Hello all,
I've been an anarchist and an anti-capitalist for years. However, because of my past experience in the military, being autistic, and the threat of losing my job always on my mind, I've often found it difficult to stand up to management at my workplace. That changed over the past year because of this subreddit.
I've been at my job for almost seven years. Last year I finally got the guts to ask management to rearrange my schedule so I can have weekends off, and much to my surprise they granted it. Before this I hadn't had a weekend off in over a decade since rejoining the workforce after “The Great Recession”.
A few months ago we got a new boss in upper management. He never worked for our company before. He's been doing what a lot of people in upper management do when they arrive at a new job, and that's to do as much to “shake things up” as possible to remind us peons that he's the one in charge.
Last week he came into the office and told us that we needed to change the schedule around. Too many of us have weekends off, and since “we didn't do things this way at the last job” he was at, he wanted to make sure that nobody has weekends off anymore. He demanded to know everyone's availability so he could schedule us accordingly.
With the exception of one co-worker (who was an older woman who didn't care what days they worked), everyone was staring daggers at the boss but remained silent as he told everyone that they'd be losing their days off.
When he got to me I told him in the most polite and professional manner as I could muster to go fuck himself. My actual words were, “I fought my ass off for this schedule. Before this, I spent a whole decade not having a weekend off, and I'm not going back to that. I EARNED my weekend off and I'm not going to give it up.”
The funny thing about standing up for yourself is that other people get the courage to do it when they see you doing it. The rest of the room began to declare why they also needed their weekend off.
Two days later the boss emailed us. He said that with the exception of the older woman that was fine with switching her schedule, the rest of us would keep our schedule unchanged. I kept my weekend because I stood up for myself. And I wouldn't have done that if it weren't for this subreddit.
Thank you, r/antiwork.