Haven’t posted much on reddit, so forgive me if this is kinda weird formatting. Also, this is a long one, it’s been building for months.
TLDR: management dragged out a possible promotion for me only to go back on their word and then blamed it on me.
A little backstory: I’ve been at this lab for a little over a year on night shift. We got a new manager and supervisor about three months in and they’ve been generally awful. I’m the CLA who’s been there longest on night shift, and they’ve been basically treating me like a lead with training responsibilities anyways. Management comes in around 7ish and I only see them in the lab for about 30 minutes before they’re whisked away for meetings and my shift ends, which accounts for some of the gaps. They’d either be too busy talking to other staff or already gone before I could ask.
I was approached by one of the directors of our side of the lab at the end of December about an official lead position opening up in late January she wanted me to apply for. They didn’t give me a lot of details so I waited. Halfway through January, I set up a meeting with her on another topic and we end up discussing the lead position more. She tells me the hours (3AM-11:30AM) which is the shift I had already told my manager I didn’t want because I’d be losing shift differential, a $2.50 paycut. She tells me we can fudge the hours a little bit and my manager would be in contact.
A week goes by with nothing, and after talking to some coworkers, nobody else that has the time/experience wants the shift, so I’m pretty much the only person in house looking at the position. I decide to try and ask if I could do 4 10 hour shifts, as it would give me an extra hour on each shift (minus the ones that are ridiculously slow and don’t need an extra person), I’d keep shift differential, and free up an extra day to recover. Manager says he’ll look into it.
Three weeks later with no details, I ask my manager for the third time for a meeting and he finally sets one up with the title of the meeting hinting that I’d gotten the position. When I go, he tells me he still has to set up the job posting and I’d still have to interview. So I ask general questions about duties and everything and he repeats the hours are 3-11:30 AM. Apparently it’s a ‘rule’ that if you work 4 10s, one has to be a weekend day. I tell him again I don’t want to lose shift differential and how I’m also worried about it cutting my weekend in half, and he assures me we can shift the hours to what I’d like, and to think on it. We didn’t even discuss pay. That night I email him and tell him I’d consider doing 2-10:30 to keep my shift differential as long as they were okay with the overtime of me coming in at midnight until my position could be replaced. 3rd shift is notoriously understaffed despite being ‘production,’ and there was no way I was going to leave them hanging.
Manager responds two days later that the position HAS to be 3-11:30 to help both shifts and I need to ‘be flexible enough to swap to other shifts as needed.’ Realizing he just wants me to ask to move to first shift, and they’ll probably end up using me with no warning to cover absences, I simply sent back “I am no longer interested” instead of the ridiculously long rant I initially typed up.
Fast forward two more weeks (around Mid March) and I ask for a one on one with my supervisor as a general check in on my work. She mentions feeling sad I was no longer interested in the lead, and I explain why I decided not to, since she hadn’t been in any of the previous discussions. She says she’ll look into possibly seeing if the hours can be changed for one day a week so I can still have the weekend to recover. I (stupidly) get my hopes up.
Radio silence again until we have our monthly meeting at the end of March. It was already a bad night after they changed a process four times in a week without clearly communicating, so I was at my wit’s end. My manager gets to the staffing, and announced they’ve extended an offer for the lead position to an outside candidate. I had no warning, no time to process, and I end up quietly excusing myself from the meeting because I was in tears and didn’t want to make a scene. After I got home, I ask my supervisor for another one-on-one for the following day.
When I get there, I apologize for me leaving and tell her I was hurt by not receiving even a text saying they were going with someone else. She tells me that it’s just because she had so much on her plate and she ‘didn’t know he was going to bring it up in the meeting.’ She then proceeds to tell me “I know the blanket reaction is to just say ‘screw it, i’m doing the bare minimum now,’ but upper management does recognize when you still come in with the same attitude. Plus, the new lead will need to be trained and we’ll need someone in that leadership role for the beginning of your shift.” I just kinda stare at her for a minute and she continues on. “We have positions open up every day, so just hang in there! But, as a little advice you know, next time I’d just have the initiative to jump on the role and not get hung up on one day you don’t wanna work. Management doesn’t want a hiring process to be dragged out for three months.” At this point, I’m fuming and try to explain that I wasn’t the one who dragged it out, but she brushes me off and doesn’t really let me answer. So I just thank her and end the meeting.
Since then, I’ve been doing my job, haven’t really changed my work ethic because I don’t want my lack of effort to affect my coworkers. I’ve still been staying over to cover their short staffing and been the go to contact for first shift to know how night shift went. But we haven’t had the new lead start. I check the job postings almost daily to try and find something to transfer out, and notice the job posting went up, got taken down, and was back up again all in a few days. Yesterday, I get curious and ask my manager what happened with the new lead and if they’d be starting soon so I could prepare myself for having to train. He just kinda smirked and shook his head like he didn’t want to answer, and then finally said “We decided not to go with her.” Which means she realized what a shit shift it was or they were trying to pay her pennies (according to a coworker, the last CLA they’d tried to promote to lead was only offered a 25¢ raise, despite the same position in another department next door to us receiving $1 raise).
I’ve been feeling a little smug about this, but other than telling my friend at work and now here, I’ve not made any smart comments yet. Every so often I’m tempted to apply to see what they’d offer me pay wise and to keep out someone who has no clue about the lab and workers there, but I’m sure they’ll just throw my application out now. And i’m ‘not flexible enough,’ so they can keep their shitty shift and shit pay. I’m still looking for a transfer out of there to keep my insurance, even though the whole company is probably like this.