Please delete top down in corporate businesses.
Upon reaching the legal age to work, the only achievable jobs reachable to 16 year-olds is retail. A hard reality that young people are told will enhance ‘life experience’ and will ‘build character’, when in fact it’s relatively soul-crushing. Alongside the perils of GCSEs and A-levels, the need to start taking responsibility for your own financial status involves grand steps such as your first job, opening your first bank account and maybe choosing your own phone contract, despite the fact you can’t pay for it directly because you need credit score and who would trust a teenager with a credit card?
Already age is becoming a damning reminder that growing up is the opposite of linear, not to mention that just growing physically isn’t a big enough reminder in its own right. But after the years of begging your parents for a few coins every now and again, the feeling of getting your own first paycheck sends you into some type of euphoria you’ve not quite experienced before.
New life achievement: unlocked.
This feeling stays with you for a while because all you need to spend money on at this time in your life is you. Absolutely no responsibilities and everything you fundamentally ‘need’ is still being financed by your family if you’re lucky enough.
However, during this golden age of financial stability, the work beef starts to rise. Working in the same place for at least a three month period unravels the seams of workforce harmony and cracks start to appear in full force. But still being between sixteen and eighteen, this is the least of your worries and it can be tuned out or faded into the background.
Once compulsory school ends, work is the next stage. It’s uncommon for most people to launch straight into a career with no experience or extra qualifications these days, so the two main options are apprenticeships or university. As well as this, it’s time to start thinking about living elsewhere.
I embarked on the path to university which meant three things; learning to live alone, learning to enjoy life without any restraints, and learning how to financially support myself. Of course, as a teenager with no real concept of budgeting, the only words I heard were ‘money from the government.’ Future me can worry about the future financial strains.
This is not a good attitude.
I had to learn that it is not sustainable to live from your overdraft- of course, it’s a support blanket because life today is expensive, but eventually, Mr.HSBC will come knocking for the one-thousand pounds I owed him. So I began to look for work. In a student city, searching for a part-time job is just like looking for a needle in a haystack- stressful and very hard to come by.
My first job luckily had no real strains and I spent most of my employment not working because of the coronavirus pandemic. The pay wasn’t good enough, and my first real dispute with the business ‘lords’ above was when I got promoted to supervisor. I was offered a measly fifteen pence pay rise for all the extra work I was doing on top of uni work.
To put it nicely- I was appalled.
Being a supervisor was short-lived as it was negatively impacting my grades, so during the summer I packed my bags and moved to a pub down the road. This was when the real imaginary battle began. I worked full-time over the summer despite my contracted hours being a minimum of twenty, but I really enjoyed having money and better money this time. It was football season, which meant spirits were sky-high. Nevertheless, this only lasted a few months. September reared its ugly head and it was time for me to break the news to my manager that I needed to drop my hours significantly. He dealt with this well as he always knew this would be the case, but the corporate overlords had other ideas. They decided that as they didn’t know me personally and I was just an algorithm on a screen that cost them money, I was able to work on their terms.
It just wasn’t worth the arguments in my final year- I had much better things to think about. I applied for a different job and said farewell to the night shifts graciously.
As I began my new job, the university upper class began to chip away at my faith in corporations altogether. My new job meant better hours I thought. I was wrong. Corporate couldn’t see me, and out of sight meant out of mind. The same for university. Lecturers are striking, covid meant lessons were remote and disruption to my learning was just constant. The countless back and forth emails getting nowhere diminished what little faith I had left in the system.
Working in hospitality is so difficult. And no one ever prepares you for that. I have seen the worst in humanity. Sexual harassment, abuse, and generally awful treatment for a stupidly low salary grinds a person down. The abuse I receive on a daily basis at a café is constant. It’s really not my fault we don’t have any bacon rolls at the moment. The general public do not hesitate to tell me how much I’ve ruined their day, or how incompetent I am. It’s not worth it. How would I live without it?
Treatment in the workplace in hospitality in retail jobs makes a person reach out to their superiors for support. They’re the same people that work you hard and shout at you for not having any ‘Birra Moretti’ left. They can happily skip away from their desks after a very tiresome day of sitting down. I have to scrub vomit off the walls, then go and do some uni work because I can’t afford to not graduate.
It’s an endless cycle of ‘do more.’ It would work in companies' interests to look after their staff as they’re more likely to be loyal and work harder, instead of ridiculously high turnover rates.
Everyone talks about customer satisfaction. No one ever talks about minimum wage employee satisfaction. I’ll be honest. It’s at rock bottom.
