chat

sometimes the situation at an organization becomes untenable. happened to me. I did just under a decade at a place. so there I am in my 40s, laundering the reputation and helping people making 4x my wage ascend ever higher so they can treat me like an appliance.

at a fundamental level, I was helping people and my immediate coworkers were cool. we also all trauma bonded over how shit the deal was.

but the writing was on the wall, the future was only going to be worse as the most swollen assholes were being elevated and making decisions that would structurally undermine everything I believed in.

so, when I felt myself getting pissed, I would update my CV and send out applications to places that looked better. and not just local either. frankly, I de-prioritized local because I already knew the landscape. and I wanted nothing to do with what was being constructed. I wanted out.

so I looked at other states, well away, that have reputations for being better to workers, unions, etc and would be accommodating to someone relocating.

I probably applied to half a dozen jobs over a six month window, but those were tailored applications where I researched the area and the organization pretty heavily.

as often as places completely undervalue institutional knowledge and experience, there are still some out there that recognize how critical these things are. I was in my 40s when I jumped ship and started over somewhere else, after 14 years getting to know people and places.

it was drastic as hell and took a shitload of spare executive function to pull off, but being treated with respect, valued, and working for a non-toxic organization was like waking up from a nightmare.

I think what really made me do it was knowing what the long timers were like at my old place. after 10 years I had become the most senior staff. the senior staff that quit before I did had done 12-20 years there and they hated life. just angry as fuck all the time, wouldn't even try to be friendly, and we all could understand the urge. we also just thought it wouldn't happen to us. but when I became the most senior, I couldn't ignore the vibes anymore. and the disrespect only amplified. that idea that an employer is doing me the favor by "giving" me a steady job for years is one that I won't tolerate. God it was amazing announcing my departure at a meeting. some close work friends knew a few days prior I had accepted an offer, but 80% were completely blindsided. it was exquisite. all the cool people immediately got why and were congratulatory and all the assholes were like mad, and it felt good to laugh at their confused anger. hmmm... who was doing who the favor all these years?

anyway, I knew the only way I could find something real was to go wide, because most workers can't or just won't.

I've made huge geographic moves before and honestly, it's like time slows down. it's tiring and draining for everything to be new and all the old patterns to be blown away, but it's also enriching too. it's like starting a new chapter in an anthology. the days don't blur together, they are full of new people, new faces, new places and ideas.

one of capitalism's most consistent features is proletarian dislocation, but if you're willing to engage it as an adventure, you can meet a lot more people, become intimately familiar with more places, and learn a lot more about yourself.

I keep in touch with my old colleagues and I am frequently able to confirm that the choice I made was correct, because of how much more wretched it has become.

I also get to be the guy they know in this part of the country, if they want to visit and see what the deal is.

only you can know if it's worth the hassle or not, to exercise your right to walk and contribute your time to something else. for me, walking away from a shit employer feels like fighting and staying feels more like surrender.

Wow. I could have wrote this and it would have been 90% accurate to my situation. The flippant attitude toward some people's needs while letting others get away with murder, the stringing along on raises and promotions... It's all too familiar. We pay pretty well and we still can't keep a staff because of overworking new people, micromanaging while simultaneously throwing them in the deep end, some people taking a mile when we give them an inch..

We just had a dude who worked with us for about a month and he would randomly disappear for long amounts of time. He was slow as fuck and wouldn't take direction. The manager was like "well, let's keep giving him more responsibility and maybe he will snap out of it". He didn't. In fact, he went home one weekend and beat up some girl he was seeing, stole her car and died in a police chase. Employee of the month, ladies and gentlemen!

People like that keep getting all the chances in the world, but yeah, let's make sure I'm doing my job, and the job of two other people. That's the real problem

My co-worker is actually a pretty good friend. We met at a different bakery and she ended up rage quitting that job because of poor management and ended up where we are now. I took her role over and then quit like nine months later.

This friend is a little weird about work stuff. She says all the right things and feels the same way I do when we are complaining about work, but the second she can be on the "other side" she kind of goes along with it. Honestly I think she just loves the gossip element of it. She also has a not so great life outside of work and I think it makes her feel like she has agency

It makes it hard to be her friend when I'm the one getting picked on. I think she feels like she's a double agent, but all she's really doing is enabling our bosses shitty behavior.

Right? They're adults, you're an adult. If they need something they'll ask. The expectation that you can upsell them is just so predatory and it always made me feel scummy.

I worked in an oil change pit of a summer once. We were always supposed to upsell them on various filters and flushes. They had a leaderboard just out of view of the customer that whoever won that month got a steak dinner with the boss (🙄 what kind of prize is hanging out with you boss off the clock?) people were into it though. They would make a sale, pump their fists out of view of the customer and mark off another X

That sounds rough. Also very dangerous. If your backup is incompetent and something happens to a swimmer, that would scar you for life. Such an easy problem to avoid, but there's nobody at the wheel anywhere anymore

I'm in a position where I'm at the highest paying bakery in town. I've worked for a couple of others and had similar problems on a smaller scale. Mostly you just get abandoned by management and don't have any co workers to lean on. Me and the co worker I mentioned above trauma bonded at a smaller bakery because the bosses just left us to run everything while they fucked off to Florida for two years. It went ok for a while but then they tried to micromanage us from Florida. They kept being like "we will be on the next plane home if you need us"

Well, one of our delivery drivers almost died in a car crash on the job and totalled the vehicle. They didn't come back to help so I had to deal with the police and go to their house to get their personal vehicle. They even asked us to go to the junk yard to get any bread or bins we could out of the totalled car. Like we were supposed to re sell this bread?

All that is to say it looks like the only way out of this job is to jump to a different industry entirely because other bakeries are paying $7 less an hour than what I'm making. I could afford a little pay cut, but I would probably have to become the Walter white of shrooms to make ends meet.

Management turnover sucks for a lot of reasons, but the worst for me personally is that every time it happens, it basically restarts my own clock of how people view my experience. My 14 years mean nothing because this new person wasn't there for it.

I spend so much time putting in the work and then the person that saw it all quits. Then I have to ingratiate myself to some new asshole that doesn't necessarily deserve to be above me in the chain. It's just a rotating door of PMC douches who don't even know about bread, but they have a nice haircut and a polo shirt and a piece of paper from Fuddruckers university saying they deserve to make more money than me.

I don't mind talking about it here I have a little in the past. I work in a commercial bread bakery. We're pretty big, but not interstate big. Checked out guy I mentioned is in a relationship with someone else we work with and she's a firecracker who wants to unionize. I told her that I just don't have it in me to fire the first shot, but I'd happily back her up. She's tenacious and he's knowledgeable about the law side of things and is a lot more organized in his brain than I am. His demeanor is a lot cooler and goes over better with the higher ups too.

Still waiting for them to get off the dime.

I've quit there twice now. Once only for a couple of months and then again for three years. I just wanted a smaller bakery where I wasn't getting destroyed daily. I don't know if this is true outside of my experience but every bakery I've worked for was ran by a hippie coded middle aged woman who would knife you to save $5.

As for the manager and getting her off my back: we had words over text today and I was at least able to land a few punches. It ended with a bit of face saving on both of our ends because at the end of the day, I can't just up and leave.

I can't really go above her head because there really isn't anyone. There's the owner, but he's a weird mix of a great boss and just completely out of touch. I think he would take the meeting but I'm afraid he would "we hear you, we see you" me and nothing would change. I e often compared my work culture to the DNC but nobody outside of hexbear would pick up what I'm putting down.

I'm not the only one who is in my position. I could probably organize a handful of people to have a sit down with the owner but like I said, I don't really want a target on my back just now, and it would be a whole lot cooler if someone else put their money where their mouth is this time. I've gone to bat a bunch of other times with them over the years and it's mostly made my life harder, hence the checking out and turning myself into a NPC at work

I think this can be a useful survival strategy for corporate environments but I'm extremely skeptical of its ability to actually improve things for your fellow workers. At best maybe you can help yourself and some of your friends for a while. But I'd still put it in the survival strategy box not a genuine tactic to change anything in a broad or lasting way (unlike, say, worker organizing, though that's got it's risks too).

I've tried in the past. I'm not saying that's bad advice, but I'm ultimately going up against a woman who has no control over her personal life so she has to come in and slap us around. You could say the sky is blue and she would say you're wrong. There's barely any recourse and what little there is would resemble sticking your tongue in a mousetrap.

People higher up than her just don't care because from their perspective the job is getting done. They don't care about the "how"

I could probably just wait her out. Other than a couple people like me, the average lifespan of a worker there is between six months and three years. She's halfway to three years and I heard a rumor that she got a better job offer.