This Manager Is Due For A Little Karma

Soon after I turned fifteen, I had a job at a local grocery store. I had worked there for a little over a year. I had three friends that worked there, along with twelve other students from the local high school. The fifteen of us made up a majority of the floor, register, and bagging staff.

Payday came every other Friday, and that’s how it had been for the fourteen-plus months I had worked there. The upcoming Friday was payday, and as a teenager, making about $300 every other week was awesome. It paid for my car insurance, gas money, and whatever else I had to put my money toward.

Friday came along and paychecks were handed out. I opened my check and it was short over $100. I flipped the check over and looked at the check stub and saw a $100-something deduction for Union Dues.

My friend approached me, and he had the same deduction on his check, along with all the other teenagers that worked there.

Union? This place is part of a union? None of us were ever told it was part of a union and they had union dues. Out of the fourteen-plus months I had been working there, there were never, not once, any other Union Dues deducted from my paycheck. This was news to me.

We asked the store manager about it, and he said it was mandatory for deduction for dues to be taken from payments for the past couple of months that were missed, and that dues would be taken out of future paychecks. After that, he just kind of brushed us off.

That was the last straw for me. I was tired of the store manager always working the high school students for fifteen minutes shy of full shifts so he didn’t have to give us breaks.

He was always looking to work his staff as much as possible and give us as little in return for breaks. Now, we had union dues we need to pay into, and no one was ever informed the place was part of a union or that we had dues to pay? Screw that. I was done.

I told my friends that I was looking for a new job, and once I found one, I was putting my two weeks. They agreed and spread the word among all the high schoolers working at the grocery store that we’d do a mass exiting.

About a week later, I told them I’d found a new job and would start it in two weeks. I wanted to start it on the spot, but my mom told me to do the decent thing and put in my two-week notice. So, I told my friends at work that I was putting in my two-week notice the next day, and they told all the other high schoolers.

I got to work the next day and I found out that I was the ninth person to put in their two-week notice that day. By the end of the day, out of the fifteen high schoolers working there, thirteen of us had put in our two-week notice.

The store manager was panicking. He pulled me to the side and asked why we were all leaving at once. He said he could change the hours I worked and he’d work with us to keep us on staff. I had to explain to him that the surprise union dues were the last straw. The union was worthless to part-time teenagers, and having to pay dues for something we wouldn’t get anything in return from was stupid. I also told him the shifts he scheduled for the teenagers are appalling, especially the five-hour-and-forty-five-minute shifts where we only got one fifteen-minute break in nearly sixteen hours of working on our feet.

Two weeks came and went, and the grocery store found no one new to replace us. Rumor was that the news had spread throughout the high school about things the management did and how they snuck union dues into our paychecks without telling us, so no high schooler wanted to work there. It took some months, but the grocery store did fill some of the positions, but it wasn’t with any high school students.

I went to work at a large pharmacy chain just across the road, made an extra dollar an hour, had better hours, and worked with some really cool managers that always had our backs. Also, there were no union dues; that was an added bonus.