I took this job out of desperation after being let go from my previous workplace. (Thanks, economy!) It's a job that barely pays the bills, but I genuinely love my boss and coworkers, despite the low pay and lack of benefits.

I recently got sick with COVID and didn't have any sick leave available. PTO is also not available for 1 year. I asked my boss if he would be willing to let me make up the hours by working on Sunday. I later found out from a coworker that my boss actually had to fight HR just to get permission to allow it. Apparently, HR considered it as my boss giving me "special privileges."

I'm the breadwinner in my household. I can't afford to lose income every time life happens, whether that's getting sick or dealing with an unexpected emergency. Finding out that my employer views a little flexibility as special treatment has honestly left me disgusted.

And it's not just me. Another coworker recently returned from the hospital after being told they found tumors in his legs, along with other internal organ issues. He needs follow up appointments and transfusions, yet his boss won't even allow him to work hybrid or remote to accommodate those appointments.

At what point is enough, enough? Why have we created a working culture where employees are made to suffer financially and physically just for trying to get by and make an honest living?

Artist Alessandro Malossi visualizes the hidden aggressive energy of passive-aggressive office emails and unfeasible operational constraints.

Like what is really the point if I won't end up in very professional fields? Like engineer, doctor etc? It feels like I'm just playing a game where no matter how much you spend time on it, you still end up being stuck at low level and not able to compete with other competitors.

I’m 34. We must do something soon!!!! I want some of that billionaire money. Take some from the one who got the most, they won’t miss it!! Or take a billion from each billionaire 🤷🏾‍♀️ apparently around 4,000 of them money suckers out here….

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice about a situation I’ve been dealing with at a large UK retail company for approximately four years.

I’m still on an 8-hour-per-week contract, despite repeatedly asking for additional contracted hours during annual reviews, quarterly reviews and conversations with management.

During my first two years, I regularly worked overtime and supported the store whenever additional help was needed. However, my contract was never increased. One manager has since said I don’t do much overtime, which completely overlooks the overtime I previously worked.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that employees recruited after me have started on contracts with more hours than mine, while others who joined later have subsequently had their contracted hours increased. Some have received 12-hour, 16-hour or higher contracts, while I’ve remained on just 8 hours after approximately four years of service and repeated requests. I was also once voted employee of the quarter by my colleagues within two years and I try to do my work best so its not I’m cutting corners or not doing my required duties.

I don’t believe that being employed longer automatically entitles me to more hours. But I do believe management should be able to explain why my requests have continually been unsuccessful when additional contracted hours have clearly been allocated to other employees.

My biggest concern is the apparent favouritism within the store.

From what I’ve observed, certain managers appear to have a circle of favourite employees, friends, family members and relatives who receive more favourable working arrangements.

Some have been given higher contracted hours, fixed working days, preferred shifts, regular weekends off and contracts with hardly any weekend commitments.

Meanwhile, I’m repeatedly scheduled on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, especially late Saturday closing shifts that other colleagues seem reluctant to work.

On many Saturdays and Sundays, I’m also the only colleague covering my department’s shop floor for significant periods, even during busy trading hours.

I understand retail involves weekend working. When I joined four years ago, I said I was available at weekends. But surely that shouldn’t mean I’m expected to work undesirable weekend shifts indefinitely without my circumstances ever being reconsidered?

I’ve repeatedly asked for occasional weekends off, a fairer rota or the opportunity to work longer weekday shifts instead. I’ve even offered to work a full eight-hour weekday or a Saturday or Sunday shift so I could at least get one Saturday or Sunday off.

Nothing has changed.

Meanwhile, other employees appear to have their university schedules, second jobs and personal commitments accommodated.

There’s also a personal concern involving one manager.

This manager has known my extended family. There have been disagreements involving family members in recent years, although I’ve always remained neutral and kept my personal life separate from work. There’s nothing between us whatsoever as we’ve barely known each other.

I wasn’t even aware this manager worked there when I applied, and another manager originally hired me.

I cannot prove that past family disagreements have influenced how I’m treated, but after four years of the same pattern, I have started wondering whether they could be affecting workplace decisions. We had multiple managers and team leaders leave with years of service without notice due to the current management and seems like only their friends and favourite colleagues survive here.

One Saturday, I was genuinely unwell and called in sick. Management asked in the staff group if anyone could cover my late shift, but nobody volunteered out of 20+ colleagues.

Yet those are the types of shifts I have repeatedly been expected to work.

The situation has caused me significant stress and affected my mental wellbeing and life outside work.

I’m now considering escalating the situation.

As far as I understand, we don’t have an accessible store-level HR contact. I’ve heard the explanation that the company treats everyone equally and therefore doesn’t need HR, although I don’t know whether there’s a central HR or Employee Relations team.

I’m considering approaching a visiting area manager or senior manager during a store audit to explain what has been happening.

If nothing changes, I’ve also considered contacting senior management or company directors through LinkedIn.

I’m also trying to find a genuine way to change my weekend availability.

I’ve considered getting a second job with fixed weekend hours or enrolling in a weekend course. However, many educational centres seem to operate mainly on weekdays.

I’ve even wondered whether management would only take my request seriously if I said I had another job or educational commitment, although I would prefer not to make up an excuse.

I’d appreciate advice on the following:

1. How can I stop being regularly scheduled on both Saturdays and Sundays, particularly late Saturday closing shifts?
2. Can I request a change to my weekend availability even though I originally agreed to work weekends four years ago?
3. What can I do if managers appear to give friends, relatives and favourite colleagues more contracted hours, fixed shifts and weekends off?
4. Would approaching an area manager during a store audit be sensible?
5. Is contacting directors or senior management through LinkedIn a good idea?
6. How can I find the appropriate HR or Employee Relations contact if store management doesn’t provide one?
7. Would getting a genuine second job or enrolling in a weekend course help me negotiate different working days?
8. Has anyone successfully moved away from regular weekend closing shifts without resigning?

I’m not asking for every weekend off, and I’m not complaining because other employees have better contracts.

I’m asking why, after four years of repeatedly covering difficult weekend shifts, my requests for a fairer working pattern and additional contracted hours are still not being meaningfully considered.

I’d really appreciate practical advice from anyone who has experienced something similar in UK retail.

Thanks for reading.

Just need to vent because I'm extremely frustrated.

My manager's position opened up because he left the company. My director actually encouraged me to apply because he said he thought I'd be a "perfect fit" for the role.

Went through interviews and got very positive feedback, but ended up getting rejected because "I don't have enough experience".

I am a higher level engineer that other departments come to for everything and I constantly carry my department and provide guidance to the less experienced individuals.

I don't want to leave because I get paid very well and there's a lot of freedom for me to operate how I want. But dayummm am I annoyed. I will definitely be pulling back on all the extra stuff I do.

And then, they asked me to interview the potential outside candidates that put in their resumes....

I hope the management team all poops themselves on their drives home from the office.

Amazon says its not spying, but their AI predicts union risk... isn't that contradictory?

Heyyy...

Idk if this is the right sub. Anyway, this happened to a friend of mine.

They left a company A for better pay at company B. They worked for roughly 6 months at company B until Company A called and asked them to come back for $18/hr and they worked out that they rate would be $23/hr at the understanding the job would allow movement. After 2.5 months, they were informed their pay would be reduced to the initial $18/hr offer without reason and job duties would not change. If anything, additional work was added.

Of note:

- they have had no formal write ups

- they train every new employee

- minus the short term leave, they've been with the company for a total of 5 years

- they do not call out

This really rubbed me wrong so I brought it to reddit bc it makes me so angry to hear about. I have no idea if any of this is legal or could be reported to the labor board at the very least but thats the story.

On October 19, Phillips 66 locked out 385 workers at its Bayway refinery and Linden terminal in New Jersey after they rejected the company’s latest contract offer. The workers, members of Teamsters Local 877, had voted down a tentative agreement 196 to 160 during a contract extension. When the extension expired at 4 p.m. that afternoon, they were barred from the plant.

Bayway, which processes 275,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is the largest refinery on the East Coast. The lockout follows the course set by BP at Whiting, Indiana, where more than 800 workers have been locked out since March 19, and by Marathon at Martinez, California, where about 120 workers have been kept out since April. In each case, the company has kept the plant running with managers and replacement labor while it seeks to impose job cuts and concessions on an isolated workforce.

The lockout is a corporate offensive aimed at imposing massive concessions. Perhaps the most significant is the proposal to increase the probationary period for new hires from 10 months to as long as six years by tying probation to a new qualification system.

This would keep a large section of the workforce in a state of permanent insecurity, able to be dismissed without recourse.

The company also seeks to shorten the 30-month training period and reduce qualification requirements—meaning less-skilled workers would operate dangerous equipment. According to the union, the company’s latest offer also included concessions on wages and healthcare. Phillips 66 insists on retaining an Absence Control Policy introduced in 2025 that allows discipline, including termination, for absences due to illness. It has also cut workers’ sick days.

The consequences are already evident. “People are coming to work sick, OK? And when you come to work sick, sometimes you have an accident, make a mistake,” refinery worker Ed Goldmann told CBS on October 20.

The company is imposing this on a workforce already on exhausting schedules. “Many of our folks will work extended shifts, 13 days on, 13 nights on before a single day off,” Local 877 President Jeff Sanford told News 12.

That is 26 consecutive shifts. The oil industry’s own fatigue guideline, American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practice 755, limits a stretch of consecutive shifts to 92 hours in normal operations and 182 hours during maintenance outages. Even at eight hours a shift, 26 shifts would exceed both. The US Chemical Safety Board, which criticized those limits as too permissive, found that fatigue contributed to the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which killed 15 workers. Some operators there had worked as many as 29 consecutive 12-hour days.

...

The union’s response to the lockout has been to confine the struggle to the channels it controls. On October 21, it filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging refusal to bargain and coercive conduct. It has maintained pickets and said negotiations will continue. But there is no announced plan to mobilize other Teamsters locals or refinery workers nationally in coordinated industrial action.

Workers at Whiting and Martinez have faced the same isolation at the hands of the United Steelworkers. In February, the USW signed a national pattern agreement for refinery workers granting 15 percent over four years, far below the 25 percent workers had voted for, and it has left each local to fight on its own.

The lockout must be ended immediately. The company’s demands for concessions must be rejected. The workers must defend safe staffing levels, full training and qualification protections, and their wages and benefits.

The past month has shown that the workers cannot rely on union officials that negotiated the very agreement they rejected.

The workers must take the fight into their own hands by forming independent rank-and-file committees, outside the control of the union apparatus, to organize the struggle. These committees must reach out to workers at the Linden terminal and the contractors throughout the wider Bayway complex, to the locked-out workers at Whiting and Martinez and to refinery workers in Paulsboro, Delaware City and across the East Coast. They should demand that the Teamsters pay full benefits from the union’s strike fund to every locked-out worker.

Above all, rank-and-file committees would break the isolation in which every one of these struggles is being fought. The workers at Bayway, Whiting and Martinez face the same demands, the same attacks by management and are confronting union officials who work to keep them divided. The fight at Bayway is a battle in a nationwide drive by the oil companies, and it can only be won by breaking out of the isolation imposed by the union apparatus and uniting refinery workers across companies and regions.

DISCLAIMER : Slavery (like war) is absolute hell, always has been and always will be.

Back then, when slavery was used in the USA, the owner needed to :

- Go to the market to purchase a slave

- feed the slave

- house the slave

- take care of the slave's health to keep his investment.

- Take care of the slave's family in order to earn money.

Today, with capitalism :

- the worker comes himself and willingly to work.

- the worker feeds himself

- the worker houses himself

- the worker takes care of his health himself

- the worker takes care of his family himself

- the owner has to pay a salary to the worker, but he can change the amount as he wishes, and he can overwork the worker for free (sometimes legally).

The catch is that the salary is less than what an owner had to pay/provide for a slave back then (it was true before 39-45, and it is true again for about a decade now).

That is exactly why slavery ended : it was convenient and with past slavery, the rich got in a favourable position and exploit the worker under capitalism.

Step one was "invest a few to exploit a few against their will" and step two is "use the earning to exploit everyone who is willing".

Corporations are well established now, they do not even need to retain their worker any more, and so they can exploit them to the very end, and use the money from this operation to lobby for more lawful freedom to do worse.

EDIT : some people seem to believe it is all about USA, and it is not. Some people seem to believe that is an accurate depiction of what happened in the world : it is not, just an overview of the main points, only the way workers are treated.

Ok, this is coming from someone who been to over 7+ life skill job program and only 1 been actual that, even then it barley passed. Sorry if the spelling is bad, I have level 1 autism and just wanted to share my life with you guys.

What I noticed is that many of these life skills programs don’t actual help disabled people a lot of times, in most cases I learned they just make you feel guilty for being disabled and you need to kiss the floor of the people that hire you. Heck in some cases, they just say “ volunteer as much as you can “, which I honestly hate now because it made me believe I was never worth anything. Even my mother ( which now I moved out ), had forced me to volunteer even when I was being harassed by my co worker at those programs. I am going over a few of my crazy experiences in different programs that come to mind.

Now here is where I draw the line and why I hold this belief very strong, I paid over 4000 dollars to go to “ life skill program “ for disabled people to help me get a job. The issue was, most of the companies they made us volunteer at were big companies that clearly could have paid us. I felt bad because I was the only one that got to work with a local business, only for me to find out it was closing it door in 3 months and it wouldn’t be my résumé. The only thing I did love about that local business is they lied to the program and gave me tips because they knew I deserve some kind of money.

Another program which was free was a life skill program that was more label has a job then life skill, even then I learned no life skill from this program. Pretty much the program was working on a farm, which the program was allowed to run on because the owner and the owner of the program were friends. Now the issue here wasn’t the owner of the life skill program, it was owner of the farm that treated level 1 autistic people has extreme labor force and screamed at us. Including not allowing woman to pet the horses, only allowing the men to do that. I was around 16 and got targeted a lot because i reported abuse by one of disabled men that the farmer liked. I was abled to leave that program, also from what I heard later on that program shut down due to many reports from different disabled people that the farmer was too cruel to disabled people.

Now I do want to share one thing, I do think there is some value in volunteering, but it should always be by the disabled person choice. Volunteering is how I got my foot in the door with getting a full time job with the help of an organization that help disabled people get paid jobs. Also when doing research on programs do never ask the parent or guardian of the disabled person, ask the disabled person has they were the one in the program.

I'm quitting the job at Wendy's for only working there tor about 2 weeks. Do I need to give 2 weeks notice or any notice at all and do I tell the manager that I'm quitting or who or do I just not go in any more?

Here’s my original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/s/qIuu9YNcvy

I’m mainly wanting I throw this Hail Mary as an almost fuck you. I was employed at $27/hr and they were drip feeding responsibilities as well as not providing the proper tools to get the job done ( forklift cert )

Here’s my response message to my bosses “ We were planning on giving you a pay bump with more responsibilities this week “ message after I told them I quit ( did have AI help iron out my thoughts ):

After giving this some thought, I’d be open to returning under revised terms at $33/hr, contingent on taking on full operational responsibility and authority over order fulfillment starting Day 1. I need total control over the systems that directly impact our ability to fulfill orders.

Moving forward, pre-fabricated nut plates must be outsourced and expedited through a qualified machinist, it’s a massive waste of labor to have me spending half the week manufacturing these components. We need to institute proper testing for any new systems and parts before we touch them. It makes zero sense to build out components when we don’t even know if they’ll actually hold up in a pull test.

Standardized staging needs to be established at the bench so everything required to build and ship these seats is at my fingertips, this means working closely with manufactures to ensure tolerances are the same across the product so time isn’t spent troubleshooting bottlenecks with stacked fender washers.

To execute the full scope of this role, I’ll also need my forklift certification completed on Day 1. From there, I’m ready to step up and handle operational fulfillment responsibilities immediately. This includes direct vendor communications and timeline updates, as well as client updates on order status eliminating the extra steps management has to currently take to update customers.

These are my terms to make this role viable and effective. If they work for you guys, I’ll keep an eye out for a refreshed offer letter detailing the rate and scope for review

Thanks for advice and input !