So maybe it is that this is more venting than anything, but I have to get it off my chest: the drug rehab place I work at is a toxic hellsite that, if it was a circle of Dante’s hell, would be the fourth circle – greed. I’ve been with this company for coming up on five months now, and I cannot begin to emphasize just how money driven the company’s entire leadership is, right in tandem with a staff that is extremely toxic on its own right. For one, they cannot keep any decent people to save their life – the lack of raises, blatant favoritism, constant gaslighting from upper management, low pay and unrealistically high workload chases off a lot of potentially good staff.
Two, what is left for staff are universally toxic people who got their positions through blatant nepotism in this place. The director of operations is no different – this is a person with no prior experience who got into a position paying over $100,000 a year by being friends on the outside with upper management. He will schedule out vacations without planning at all for the reduction in staffing levels, and like clockwork, he is always scrambling at the last minute to get gaps in the schedule filled. He periodically will hire new people, but they almost always end up on swing shift. He cannot get anyone to really work days for the second half of the week or even night shift, which has translated into a situation where, with the exception of a handful of days, I have constantly had to cover almost an entire extra shift for close to five months since starting, this after having already worked a ten and a half hour shift where I am constantly stuck running our detox unit alone and with zero breaks. Nobody up the chain will offer higher pay, better shift differentials or even incentives to work weekends, which exacerbates everything – and all out of an unwillingness to part with even a portion of their already bloated salaries out of sheer greed and selfishness.
Swing shift for their part does not help matters any. They tend to abandon their post the minute my shift arrives at night, claiming as they do that they have to help out at the front desk – leaving us to handle all the rounds, obtaining a ton of vitals, cleaning, restocking, helping nursing with getting numerous clients up to them, constantly trying to deal with often needy or pissed off clients and handling the phones – while they spend the remaining two and a half hours of their shift hanging out up front and doing nothing of note. Our rounds alone are every 15 minutes in detox, a thing which only happened because everyone from the director of operations on up refused to recognize that we weren’t getting even 30 minute rounds in on time because the amount of work we are doing is too much for one staff member to even keep up. Even during that point when we had 30 minute rounds, they actually expected us to take our lunch breaks in between rounds but yet would scream at us for leaving our assigned areas. And they refuse to hear us out at all when we tell them we are being burned out.
Much of this would be resolved if they raised the fucking pay, but the CEO simply gaslights us and tells us to apply for public assistance – this while he kicks it in an $8 million dollar mansion and drives around in a literal Bentley. All while fleecing other rich people who have an addiction with rehab treatment that is a joke. And nobody has the genuine interest in organizing into a union, as they all sincerely believe it would never work. And so I am looking for another job, but I am having no luck yet. All while trapped among a bunch of sycophants, ass kissers, greedy executives and some of the laziest pieces of shit I have ever seen in my working life. And the real sticking point is that every place like this is the same exact way.
TLDR: fuck the treatment industrial complex. Nationalize it today and clean house as it happens.