Quitting the day job
Yes, finally. But not quitting having a day job, just this one. :)
After thinking about it for a while now and being aware for some time that I wasn't really happy at work, an incident on Thursday made me realise that I just didn't want to be there at all. So I handed in my notice on Friday ... and then again on Saturday, because I'd discovered I could give shorter notice than I'd thought. Also something happened on Friday which made me even more unhappy.
The job and the firm are not the same as they were when I started there. The long hours, which were aleviated by little things, like radios and lots of short breaks and plenty of hard work, now seem even longer. The radios went some time ago, and the cut and crease machines changed so that many of the jobs now don't require stripping (which was the best part of the work) and we now have only 1 break in the morning and afternoon instead of 2, so the gaps between breaks and for which you can be standing at a machine making the same movement every few seconds, are now around 3 hours instead of 2. And lunch break has been cut from 30 mins to 20, and now they expect us to be on the shop floor at 10 to 7 in the morning but still to clock out at 7 in the evening, so we're working an extra 10 minutes and not being paid for it.
On top of the whole dodgy thing about having to work extra days after bank holidays so that we split the time off with the other shift (who were off-shift over said bank holidays) and not getting paid for those extra hours worked. And overtime only at plain time rates or, in the case of the operators, sometimes at lower than their normal rate, and the recent dodge of making us work on a bank holiday at normal pay rates to juggle the days the factory is shut, around. (We worked Good Friday (no choice offered) and had Sat, Sun, Mon off (Sunday's not a working day for us anyway) but had to work the following Thursday so the other shift worked the same total hours for the month. All for a standard month's pay.
And this year no Christmas bonus (I'm not used to bonuses, but it seems 30 quids' M&S vouchers was standard in previous years) and the warning that there will be no pay rise because we weren't able to improve our performance last year, whereas the other site improved theirs mostly by implementing the procedures we already had in place. So we get no reward for doing a good job while they get one for going from bad to better. Of course the other site has a heavy and historical union presnece whereas our site was originally a family firm where the management looked after its workers and no one needed to be in a union.
And the company is losing money which apparently has a lot to do with the sales people's job estimates but anyway if we could just improve our running speeds slightly it would be okay. But no, they won't be specifying the running speeds required for break-even because then we might not try to run faster than that. How to destroy trust between management and work force. Another way is not to ask the work force what opportunities for savings they can see in the way their work is organised and carried out. No suggestions boxes in the factory.
On top of this, I'm uncomfortable working with a couple of my colleagues who don't seem to believe that their machine crew are worthy of their consideration with regard to break times, and whose inability to take into consideration the fact that when too many machines stop at the same time, there aren't enough seats at the canteen tables, is wearing, even when you're not on their machines.
So, I shall be taking the rest of April (19th is my last day) and May off and signing up with my old agency when I get back from WisCon. I'm hoping that I can get back into night work, but truthfully, any of the jobs I used to do for the agency were more enjoyable than this. Money might be tighter, and I won't get the time off that I do now, but I should be able to write even on days when I'm working and I won't be so shattered even at the end of the day, let alone the end of the shift.
Between now and WisCon, I shall be working on my other project (about which I shall eventually explain) and writing the stories for WisCon and the Heinlein competition and maybe digging out my old children's stories for sending out, since it's 20 years since I last tried. (They were rejected in one case for being anthropomorphic, the publisher explaining that we don't (back in the 80s) do those kind of stories. Of course the Duchess of York's Budgie the Helicopter may have helped to change that perspective!) And also working on my web page.
So I have a lot to keep me busy and to get my Attack Year off to a good start.
After thinking about it for a while now and being aware for some time that I wasn't really happy at work, an incident on Thursday made me realise that I just didn't want to be there at all. So I handed in my notice on Friday ... and then again on Saturday, because I'd discovered I could give shorter notice than I'd thought. Also something happened on Friday which made me even more unhappy.
The job and the firm are not the same as they were when I started there. The long hours, which were aleviated by little things, like radios and lots of short breaks and plenty of hard work, now seem even longer. The radios went some time ago, and the cut and crease machines changed so that many of the jobs now don't require stripping (which was the best part of the work) and we now have only 1 break in the morning and afternoon instead of 2, so the gaps between breaks and for which you can be standing at a machine making the same movement every few seconds, are now around 3 hours instead of 2. And lunch break has been cut from 30 mins to 20, and now they expect us to be on the shop floor at 10 to 7 in the morning but still to clock out at 7 in the evening, so we're working an extra 10 minutes and not being paid for it.
On top of the whole dodgy thing about having to work extra days after bank holidays so that we split the time off with the other shift (who were off-shift over said bank holidays) and not getting paid for those extra hours worked. And overtime only at plain time rates or, in the case of the operators, sometimes at lower than their normal rate, and the recent dodge of making us work on a bank holiday at normal pay rates to juggle the days the factory is shut, around. (We worked Good Friday (no choice offered) and had Sat, Sun, Mon off (Sunday's not a working day for us anyway) but had to work the following Thursday so the other shift worked the same total hours for the month. All for a standard month's pay.
And this year no Christmas bonus (I'm not used to bonuses, but it seems 30 quids' M&S vouchers was standard in previous years) and the warning that there will be no pay rise because we weren't able to improve our performance last year, whereas the other site improved theirs mostly by implementing the procedures we already had in place. So we get no reward for doing a good job while they get one for going from bad to better. Of course the other site has a heavy and historical union presnece whereas our site was originally a family firm where the management looked after its workers and no one needed to be in a union.
And the company is losing money which apparently has a lot to do with the sales people's job estimates but anyway if we could just improve our running speeds slightly it would be okay. But no, they won't be specifying the running speeds required for break-even because then we might not try to run faster than that. How to destroy trust between management and work force. Another way is not to ask the work force what opportunities for savings they can see in the way their work is organised and carried out. No suggestions boxes in the factory.
On top of this, I'm uncomfortable working with a couple of my colleagues who don't seem to believe that their machine crew are worthy of their consideration with regard to break times, and whose inability to take into consideration the fact that when too many machines stop at the same time, there aren't enough seats at the canteen tables, is wearing, even when you're not on their machines.
So, I shall be taking the rest of April (19th is my last day) and May off and signing up with my old agency when I get back from WisCon. I'm hoping that I can get back into night work, but truthfully, any of the jobs I used to do for the agency were more enjoyable than this. Money might be tighter, and I won't get the time off that I do now, but I should be able to write even on days when I'm working and I won't be so shattered even at the end of the day, let alone the end of the shift.
Between now and WisCon, I shall be working on my other project (about which I shall eventually explain) and writing the stories for WisCon and the Heinlein competition and maybe digging out my old children's stories for sending out, since it's 20 years since I last tried. (They were rejected in one case for being anthropomorphic, the publisher explaining that we don't (back in the 80s) do those kind of stories. Of course the Duchess of York's Budgie the Helicopter may have helped to change that perspective!) And also working on my web page.
So I have a lot to keep me busy and to get my Attack Year off to a good start.