Jobless

I quit my job!  I've been working every Sunday since my maternity leave ended.  It was nice to get out of the house and interact with adults once a week and the small amount of extra money was nice, too.  Part of that income was based on a small commision for selling certain items and doing certain services for customers.  We had an agreement in our store that if you do the work, you get the sale.  Its fair.  Again, its only a small amount of money, but if you work on an order for an hour or two, you should get the extra $2-3 for that work.

My manager takes in service orders and does none of them; he makes his extra money with sales and if he works to make the sale, he should get the money for that sale.  Again, its fair.  So, whoever does the work will switch the sale so they get the credit.  We all do this to each other, its not like its something that only happens with him.  He's complained in the past about us doing this to him, but he still refuses to do the work himself.

Today he announced that switching the sales would not be allowed and if you are doing the service work then that's what you are paid for and the person who talks to the customer should get the extra money.  He said that if we don't agree with it we can leave and if we stay and we don't agree we will be fired.  According to him the company has no qualms with replacing every associate in every store.  In fact, he said, all the managers were told to go a closing competitors stores and speak with the managers to get info about the people they are laying off so they can be hired by this company.

So, I said that it sounds like the company doesn't care about us at all.  Blah blah oh yes they do, but they can replace you.  Of course they can.  They can replace us with people who just got laid off and will be happy to have jobs and would probably even work for less (not much less, tho, I barely made above min. wage).

He's threatened our jobs in the past, but I was full time then and couldn't risk losing my job.  I have always been looking, but haven't found anything else, which is why I was still there after 6 crappy years.  I think he was really surprised that someone actually took him up on his offer to quit.  I figure he's been blowing smoke up all our asses for so long since he hasn't ever acted on his threats.

So, I'm going to call HR tomorrow and tell them what happened, though I'm sure they don't care, since they've never cared about our complaints in the past.  Maybe I'll look for something new.  I am going to see if I can get some more free lance jobs through Patch.