipment even though they were marked as a back order in the receipt/packing slip
- forging doctors notes for two illnesses because I used Teladoc (a free remote medical service offered by the company insurance)
- Lying about receiving inventory when we hadn’t (I don’t know what benefit I would have saying we received twice as many products as we should have, but this was a fiasco)
- not locking dock doors that opened during a storm (on camera it was apparent that I latched the door all the way. Most everything in the warehouse that required a call-out for repair remained in disrepair for a while before it was fixed)
At one point payroll (ran by the Vice President/wife of the founder) paid me 3x the amount on a paycheck, the solution was “you keep the money, we just sick your pay until it’s paid back” which I was fine with, but eventually the owner forgot how to do math and was trying to take my POST-tax pay to pay back their PRE-tax amount and tried to convince me to let them dock me an additional $1000 or so.
For 5 months I couldn’t drive and rode my bike to and from work every day, rain or shine, came early and stayed late, was very motivated and eager. The position “required” overtime every day to wait for late shipment pickups and I would stay daily.
After 6 months, I asked about a pay raise and title adjustment as I was the highest ranking staff in the warehouse (there was one more person in the building, the purchasing manager who was the former warehouse manager). I was told they would offer me the Manager title and a pay raise. The raise they offered me was salary based strictly on the 40 hour a week pay rate, not considering the required/mandatory overtime of the position. So what they considered a raise was actually a 3500 a year paycut (based on the average OT per week) for the same amount of work.
I could go on and on. Anyway though, I finally left the company around two weeks ago and last week I found out through the grapevine that upon my leaving, the entire floor staff and the replacement they hired for me left at the same time. The purchaser/“manager” is a nightmare, made this job a nightmare and it was validating to see the staff all cut out once I was gone.
tl;dr: left a toxic AF company, my entire staff followed me in leaving within a week.