So I used to work for TD bank. A position that required a degree and they expected A LOT from you. I thought the pay was amazing at $25 an hour. Although I have since left foot a Union job and have doubled my salary. This is a story of 'Employee Appreciation Week '.
At this point I had been with the company 4 years. We just lost an incredible manager who truly did appreciate us. I once called out, and he called me from his personal phone. I thought he was fishing for why I called out, but he didn't care, because I never called out he wanted to make sure I was ok. The guy maxed out the company credit card to throw us parties whenever he could, and paid out of pocket for a big Christmas party. Dude was amazing and well loved. He was also fired after about two years. In comes the new manager, a 24 year old who thinks she knows everything and LOVES to micro manage. Her and I did not get along well at all. I am very stubborn when it comes to employment, I encourage pay discussion, I encourage work life balance, and… Well I'm on this sub aren't I?
Anyway, it begins with her pushing our sales goals higher while also eliminating staffing. She wanted to be seen as 'ultra efficient' to her bosses so she could climb the ranks quickly. No matter the cost. One day she tells me if I do not cut my hair, I will not get a be getting a raise. I don't push back too hard, instead, I document the conversation, look up the dress code in the employee manual, and forward this to HR. She had grown a very bad reputation in my branch very quickly. As she's done just as horrible stuff to everyone else. It was Employee Appreciation Week that she really fucked up, and cost her her job. Every year the company set aside $30 per employee on top of the EAW allotment for a “personalized gift” for instance, my last good manager saw I drank a lot of Amp energy drink, so he got me $30 worth then spent his own time got glueing them into the shape of a Christmas tree. It was awesome. Well when discussing EAW this year, shit manager accidentally CCed me! Oops! I was a 'store supervisor' so I was on a lot of management emails, but the title basically meant nothing. In replying to our district manager, and other regional managers on what they were doing with their $30 allotment per be employee. Our manager replied “I am making a run to the dollar store, we can make a personalized gift for under $5 each! This will save the company hundreds per store!”
This was it. This was the final straw. I IMMEDIATELY forwarded this to the rest of my coworkers. And they were just as mad as I was. We wrote up a formal list of complaints and each of us signed it, and wrote our own letter about what has been done to us personally and submitted it to TD banks 'tip line' but it wasn't until we began to discuss unionization that they took us seriously. Within days our branch was scheduled to close one day for what they called a “temp check” where HR management, the Regional Manager, the Regional Operations Officer, and another 'neutral' Branch manager met with all the branch staff. During this meeting we basically just stated what we already told them from our grievance letter. They gave us the anti union talk and said we could rely on them to make the right decision. Unfortunately unionization fell through bc although they did follow through with our demand that our manager be removed… They moved her to a different position, but no longer in a management role. When we saw she wasn't fired a lot of people who were there for 10+ years quit. I got promoted surprisingly, and with us out of the store the unionization effort lost most of its momentum. But hey, I still consider that a win.