Warning, this is pretty unorganized. Pretty much a vent post about the (literal) shitty working and living conditions at my previous job before I got a much better job elsewhere.
Recently quit a job I had in central AK in a tourist town. I got fired from my previous job up there for “standing around too much” (but that's another story), and desperately needed to find a job with housing, because there is no housing up there. Like, at all. You can sleep in the woods or one of the many, very expensive hotels but… That's it.
So I got a job with a company that owned 3 different businesses. I showed up at Place #1 and said I'm not leaving without a job. Cause it was either that, or sleeping in the woods where there are moose and bears and what not. Sweet, I get a job and I'm taken to housing!
Something important to note before I continue is most of the employees are J1's and other foreigners looking for a summer job. So once they're here, they dont have very many options to go back home, or find another job. So the company decides they can treat their employees pretty much however they want, and they can't complain without getting fired.
So I get to the housing. It's… It's literally just a bunch of shipping containers turned into rooms. Whatever, not that awful. What was awful is the fact that the “kitchen” everyone in camp (70~100) people had to share was: a hotplate, a microwave, a shallow 1 basin sink, a soda cooler, and a deep freeze.
…
Yeah.
So I start my job at Place #2. I had sent an email to HR stating I have chronic pain, and bare minimum I need a half hour break in the middle of my shift, and the shift itself could not be more than 9 hours. Ignored. For a week.
I'm a food runner, so I'm on my feet at all times. When I got home, I would be in so much pain I physically couldn't walk for the rest of the day. But as a food runner, my responsibilities included, you guessed it, delivering food/drinks, and bussing tables. EXCEPT the servers never pre-bussed. So either I would have to pre-bus for them, or wait until they got pissed enough that they'd yell at me for not clearing their tables. Instead of, ya know, pre-bussing their own table.
They were all too busy sucking up to customers, 'cause if their name was mentioned in a review, they'd get $25.
For 4 days straight there, I was the only food runner for lunch rush. I was so overwhelmed I couldn't keep up. The food runners who would come in later, around 4pm, took me aside and told me the servers were talking shit about how slow I was.
NO. FUCKING. SHIT.
Oh yeah, all of this for $10.35 an hour.
On top of literally ALL of this, the employee housing was $15/day, adding up to ~$450 a month. For a fucking shipping container.
HR eventually got back to me, and said they'd be moving me to another job, at Place #1, as a merchandise clerk.
Except, surprise! Despite my title being “merchandise clerk”, they wanted me to work mostly as a host! Not what I fucking agreed to! I loved working with the other hosts, but I'm very easily stressed out, and when we'd get slammed, I was easily flustered and overwhelmed by angry customers who didn't like being told it's be an hour and a half wait for a table.
Merchandise clerk wasn't that bad. There was a small gift shop that didn't get much traffic. It was the only room in the building, outside of the manager's office, that was air conditioned, and it was much quieter, good for someone HoH like me.
Except I worked 10 days in a row without a single day off as soon as I started there. On top of all of that, HR said I could take my breaks, which I needed to rest my body, but management told me “You don't tell us when you want to take a break, we tell YOU”. And then they'd never tell me I could take a break. Even when they knew I was crying in the supply closet from pain, they still wouldn't let me take breaks.
One manager even had the balls to ask me to come in at 10am, under the guise of switching my shift to an earlier one, then said “Haha yeah you're going to need to work your other shift as well :)”. Working doubles was required for most people, because it was a revolving door.
The topping on all of this? Raw fucking sewage was seeping up through the ground and under the employee housing, and it was never fixed.
Anyways, I put in a week notice, and left as soon as my new job confirmed I had housing (which is, again, a whole other story), and I'm at a new job now. There's a few people from my old place there, and we're all trying to unionize the workers from our old job and lure them here.
But christ, my new housing has: a full kitchen, a living room with a decent TV, actual beds, a nice shower I only have to share with 3 other people with consistent hot water, and an in unit washer and dryer (free! finally!). The cost? Same as the last place lol. Now I'm down to working 4-10's, but it's overnights where most of my time is spent organizing receipts and doing computer work, which I enjoy, meaning I get to sit down most of my shift! Starting pay of $19/h, and multiple options for upwards mobility.
Sure not everything is perfect here, no job is. Other departments have it rough (might go into detail with that later, cause as someone not involved in it, it's pretty funny), but my department vibes. The worst we have to deal with is angry guests and, like, for me personally, preparing an important revenue excel sheet the big wigs of the company need for their morning meetings.