Most, if not all, of us work. What’s the worst experience you have had where you work? Can be past or present.
I work freelance in an industry where only two groups are hiring. Companies looking to exploit my brain for their economic benefit, or rich shits who want one-of-a-kind masterpieces and don’t understand the process machining takes.
A lot of my job is absolute shit. NRA union busts, so there’s no defending ourselves. Contractors aren’t employees, so agreements get manipulated. It’s a very unfriendly environment, and to boot, my licencing and certifications cost a lot - with annual renewals - which job-providers use as leverage. It’s not difficult to assume there are many “worst” experiences. But there’s one specific one that I’ll shorten. It was a contract from a daddy’s-money, some 17-year-old who wanted a rifle, but not just any rifle. They wanted one nobody else had. As is common, we held a design meeting. The kid told me nothing useful, all I could get out of him is that he likes Glocks. So, I quickly draw up a Glock-shaped-rifle thingy, he okay’s it and sends me off to begin prototyping. I make a basic functional prototype, and he goes off about how it looked nothing like the picture I drew and that I have to redesign it. This is about $1200 into the project btw, a full rebuild means making new mouldings for the plastic frame/stock, which gets expensive, and it’s out of my pocket so far. Three iterations later he still hates the thing, so I asked him wtf. Turns out, in his words “[he] doesn’t want a rifle, [he] wants a machine gun”. This was never discussed. This is technically illegal. This puts me in extreme debt and threatens my certifications. The guy still hasn’t paid me years later, as well he kept the prototypes.
Nothing spectacular for me, but I worked a 0-hour contract for 9 years. It’s not too bad if you’re still called in regularly, but it wears you down after a while. You’re never fully part of the team, you have very limited rights, you’re the first to be disposed of, you’re never entirely sure of income, etc. I decided to get a teacher’s degree after a while to have something on the backburner. When I wanted to go for an interview my boss gave me pain because, even though I wasn’t scheduled to work, I had to keep the day free for them! That was the final straw, decided to quit. We have a decent welfare system where I live, but it’s been crushed by decades of neoliberalism, so I expected nothing of it. Amazingly, they decided that I had a good reason to quit and I was still entitled to unemployment benefits based on the last weeks of salary. Nothing came of the teaching job (too many people with my degree and too little openings) so no luck there. But then I moved two years ago and now I’m at a new employer, a very small one, and this time it’s on a good and steady contract. Glad I said “fuck you” to my employer and left. I get that that’s not a luxury that every worker can afford though, so solidarity to anyone who is in the situation I was in.