I am a self-licensed, self-insured, sub contractor.
We (my crew) have been getting work from the same company for the last 6 or 7 years.
The general age of the supervisors has gotten younger (closer to my age 26-29) with guys that are decently experienced and deserved the move up from field work. But the “lead supervisor” a guy who's been a manager longer, and is significantly older, and above him there's a shop manager who he answers too.
Lately they've been telling my crews leadman that they've been getting complaints about work not getting done because of us from field supervisors. Which roughly translates to: The “lead supervisor” at the shop has multiple jobs that are slow and can't be complete because of lack of supplie, lack of manpower or lack of ability for the lead supervisor to pull his head out of his ass. And my crew not being an official company crew was the scapegoat.
The day after we got this complaint we went into the shop which is about a 30-40 minute commute from home, when we went in office area to get our work for the day the lead supervisor told us they had no work for us. (this is bullshit all the supervisors have been complaining about how swamped they are.) My leadman said “seriously nothing?” The lead supervisor said almost with a laugh “yeah nothing”
This pissed off my leadman, and we left.
Now my leadman has friends in upper management at the main city branch of this company, and called him to try and smooth things out so we could go back to work the next day, and all seemed fine, but now they're trying to tell us how late we have to stay like we're on the clock even though we're basically independent of the company and we work at our own pace and if we decide that's it for the day, then that's it. And now the shop manager is trying to tell us we need to be wearing company shirts, and this morning he comes up to me and starts bugging me about my dreadlocks, and if I was gonna get a “normal haircut.” I almost told him fuck you, I like my hair and I like me, if you've been getting complaints then I'll tie them back but don't beat around the bush.
I hate office politics, it's the whole reason I became a sub contractor in the first place, so to distance myself from it and minimize it in my own life.
And on top of it all, we worked all through the pandemic, we've been struggling to get a raise in our contact salary pay, and we constantly seem to get the shit work that gets passed down from inexperienced crews who can't seem get it done.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do. But I'm done with this kind of struggle, when I know for a fact I could be making $16 an hour with benifets at a work from home job. I wouldn't have had the thought to even try to work from home jobs if it hadn't been for this sub, after reading some of the story's here it really helped open my eyes to see the way management has been treating me and my crew. Thanks.