spacemt354
Chili's
Have you tried talking with your boss about this? From the little I gathered from this it seems like a small business with close employer/employee relations, so perhaps asking her why you're only working 4 hours a day on average and telling her you'd like to go back to working your usual 9-5 like before would solve a lot of those issues. Her response will determine your next moves. Because you're not receiving the same salary not because you're a bad person, but because you're working half the hours you used to.Going to be a super professional host and vent my work problems on here because I just can't stop thinking about it and could use some advice. So our store did shut down for a few months when the pandemic first started but we were back open by June. From June to December I was making roughly 8-900$ a paycheck. Very standard, pretty much fixed in place "9-5, five days a week" sort of schedule. Things got complicated at the start of the year. I was going on a 30th birthday trip and would be gone for a week, and had let everyone know MONTHS in advance. My only other coworker at the time decided that she was going to take a new job right before I left for said trip which really screwed over the schedule and caused us to have to hire a new person.
Well, I don't know what changed or who peed in my boss's cereal, but basically AS SOON as I got back from that trip everything changed. The attitude for sure, but especially the hours. I'm now making roughly 3-400$ a paycheck, but I also feel like my boss is ON ME for every little thing. I used to stay after the alley closed to organize stuff like the art room and the kids books, but she got on me about that because she couldn't afford to keep me on after alley closing. Well lo and behold the art room got filthy because I DIDN'T FREAKING HAVE ANY TIME TO ORGANIZE IT and somehow that's my fault. That's like...one of many examples of hypocritical "why didn't you do THIS??" BS that's resulted in the whole I'm forbidden to stay after the alley is closed thing.
Breaking point to me was tonight though. That's why I was so Emo Jones on the podcast. Imma put it simple for you folks. California law is that employers CANNOT demand an unpaid lunch unless employees are working five hours or more. Now due to the unpredictable nature of when the alley closes I never know exactly how long I'll work but on average I'm there about four hours a day. When I'm there for five I will always try to clock out. To me, there's a big difference between your employer reminding you to clock out if you are staying over the five hours and my employer texting me a THREAT to dock pay if I didn't sign out for an unpaid half hour lunch EVERY shift, no matter how long I work. So there's days I come and go in three hours and now she wants to take away even more of that pay.
I don't know, I feel like a pretty genuinely BAD person after that. Like, she might as well scream in my face "YOU DON'T DESERVE TO BE PAID FAIRLY". Anyone got any advice? It's completely eating away at me tonight. Like, I feel like a dementor is in the room.
Maybe she'll be understanding and come to a better arrangement for her employees, but she won't know if you don't ask. If her response to your inquiry goes in the direction of "I can't afford to pay you more than 4 hours" which from the brief excerpt here seems to be the case, then perhaps you could start looking for a new job that pays 9-5. In this climate I realize that finding a job probably doesn't grow on trees, but since you're only working half a day, your job search would not interfere with your alley work because you can use your free time afterwards to search rather than constantly dwell on the unknown before/after your shifts.
)
