HR Nightmares

Nothing makes an employee lose respect more than a manager who won’t reprimand a shitty coworker. Had you ever encountered a situation where the worst employee is buddy buddy with the boss? Anything said to the boss about said person just gets brush under the rug and in some cases laughed about. I started to notice this at one of my current jobs. It was as if any issue being brought to the table was never addressed. This company would tell the manager who was reporting incidents to HR and that employee would lose hours. How was this even legal?

One incident specifically I observed, was an employee was late to every shift. I’m not talking ten minutes late but more like an hour or more every shift. She was never written up and we were told that’s just her and how she’s always been at each location. One morning I came in to open the restaurant and was sick as a dog. I informed the manager that I would need to leave when more employees arrived and that I would still open as to not leave him without coverage and needing to find someone at six o’clock in the morning. Nobody is going to answer and come in at that time. This was a courtesy to him despite the fact that I was upchucking my guts while my blue eye and my brown eye weren’t seeing eye to eye.

When the manger arrived he not only threw a fit but cut my hours from 4 days a week to 1 day a week. Not to mention the slowest night shift known to man. The kind of shift that would make you wanna chew your arm off. The shift that would make you question what you were doing with your life. When I asked why this was, he said because I was unreliable. I looked over my work history and saw I had only been out sick four times in three years. I couldn’t bring this issue to human resource because I would get taken off the schedule completely.

I started to completely resent this manager and so did majority of the employees. What can be done in a situation where you have no higher person to safely bring your issues to? Slowly every employee started to do less and less. The dirt built up in corners and the tasks were constantly left unfinished. We no longer gave a shit about a building or each other for that matter. We came and made our money and left. The yelp reviews came pouring in and consumers could tell this place was falling apart. It was as if this manager was the parasite and us being the hosts to him, we were dying off.

Needless to say this establishment is days from going under. The toxicity of this workplace infected the employees to the point of resentment, leading to radical acceptance that we were a sinking ship. The spreading of negativity is constantly circling us in many jobs and careers we work. Would you say we could call this a Staff infection at this point?