venti urnex latte rant - union busting and ableism (self.starbucksbaristas)
submitted by GreatWizardH0wl
I've been working for the company for about three or four years now. The store I'm working at now, I started in December and I already want to quit. Like with contempt, screaming kicking and yelling the whole way. My manager is blatantly anti union, she doesn't give a single fx about her team, she's always wandering off the floor, has a terrible time keeping up when she is on the floor. She's petty and gossipy and cruel but acts like she knows and loves everyone and she's good at it too. Today in the shift meeting we have once a week (I'm a Shift Manager), we just learned there's going to be a district wide contest to promote our customer connection scores. Which -- I am team "customer connection scores are subjective, unattainable and decrease morale" to begin with. So we're having this contest, I'm already upset cause I think it's ridiculous to force our team to participate in that, and then my manager was explaining the rules and prizes (cause of course there's prizes) and I wish I was kidding when they said one of the prizes is an ice cream party. So I was taken aback. Are you serious? A corporate pizza party tactic, again, for the third time in six months??? No one goes to these because we know they're just to kill unionizing efforts in the district. So I asked my manager, verbatim, if this made her angry, or upset her in anyway, that were being offered stupid stuff like this when half of us are struggling to pay rent, at least one person on the team is homeless, and most of us are food insecure, and you're tossing us, what? Participation trophies and soggy Panera bread catering? All I said verbatim was "doesn't this make you angry?" And her response was "let's be adults about this" (coming on the heels of months of multiple comments referring to me as child like, emotional, or critiquing my expressions and manners of speaking -- I am ✨ autistic ✨((undisclosed)) and an full grown adult) my response was to completely dissociate and day dream for a useless hour and change about quitting in a screaming blaze of glory and going to a job I find much more rewarding. But Starbucks is all I know how to do. and I can't afford to job hunt so close to renewing my lease. I had been doing the research to unionize our store but when I started talking about it to my team the people I thought were with me all froze up and backed out and now I feel like a fool for even trying. How do I get through the week without a break down, cause heaven knows my life isn't exactly rainbows outside work either. Everything is so hard right now, I wanted this job to work out.