I lived in Decatur, Illinois for nearly 10 years of my life. It has no jobs, an extremely polarizing population of aspiring gang leaders and racist hillbillies of equal amounts black and white. It is a hellhole.
I got a job working at OSL. OSL is a company that works out of Walmart to sell phones. Here are some basic rules about working at OSL:
- As a sales position, you get paid minimum wage ($13.00) and then get commission pay for every phone plan you sell.
- Because no one buys a phone at Walmart, you are encouraged to trick people into buying phones they don't want or need.
- My coworkers were equal parts racists (against me, I'm white) and conmen (my boss was literally breaking the law consistently and I didn't realize until I quit).
- I do not work for Walmart. I work for OSL. I do not have to do Walmart sales.
- I specifically sell phones. I do not do tech support, I do not troubleshoot. I sell you a phone and set it up so you can use it the second you exist the building.
- You make minimum wage but 50% of your pay goes to an OSL-exclusive retirement fund. So I was making below minimum wage. I worked two weeks, full-time and made less than $500 at one point.
So this was a scummy workplace. From higher-ups abusing and fearmongering employees to get them to sell more, my boss being a fucking con artist with a master's degree in sales, and my coworkers being racist, it had to be the second worst place I've worked at (just shy of McDonald's).
My boss, Zach, was a white rich kid who got a master's in sales because his rich parents paid for it. He drives a Porsch and carries $2,000 in IPhone 14s on him at any time. Zach constantly tried to make me spend money on new phones and things by saying stuff like “Yeah $400 is not that expensive.” and even sent me home before my schedule was finished which is illegal. In Illinois, your schedule is just as binding as a legal contract and Zach literally is not allowed to send me home.
I rode the city bus at this point. It does not run on Sundays and takes like 45 minutes to get to my workplace. I was getting up at 6 AM for work and working until 8 PM including my commute and stuff.
OSL made the executive decision that Sundays were mandatory. One rule about OSL is this: no one, and I mean no one, is allowed to call employees off the clock about work. If you are not scheduled to work they cannot call you. So guess what Zach did? He called me and my brother on our day off to tell us “Hey, yeah I'm not gonna be able to give you Sundays off. Sucks, but it is what it is.” So I respond “Yeah man it sucks. Not much I can do about it either. I don't have a ride on Sundays so unless I get those days off I just can't come in those days. Nothing I can do about it.” To which Zach responds “Well I need you to come in. What are you gonna do about it?” To which I say “Zach there is nothing I can do. You just need to accept that I can't work Sundays because I can't Uber to work when you guys take half my pay for a retirement fund. I literally can't afford it.”
So I got Sundays off. Moral of the story: don't let your boss just toss a problem in your face and force you to accommodate them. Tell them to their face that you cannot do it and politely inform them that their job as a manager is to make it work, not yours.