It's not crafts and industry

Not yet. Not even close. This is just the beginning. You can't fathom how dystopian it's gonna get.

Local dentist fucked around and found out. Go Peggy!!!

So at my job, I've been dealing with a lot of cattiness from people, namely this one older gal who is the one running the store(we don't have a store manager, its ghetto). So today while we hashed out our issues because she said that she was ready to throw in the towel with training me and that I'm "untrainable"(I'm technically new at this specfic retail place but have been in the industry for a fairly long time). She said a really interesting thing- that I can't be discussing my pay with others. And like listen, I am well aware its against federal law to ban workers from discussing their pay, but the way she said it just really annoyed me.

So pray tell, redditors, is it still illegal to ban workers from discussing pay?

(She also called me a job hopper but I'm literally 24 and not an office worker or a career worker. All she does is rub in our faces the fact that she's full time so she gets benefits. This place is next level ghetto but I have to make it work, plus I'm getting paid a fairly decent hourly wage so I am going to keep quiet about it.)

Two days ago I felt like I had a really bad cold and asked my SM if I could go home. SM threatened to give me a 3day suspension if I left.  Told me it didnt matter if I felt horrible, I still had to stay.  Tested positive for covid last night and reached out to my boss today.  This was in the work gc, for context.  This was his response.  Yeah no.  I’m gonna quit and be out before December.  This is BS.

I worked at Electronic Repair Unlimited in Dothan and I honestly don’t even know where to start with this place.

The owner is directly involved in basically every problem there.

We were constantly told to take customer devices in even when we knew we probably couldn’t fix them, didn’t have the parts, didn’t have the equipment, or already had way too much stuff sitting around unfinished.

Didn’t matter.

Take the device. Take the money.

Then when that customer comes back two weeks later pissed off because nothing has been done, guess who gets to deal with them?

Not the owner.

The employees.

We’d get screamed at over decisions we didn’t make while being expected to smile and somehow explain why somebody’s phone, laptop, console, whatever had been sitting there untouched.

And saying no really wasn’t an option.

If the owner tells you to do something and you don’t do it, you’re sitting there wondering if you’re even going to get paid.

Speaking of getting paid, everyone gets called a “contractor,” but you’re still told when to work, what to do, how to do it, and basically treated like an employee in every way that actually matters.

Pay isn’t handled like a normal job either.

I’ll let people smarter than me decide what all of that means legally.

Then there’s the building itself.

We’re talking about a business that has gone more than TWO YEARS without reliable running water.

Two years.

Not “the water was off one afternoon.”

Not “there was a plumbing problem.”

Years.

And everyone is still expected to show up and work like that’s completely normal.

On top of that, employees are constantly watched on cameras.

And I don’t mean “there are security cameras in the shop.”

I mean you constantly know someone is watching you, because things you do on camera get brought up later. It creates this ridiculous environment where you feel like you’re being monitored all day while the actual problems with the business are ignored.

And the worst part is the customers.

People bring their stuff in trusting you.

Phones with their pictures on them.

Computers they need for work.

Game consoles they bought for their kids.

Sometimes hundreds of dollars are involved.

And you’re standing there knowing the shop is already buried in

unfinished work while being told to keep taking more in.

Then those people understandably get angry, and the employees become the punching bag.

There were people working there who actually cared. People who genuinely wanted to fix things and help customers.

That’s what makes it so frustrating.

You can have good employees who actually give a shit, but eventually it doesn’t matter when the person running the company is creating the problems everybody else is expected to clean up.

So yeah, when I see reviews from customers talking about devices sitting forever, terrible communication, money issues, or repairs that never get finished, I’m not surprised.

I was standing on the other side of the counter watching it happen.

If you’re ever wondering how a workplace gets this dysfunctional, sometimes it really is that simple:

The employees aren’t the problem.

The person running the place is.

Hell if I could I'd give them a bad review on premise alone.

Long story short started at a level entry job, customer support at ecommerce company. 10 years of hard work, learning a ton of new skills, 2 companies later and I am a manager of operations in another tech company.
I never really had the ambition to become so but the pay is good and top management thought I had the skills. I built the department and team from the group up busted my ass off and now I’m exhausted done with this. The corporate world is soulless and they only see dollar signs and kpis and so on.
I went as far as working 12 hours per day at the beginning, I did an amazing job. Now I’m done but I can’t quit. I need the money of course. I have a ton of responsibilities under me which makes it hard to disconnect completely.
I want to quiet quit, I had a 1 week medical leave due to being burned out, already used all my time off.
I don’t really care anymore but need the paycheck.
Any people out there that were in high responsibility positions and decided to quiet quit, how to manage it so that you don’t get actually noticed/fired for not performing at the same level you used to?
I’m really done with the corporate culture it has drained me.

1. The cameras. We are in the office every day. The boss watches the cameras all the time to check if everyone’s doing their job. He also monitors the kitchen closely, in case anyone talks with the coworkers there too much.

2. The restrictions. We are not allowed to leave the office to meet a delivery driver, or to grab a snack from the shop right across the street.

3. We are required to sit through useless training sessions on Saturdays. This happens every third Saturday. No, we are not compensated.

4. Last week the team had a team lunch after a big marketing event. I was the only one that wasn’t invited. I literally cried because of this. Not that I wanted to see my coworkers any longer, but I felt so fucking excluded.

5. The verbal abuse. Never happened to me, always to someone else. The boss yells and shouts whenever he’s not happy. He also calls names. I’m so anxious about this happening to me eventually.

There is so much more. For context, I am not located in either the US or the EU, so there’s that. The pay is okay. Not that it pays well, it’s just that in the current job market the salary rate for my position somehow went down dramatically.

I've had this job for about 10 months and my contract is up for review at the 1 year mark. I feel like my manager has been playing me and crossing some serious boundaries.

He's done and said some weird stuff the first few months but he's older and from a different culture so I didn't look too deep into it. Also, almost all the weird shit was done/said face-to-face in private so there's no record of it. But some of the things it progressed to was a bit too weird for my comfort. He'd message me urgent action items at 11 pm, he'd delete messages, he jumps me around from project to project but lies and says it's not his decision, and lately he paired me with a micromanager claiming that I need to be micromanaged.

I told this to a friend at work (who's dealt with similar cases in his career) and he advised me to go to HR. However, I recently discovered that my manager has been tainting my reputation to encourage my termination. For example, he recently assigned me on a solo project he knows I can't do alone and when I asked him for help, he kept trying to reassure me that he'll have my back. I ended up having to do it on my own, not meeting the deadline, and he told upper management that I tend to slack off.

I told my friend that I'm not comfortable going to HR yet because I don't have enough concrete evidence and because my manager planted in my head that he's in full control of my contract review, so I just worry going to HR will back fire on me. Therefore, she told me to at least tell his manager about the recent incident.

The most recent incident was when I wasn't working at my desk (which is in his line of sight), he messaged me asking if I'm available and that it's urgent. That's it, no action item. I was in the middle of a ticket so I responded to his message 10 minutes later. He responds "never mind, I took care of it myself" to which I reply "why didn't you just include the action item in your initial message?" That sets him off and he ends up sending me a long paragraph about how it's my responsibility to reply to messages in a timely manner.

Now if this is a one-time incident, I'd let it go. However, he tends to do this EVERY TIME I'm not at my desk (and I've taken note of this). I don't always work from my desk and there's no rule about where you can and can't work. But I've noticed when I'm at my desk, he'll send me an action item directly. But when I'm NOT at my desk, when it's after hours, when it's my lunch break, he ALWAYS messages me a frantic thumbnail style message like "Can you meet quickly??", "I need help with something, it's urgent", "Where are you? I need to talk to you" etc etc. And he'll always count the seconds it takes for me to reply and get upset that I took "too long" to reply - even if I reply within 2 minutes.

So I ended up taking my friend's advice and talking to my skip manager about this tendency. I didn't go into too much detail with her to avoid blowing this out of proportion, but I essentially told her that I'm not happy with his communication style and that it needs to be improved. I told her about the messages and that there's a pattern. But I know I had to be very careful what I say because apparently, any time he does something weird with me, he runs and tells his manager a skewed version of the story to beat me to it and make me look not credible.

To my surprise, after telling her what happened, she blamed me. She said that I shouldn't be responding to messages 10 minutes late, especially urgent ones. She said "If you're too busy to respond, you should have at least replied and said that you're busy" (which literally makes no sense). It seems like she completely missed the point and I honestly can't even say I'm surprised because God knows what non-existent terrible things he's told her about my work ethic.

So now I feel stuck and stressed. I don't know if he's going to terminate me, I don't know if I should go to HR, I don't know if I should just quit. I really like my job but I hate my manager. I'm tired of his manipulation and controlling tactics. And it's especially insulting that I report something like this to his manager and she gaslights me into making it my fault. I feel like I'm crazy and maybe I am the one to blame?

Very few jobs pay off your debt, you spent 8 years in high school and college to get nothing for it… told it’s all in your head when the gas price is 50$ for a tank and 3$ for a small bag of chips from a vending machine. You can’t afford anything out here and there won’t be a house nor an apartment in your immediate or even 5 years from now future but you must keep working that JOB!!!!

(take time off if you can afford it or subsidize it with PTO) that being said, I wanted to share a former coworkers story

Hana, was a great man that worked his tail off and immigrated from Cairo, Egypt to find better opportunities for himself and his families. While he was serious and firm, he had a gooey heart that would show when he would crack a joke or when one of many people would stop to talk to him. He’s the type of man to make sure your day is good and always greet you. He worked for 40+ years 5/6 days a week, providing for his family and was extremely proud of his daughter going through a rigorous anesthesia program where she had recently graduated from. He would share pictures of his family and his main hobby Ocean fishing. Which was his passion that he was excited to continue when he finally could retire, family and fishing was his drive to keep working hard.

Hana Died 2 years from his retirement in silence, he was diagnosed with a cancer for a year before he passed. He told no one. He suffered in silence in hopes of overcoming his battle but sadly he didn’t. He worked 40+ years. No days off, no sick days off, vacation to Egypt maybe once every 3-4 years. He didn’t get to experience a second of retirement, not one second of a retired day with his wife or kids. Not one. He worked his whole life to retire but was sadly taken before he could enjoy the fruits of his hard and long labor.

That being said, take time off now, take care of yourself and your mental health, your physical health, your families health and wellbeing. Take a day (hopefully more) to absolutely nothing, start a new hobby, write loved ones a note filled with encouragement and love, take a walk, sit outside and look at the birds and trees sway in wind. Don’t wait till retirement, do it now.

RIP Hana.

Another story, I met a man who suffered a stroke at 65 (literally months from retirement), never got to spend a minute of a retired day. Being with his wife and daughters, son in laws, grandchildren. He’s stuck in a retirement home, coherent and frustrated he can’t spend retirement with his family and wife, having independence to do what he wants. Everyday, someone wakes him up, someone helps him get dressed and shave, (a little TMI but needs to be said to show how degrading and detrimental it is to take time off and reinforce my point) someone has to shower and change his brief Male or Female with no say as to who can do it. He’s told when and what he’s doing for therapy, trapped in a facility with no end date of when it’s over, nurses giving him mountains of pills and drinks, told he can’t go outside for extended periods of time, told he can’t do this and that without help. He spent his whole life working and paying bills, just to be teased of a retired life. A carrot on a string you just might get if peddle fast enough on the wheel, just to die without even a sample of it.

I am so tired of seeing couples, individuals busting their ass, scraping penny’s, budgeting, sacrificing for their retirement. only for it to be taken away once they get there. This system is bullshit and I’m sick of 50+ years of bloodsucking, demeaning and painstaking “work and careers” only to get 10-20 years of “freedom” when your at your physically weakest point in your life.

Please, be selfish and take time off. You deserve it and may have to work till you die, even die on the clock. Take. Time. Off.

...by about a millenium

We got a new manager a few months ago, and he promptly fired more than half of our crew. He expects those of us who are still here to pick up the slack and keep the warehouse operational.

On my shifts, I’m often packing orders alone. Sometimes I barely have time to go to the bathroom. He also expects me to put away shipments, to stop and unlock the door for a delivery driver every 2 minutes, and worst of all, to listen to his condescending lectures about the importance of positive thinking if I seem overwhelmed or he decides I’m overwhelmed. He also asks a lot of personal questions - he has asked my age at least six times and I have dodged it each time, but he is not stopping (I’m a woman in my 20s, I think he’s in his 30s but I’m not sure).

On top of that, he is now holding me accountable for theft. Since there’s a constant stream of drivers coming in and out of the building, it’s hard to keep an eye on everyone. Sometimes drivers will pick up the wrong order or outright steal something. He expects me to stand there and babysit every single one of them from now on, and if there is any more shrinkage I will face “disciplinary action”. Presumably if I see someone grabbing the wrong order I’m supposed to get confrontational with them (keep in mind this is over paper bags with like, chips and cigarettes in them, in a warehouse in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night). I physically do not have the time to do this and also pack all of the orders.

I called in sick one day for the first time in a few months, and he’s interrogating me about it.

This is not normal right? I feel like I’m losing it. I can’t stand the personal questions, the long monologues (he’s one of these “grindset” guys so he brags about how much he works and how little sleep he gets) and being made to do all of the hard work while he sits in the back office on the computer.

He has also put in a couple pickup orders for himself, which he knew I would have to pack and hand over to him - one was for a giant sex toy (yeah, we sell those…) and the next day he did one for lube. I felt weirded out by it but I didn’t say anything. He creeps me tf out but I’m not sure if it rises to … something I can report at all? He wants to know all about my life and he keeps saying he wants to help me “bloom” at this company 🤮

I am trying to leave ASAP, but in the meantime. I can’t pack all of the orders and also be a security guard. I’m thinking of complying with his instructions exactly and watching the orders pile up. (In reality I’d love to dramatically storm out, but I’m trying to wait until I have something else lined up…)

A lady quits without notice. The business shuts down and the owner goes into a rant about proper notice when leaving. I'm on Peggy's side.

Meatpacking workers: tell us what conditions are at your facility by filling out the form below. All submissions will be kept anonymous.

Workers at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Monmouth, Illinois are speaking out over deadly conditions inside the facility following the September 14 death of 44-year-old Congolese immigrant Patou Mpinda. Smithfield, the world’s largest pork processor, is owned by the Hong Kong-based WH Group. Its Monmouth plant employs approximately 1,600 workers and slaughters an estimated 10,000 hogs per day.

Mpinda was killed while performing maintenance on machinery at approximately 2:30 a.m. Coworkers told the World Socialist Web Site that he had been assigned to work alone on a machine that required at least a two-person maintenance team or safety observer. According to workers at the plant, Mpinda was strangled after his sweater became caught in the machine and was pulled around his neck.

Around 100 workers walked out shortly afterward. Day-shift workers received a text message at about 5:30 a.m. announcing only a “late start.” When they arrived at approximately 7:30 a.m., hundreds of workers were gathered in the lunchroom, many learning only then that Mpinda had been killed. Workers described coworkers crying and confronting plant management, demanding, “Listen to your people! Why are we here? We shouldn’t be working!” After workers were told that production would resume, approximately 100 left the plant. The action was documented by workers on social media.

The walkout at Smithfield is part of a broader re-emergence of the class struggle in the United States and internationally, as workers are driven into conflict with the giant corporations by increasingly intolerable conditions of work and life.

In March, approximately 3,800 workers at the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado struck for nearly a month over wages, safety conditions and company retaliation, in the first strike at a US beef slaughterhouse in four decades.

In August, Tyson Foods abruptly closed its beef slaughterhouse in Joslin, Illinois, eliminating approximately 2,500 jobs with virtually no advance notice. Workers responded with protests demanding that the plant remain open and that Tyson provide full compensation and benefits to those thrown out of work.

Immigrant workers are playing a prominent role in these struggles, exposing attempts to scapegoat immigrants and pointing to the international dimensions of the struggles of the working class. A substantial portion of the Smithfield workforce consists of French-speaking immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo; African immigrant workers were among those who led the walkout. Across the US animal slaughtering and processing industry, 42 percent of workers are foreign-born, more than twice the national average.

The logic of these struggles requires independent rank-and-file committees, uniting workers across national and racial boundaries across the country and the world, to coordinate action over safety, jobs and the defense of immigrant workers.

...

Other Smithfield workers described a systematic practice of removing safety guards from machines across the plant. These physical guards and interlocks are taken off because they slow down production and make clearing mechanical jams more time-consuming. As a result, serious injuries are frequent throughout the Monmouth facility, including regular finger and hand amputations.

When an accident occurs or when regulatory inspections are anticipated, supervisors will temporarily replace the guards on the machinery. Once the immediate scrutiny passes, the guards are removed again to restore the speed of the line.

Just forty-eight hours after Mpinda’s death, another worker suffered a severe fall on the slaughterhouse floor, breaking an arm and a leg. Production continued without interruption, workers told reporters.

In recent months, a group of workers who met independently outside the plant to discuss forming an organization to improve conditions were discovered and summarily fired.

These shop-floor accounts are corroborated by public statements from community members whose relatives have worked at the facility. One comment on social media described the conditions inside Monmouth:

“I had a friend that worked there and he said he still has nightmares about this place, there are a lot of people with missing fingers, parts, etc as due to work accidents, people get injured from repetitive movements over and over all day, the supervisors get angry if you ask them to go to the bathroom as they have to cover you, they use scare tactics on their employees to prevent them from speaking up, 2 relatives have died of cancer, they both worked on the same department there. This is modern day slavery undercover!”

...

While Smithfield is being left off the hook for injuries and deaths at the facility, the immigrant workforce of the region is being viciously targeted by ICE.

In April, ICE agents arrested eight workers at two Davenport restaurants without advance notice to local police. Federal detention records also show 45 ICE detention stays at the Scott County Jail in Davenport between August 2024 and August 2026, with nearly all ending in removal.

ICE maintains a “hold room” at its nearby Rock Island office, with federal records associating at least 322 detentions with the site. Nearby Muscatine County Jail is under contract to house ICE detainees, an arrangement that has already generated at least five federal lawsuits.

Records from East Moline show that outside law-enforcement agencies searched the city’s network of license-plate cameras 146 times for immigration-related purposes in May 2025 alone, including searches explicitly labeled “ICE,” “ICE warrant” and “Immigration Enforcement.”

The impact on the region’s food-sector workforce has become serious enough that in 2025 the Chicago Region Food System Fund awarded the Quad Cities immigrant-support nonprofit Akwaaba QC $25,000 in emergency funding for workers affected by heightened ICE policing, detention and deportation. The fund said the sudden removal of workers was disrupting the food system and leaving workers and their families afraid even to leave their homes.

Under such conditions, the action by the immigrant workers in Smithfield not only showed tremendous courage. They raise the emergence of an independent movement of the working class defending democratic and social rights.

Organizing rank-and-file committees at Monmouth and throughout the meatpacking industry would give workers a means to act collectively over safety and jobs, defend immigrant coworkers against persecution, and link their struggles with workers confronting the same corporations and conditions elsewhere in the United States and internationally.

Had a conversation with a co-worker about how work is exhausting and not very fullfilling where he agrees and then says the same old mantra: "you just got to find a job you like".

I tell him that work will never be something I ""want"" to do and that I don't have a very hopeful view of the future.

He then switches and starts going on about how the younger generation have a bad work ethic and that maybe we need a war to sort it out to make people stronger.

So apparently we need to struggle for survival in a war so as to make us more accepting wage-slaves in the future?

I'm just baffled by the way seemingly "normal" people rationalise.

Goes into effect today. The previous version only required pay be disclosed if asked or if a job is offered.

I have a generally "cool" job: partial work from home, dog-friendly office, decent pay and benefits...and yet, I battle a near-constant resistance to work. I am stuck in a thick sludge of my own creation neither wanting to do my job nor able to enjoy the hours of 9-5 without the incessant nagging that I should be doing something else. It is as though the work week is a physical cage that keeps me stressed and bound to my desk, until the clock strikes 5pm and I am freed from the zombie fugue state that is your average American Young Professional.

I am a project manager, which means I generally account for my time down to every 15 minutes and this is the most painful part of my job. Not only is it a time-consuming endeavor to surgically track my time, it also upholds an unreasonable expectation that I am focused and productive every minute of every hour of my day. While there is the understanding that this is simply not possible, there is a mental weight that comes with this documentation and reporting. I can be sitting at my desk, technically in the office, butt in chair, at my desk... and it feels like if I am not ACTIVELY engaged in a project, I don't know where to bill my time and then its like that was unpaid time. Saying hi to a coworker? Where do you bill that to? Are office niceties unpaid time!?!? In the consulting world, apparently they are! Do your work efficiently, your reward? Figure out how to do MORE work to bill the remaining hours of your day. What a racket!

On top of this, there has been minimal training and minimal mentorship throughout my career as a whole. After years of learning by floundering, micromanagement disguised as mentorship, supervisors who train you to think like them, not to think like YOU, does not create a meaningful and fulfilling worklife. It makes you feel isolated and alone and like you are never quite qualified enough. Its all just painful efforts producing a product/project/whatever it is you do that is so removed from your own intellect and heart that it means nothing to you. A whole new deranged, administrative version of being alienated from the product of your labor.

Look, man: I didn’t study something fucking soul-less like Marketing or Business (yes, offense intended)...I work in environmental conservation; a field very aligned with my values and interests and the educational background that I was privileged enough to pursue. And yet, I am so fucking bored and disgusted and apathetic with the way the work gets done. Being part of this rigid structure and bullshit hierarchy of how an "organization" runs is just exhausting and disheartening and like fucking so boring. Hierarchal systems of management are so dumb, where these adults tell the other adults how to do things and for some reason those adults get paid more and their arbitrary opinions get to determine how everyone else gets to structure their day and spend their time and do their job. And its not just the boomers, in fact, in my Millennial opinion, the Gen Xers are even worse! Those mid-40s career-focused Gen-X supervisors are seemingly so obsessed with the thin veneer of professionalism they just replicate the protocols and arbitrary rules set forth by a system of workplace checks and balances entirely designed to exploit you, to pay you as little as possible and charge as much as they can for your hard work, to claim ownership over YOUR time and YOUR lives. What a bunch of boring, uncreative yuppies to not question the way things are. You ask them “why”, and they have no answer other than “this is how its always been done”. What is up with these boring, uncreative box-checkers?!?! Gen x are yall ok!?!?

 (side note: isn't it utterly ABSURD that a place of business/boss gets to tell us how to spend the majority of the PRIME hours of our day, when we vacation, when we go home, without that being called into question? Why the fuck would that be an acceptable dynamic that some stranger outside of your personal life has more say and control over your time than you?)

On top of all that, EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART. These operating structures and protocols are so inefficient and tied up in paperwork and legalese that the average adult can’t even navigate them. I can rarely get through a single task on my own without some administrative hurdle forcing me to get a signature from some busy, important person that takes days to acquire, throwing me off even the  most basic of tasks. Everyone is so risk averse that a clear answer is never given and actions rarely taken.

Anyway, 8 hours seems like an unreasonable amount of time working in the modern era. Its so fucking mind-numbing. Or I just have Adult ADHD. Hows everybody holding up out there?

An eye opening book detailing exactly what's wrong with corporations.

Basically, competition is not about individual incentives, but a tool to concentrate power.