hey y'all. thought you might appreciate this one. i'm pretty heated about it, so if anyone has any thoughts about if we can report this employer and fuck their day up, I’d appreciate it.
my partner was planning on working for a wildland firefighting company in oregon this summer. they have a great conversation with the owner, get hired super fast, and are given the details for the mandatory 36 hour employee training.
now, this training (which involves sitting in a metal folding chair for 36 hours in an unheated warehouse), turns out to consist mostly of a very bored manager reading verbatim from a slideshow. (including one slide that read, literally, employee “rights”). except there were a few slides that the manager didn’t read from. for instance, when the sexual harassment slide came up, the manager asked the group of overwhelmingly men if they all knew what sexual harassment was, and when one guy nodded he moved on, summarizing the slide by saying “women get offended by stuff, so be careful.” similarly, when the discrimination policy came up, he chose to skip this slide too because “it’s boring.”
this was followed up by the fire crew leader being overheard talking about how “now they not only got girls out there, they got transgenders out there” (my partner is transfemme so…..this did not bode well), as well as about how the company will “jew ya” re// their practice of underpaying their staff.
now the kicker: after going through this shitshow, my partner finds out that this *mandatory employee training* is unpaid. a full week's worth of pay, just gone. which is, i'm pretty sure, very illegal. they also find out that the pay is substantially less than the owner of the company led them to believe during their interview.
also, as all this is happening, the owner (who is present for a portion of the training) starts talking loudly about how expensive her italian leather boots are. literally. like this not satire this is real life. this is not a drill lmfao.
so, needless to say, my partner is not going to be working with this company. i really want to report these fucks to boli (bureau of labor and industries). given how bad what little my partner already saw was, i’m also sure they’re violating osha standards all over the place, and my only regret about my partner not working there is that we won’t be able to document and report these violations.
i’m guessing there isn’t a way to get them to pay up on the stolen wages, but if anyone has thoughts about how to go forward i’m all ears.
okay, thanks for listening to this vent lol.