The Provisional End

As my last shift of wage labour at the supermarket began to draw itself to a close on Monday night, I found myself experiencing mixed feelings, much to my surprise. Throughout my time working there I had shown a tendency to focus intensively on all of the negative aspects of my state of employment -- receiving near minimum wage; having good uni days ruined by being required to spend several hours at wage labour in the latter parts; and the manipulative behaviour of the departmental manager. I had not gone to much depth at all to consider that every day I spent at work, during my term of employment of just over one year and seven months, was solidifying sentimental feelings towards the place.

Ultimately, the produce manager has become the primary reason for my departure and also the other sixteen confirmed resignations that have occurred during the build-up to the Christmas week. This is largely due to the fact that he has consistently refused to allow anyone to make use of their three weeks' holiday pay, to which employees of a minimum of twelve months are legally entitled. In one case the manager even went so far as to lie to Joseph, a friend and former co-worker of mine, telling him that he had not accrued any holiday pay when in fact he had. The upper echelons of management have been informed and, hopefully, appropriate action should be taken against this perpetrator before long.

But the manager's actions around this time of year are only the tip of a truly gargantuan iceberg. He has been cunning and manipulative of the workers ever since I was first employed there in May last year. It was not uncommon that the manager would change our rosters at his convenience, without consulting us first. This inevitably resulted in many of my shifts clashing with university classes. Whenever I requested that he sort these problems out, the manager would say that he would do it if I took it upon myself to find replacements for me during the conflicting shifts whilst he found a remedy, despite the fact that it was not at all my fault.

The "end" result would usually be that he'd forget about me in his flurry of other work, and not make any effort to clean up his own mess in which I was caught up. I eventually stopped calling other workers to fill in for me on the shifts in question, and my would-be supervisors crossed off the shifts on my roster in recognition of the fact that neither I, nor a replacement, ever attended. The manager himself also came to acknowledge that I didn't work those shifts, because I couldn't. However, every single time he printed out new rosters throughout the year, he failed to edit the document in order to make it indicate that I was not rostered for the problem shifts. Me and my friends and former co-workers took it upon ourselves to amend any new roster when it was put up on the wall.

One of the most disgraceful practices of produce management was their tactical selection of workers on public holidays. To put it as simply as I can, the legal fact is that any worker who is rostered to work on a given public holiday will receive time and a half, as well as be owed a day in lieu (essentially a holiday), if they turn up to wage labour. However, if a worker not rostered to work on that day is drafted over, they will only receive time and a half -- no day in lieu. This means that shifting other labour in, and forcing the normally-rostered workers out of the shift, is beneficial to the company as they aren't required to give the alternate workers as much money.

In recognition of this loophole, management made a habit of making it a policy that workers for public holidays would be selected on a "first come, first served" basis. This ensured that a significant number of the workers on, say, a Queen's Birthday Monday, would not be ones usually rostered to work Monday -- and as such, the company would not end up in a position where it owed them days in lieu. It also ensured that most of the workers -- the more expensive workers -- who would usually be rostered to work on a Monday, would miss out. As a Monday evening worker, I was significantly affected by all of this.

It turned out that for Labour Day -- of all days -- this year, the manager actually called around all of the workers that were not usually rostered to work Mondays and drafted them over to the Labour Day shift. He had actively swindled all of the workers involved, including the ones that had been unwittingly forced off the shift. I wasn't about to let the manager get away with this, so prior to the public holiday I explained the situation to Joseph who had, like me, been forced out of working Labour Day. Eventually the explaination spread around most of the department, and most people were now venomously aware of their rights and that they were being unethically ripped off.

When Labour Day did come, much to my delight, everybody turned up -- not just the people who the manager had asked to work, but all of the more expensive workers that he had temporarily kicked off the shift as well. The result was that the department was around two hundred per cent overstaffed, with us for the most part just standing around with our hands in pockets, leeching money off of the company that had sought to fool us. Management had attempted to be as cost effective as possible, but the workers' actions and consciousness of the fact that we were being exploited meant it had backfired on them and a disproportionate amount of company money had been spent on that particular shift. That success is one very fond memory that I will hold with me for a long time to come.

So in the end the fact is that the job that I complained about so much wasn't all doom and gloom after all. Certainly, the work itself wasn't exactly hard. I've also met some great people during my time there, such as mulleted Michael (also known as Whitey), and Joseph who I organised the protest action with. Anand deserves honourable mention for having been a loyal acquaintance since the very beginning and also for helping me by identifying a method by which I could pick up another two weeks' pay for free at the end. Aside from offering to provide me with certain raw materials for free, Chris has been an invaluable friend to me as of late, being the only remaining worker who can come close to equalling my raucousness. I expect to keep in contact with all of those individuals

I can't truly do the numerous positivities of my experience of being employed at the supermarket much justice by simply writing about them here, at least without developing textual diarrhoea. It really is interesting to me that I feel that I have so much to say, though. I had never thought that I would actually get the sense that I'm going to miss my job. Nonetheless, I'm better off, now that I'm free of the governance of the produce manager, and to be quite frank, it almost was time to move on. But there is a conscious reason that I have hung in there at the supermarket for all of this time -- I am wary of the mission of settling into a new workplace. It's going to be a tricky transition. This will probably be my last entry for a few days as I'm off camping tomorrow -- I hope all have a good week.