Been thinking of starting a new apprenticeship next year. My job isn't terrible by any means (a lifeguard with a LOT of extra duties and a 3-year apprenticeship I finished), but there are problems. I tend to get a lot of bad morning to evening shifts, some don't even see a problem letting people work 9 or 10 hours, breaks are rarely properly taken, communication essentially doesn't work, the upper management is, for the second time now, talking about demolishing the entire place, and another coworker demands a 6-day work week for everyone.
Luckily I gathered about 72 overtime hours on my account, mainly from a time period where I didn't get a single day off in weeks.. Originally wanted to take a few weeks off, but now that I'm thinking of getting a new job, I might want to use the time to trial work at some other places for a few days or a week, to see what jobs/places I can get along with and which are worth applying at. This year the time schedule was so messy I didn't get to trial work much and mainly didn't find anything worth applying for.
Now last week they told me I'd have to take my overtime until end of December, otherwise they are gonna force me to take days off. This does not play well into my plans.
Next year I could use my paid vacation days for the trial work, but the risk is that if I don't find anything, or don't get accepted anywhere, I end up with a year where I can't take actual vacation. The only way to get vacation then is to make overtime hours and use those, but the thing with taking overtime days off is that, if they want to, they can demand me back at work for whatever reason in the middle of it. This means if I travel for vacation using overtime, and they ask me to come back because someone called in sick (again), I have to cancel my vacation and get back home until the next day.
Not sure what to do. There is no way the HR departement is going to let me keep the overtime until next year, using up the overtime in december, really the only time of the year where I have absolutely no use for it at all, sounds awful and using up my paid vacation time next year is risky. Why did they have to decide this? Why didn't they tell us this in June? It never was this way before, its most likely they saw some of us having too much overtime from people having been sick and us having been understaffed, and now want to avoid having the place understaffed next year because of people taking days off.. Like, most of those hours are my days off, days that i worked where I should've had been off work, weeks where I worked 10+ hours at times because we were understaffed and nobody was willing to cover other peoples shifts except me and now I'm told I have to get rid of it ASAP? Just one more reason to quit this job and get a different one I guess. And I guess this has turned into sort of a rant.