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It's been an interesting few months for me at work. There have been times when I've been pretty circumspect about my work situation (Boeing), times when I've been extremely loquatious (Cal Johnson's Phone Service), and times when I've vacilated between the two extremes in my private life. Right now I work at Weekend's Only, a third-rate furniture shop located in the St Louis area, and I've mostly kept it out of my day to day writing because it hasn't really been a job I've taken home with me until the last few months or so.
I don't have any intention of turning this into a tell-all, if only because that'd take fucking forever. This place has eaten up enough of my time, anyhow. At the end of summer, our old manager was moved and replaced with a different one without any direct operations (read: warehouse team) experience. She leap-frogged our supervisor who had been working directly with our manager for over five years in preperation for taking over management of the warehouse and display teams when our manager was promoted, moved, or left and immediately kind of proceeded to drive day to day operations into the side of a cliff.
The movement came at a point in time where operations were already pretty troubled. We're changing the structure of our labor distribution store wide. Our team is already short-handed - in a market where turnover is already averaged at a year mark and in a business where we experience a 90% turnover on the sales floor per year, until two weeks ago, the newest members of our operations team had been there 9 months and the second newest was myself, at almost two years. I've personally remained there much longer than I anticipated, to something of a detriment to my scholastic pursuits, even into this semester. There's a great deal of loyalty to the team, even if the greater department logistics are severely troubled.
Morale has gotten so bad, lately, that many members of the team are close to walking. To that end, almost all of us have found second jobs, re-enrolled in classes, or are interviewing at different businesses. The straw that breaks the camel's back might be wage disparity amoung the warehouse personnel, though. It's already a problem that the team with our immediate managers were struggling to solve in an equitable way. I feel like we've been extremely patient in working with the chain of command as we've been asked to do, but nothing has been resolved. When two departments were combined into one, wages weren't changed to reflect the new baseline for entrance into the department. The difference in wages are substantial, and management has become very aggressive in trying to get operations members to cease in our discussions of what our wages are and what we think is appropriate amoung ourselves.
Which is flat out illegal, I might add.
When asked to cease personally, I responded that I was well within my rights to continue to do so and that I could not, actually be stopped or even asked to cease. I was summarily brought back and talked to in a seperate room, surrounded on two sides by managers, about my aggressive and insubordinate tendancies. Something, I should probably note, which has never been an issue before - specifically that I have been noted for my easy-going demeanor, upstanding attitude towards other members of my team, and extensive patience with even the most aggressive customers. So, why now? Tempers are at a boil, and we're extremely frustrated at the lack of action in regards to safety and health hazards, poor management overall, and underhanded or downright fraudulent business tactics. Not only that, but we've just discovered that those new guys who were just hired make more than several people who have been there over a year and as much as I do after well over a year on the job. (Not to mention that the two people paid the least never had their wages modified after joining the team with a good deal of experience already, they're both people of color, and the person who makes the least is a black woman, which is almost steriotypical discrimination).
So, there's a meeting on Wednesday that I may or may not be able to make depending on what remains of my coursework for the week. Regardless, I'll find out what the results are. There's a fair chance that, without dramatic positive steps on managements part, upwards of 6 members of an already dramatically understaffed team could be walking off the job right before we open for business on the weekend and maybe even before we get our weekly mattress shipments in.
I don't have any intention of turning this into a tell-all, if only because that'd take fucking forever. This place has eaten up enough of my time, anyhow. At the end of summer, our old manager was moved and replaced with a different one without any direct operations (read: warehouse team) experience. She leap-frogged our supervisor who had been working directly with our manager for over five years in preperation for taking over management of the warehouse and display teams when our manager was promoted, moved, or left and immediately kind of proceeded to drive day to day operations into the side of a cliff.
The movement came at a point in time where operations were already pretty troubled. We're changing the structure of our labor distribution store wide. Our team is already short-handed - in a market where turnover is already averaged at a year mark and in a business where we experience a 90% turnover on the sales floor per year, until two weeks ago, the newest members of our operations team had been there 9 months and the second newest was myself, at almost two years. I've personally remained there much longer than I anticipated, to something of a detriment to my scholastic pursuits, even into this semester. There's a great deal of loyalty to the team, even if the greater department logistics are severely troubled.
Morale has gotten so bad, lately, that many members of the team are close to walking. To that end, almost all of us have found second jobs, re-enrolled in classes, or are interviewing at different businesses. The straw that breaks the camel's back might be wage disparity amoung the warehouse personnel, though. It's already a problem that the team with our immediate managers were struggling to solve in an equitable way. I feel like we've been extremely patient in working with the chain of command as we've been asked to do, but nothing has been resolved. When two departments were combined into one, wages weren't changed to reflect the new baseline for entrance into the department. The difference in wages are substantial, and management has become very aggressive in trying to get operations members to cease in our discussions of what our wages are and what we think is appropriate amoung ourselves.
Which is flat out illegal, I might add.
When asked to cease personally, I responded that I was well within my rights to continue to do so and that I could not, actually be stopped or even asked to cease. I was summarily brought back and talked to in a seperate room, surrounded on two sides by managers, about my aggressive and insubordinate tendancies. Something, I should probably note, which has never been an issue before - specifically that I have been noted for my easy-going demeanor, upstanding attitude towards other members of my team, and extensive patience with even the most aggressive customers. So, why now? Tempers are at a boil, and we're extremely frustrated at the lack of action in regards to safety and health hazards, poor management overall, and underhanded or downright fraudulent business tactics. Not only that, but we've just discovered that those new guys who were just hired make more than several people who have been there over a year and as much as I do after well over a year on the job. (Not to mention that the two people paid the least never had their wages modified after joining the team with a good deal of experience already, they're both people of color, and the person who makes the least is a black woman, which is almost steriotypical discrimination).
So, there's a meeting on Wednesday that I may or may not be able to make depending on what remains of my coursework for the week. Regardless, I'll find out what the results are. There's a fair chance that, without dramatic positive steps on managements part, upwards of 6 members of an already dramatically understaffed team could be walking off the job right before we open for business on the weekend and maybe even before we get our weekly mattress shipments in.
