As with a lot of companies, my employer is struggling to get new hires, and keep full trained staff in the door. Last weekend we had our company xmas party, which included an end of the year update.
Everyone in the company has been pensive the last 2 months since the president said 'it's been a tough year, but we've stuck through it and made it through the roughest of covid'. The company produces food stuffs for grocery stores so we had to work through the lockdowns and variant spikes. Manually feeding bulk product to be shredded down into finished goods (store brand cheese). Averaging 40-120lbs at a time, around 25000lbs of cheese on the slower lines, and upwards of 60000lbs of cheese per shift (the lines I'm lucky enough to work on 99% of the time). All put on the infeeds by hand.
As of now, we are at about 80% staffing compared to pre-covid numbers, despite that, we made the same amount of production in 2022 that we did in 2021. However, the president said it wasn't close enough to the projections of the year, so we didn't qualify for our bonus (4% our yearly pay).
Needless to say, morale is at an all time low, and myself, as well as, a lot of my coworkers are now looking for different opportunities.