Read on Twitter
Ok since the CBC reporter couldn’t be bothered to reach out to anyone employed in the service industry, besides some jerk owner, allow me to tell you how things shook down at my part time mall job. https://twitter.com/withane_lindsey/status/1254109009872777216">https://twitter.com/withane_l...
First: my mall gig is part time and purely fun for me. I don’t need the job, I just love it. Were I to be laid off from it, I wouldn’t qualify for any relief because I’m still employed full time elsewhere. Allow me to tell you what the last week the store was open was like...
Mall job is owned by a billion dollar company and they’ve always been good to us. It’s cosmetics. Towards the end, we took all our testers off the floor, stopped offering consultations and tried our best to stand six feet away from customers which is tough...
The employees, including me, were getting more and more worried about this virus. By this point, stores were voluntarily closing or altering hours all around us, but we were business as usual until the mall itself changed hours of operation.
Every day we had more and more anxiety. Eventually we started covering off people’s shifts because we didn’t think it was right to have them working. A 60 year old woman, another woman with an infant that also lived with her older mother.
We waited. We kept asking our manager when we’d close, knowing it wasn’t her choice to make. The last two or three shifts I was working, I would be almost in tears on the bus. I debated just not going. It didn’t seem worth it.
Eventually my manager pointed out that just coming in was veering into dangerous work territory, and that she wouldn’t fault anyone that stopped coming in.
Oddly the final night we were open, we were told earlier that same day we would continue to operate. Something changed in the course of the day and all of a sudden, we were done.
We didn’t know the status of our employment but myself and the girl I closed with cried tears of actual joy. We didn’t give a shit about money, maybe getting laid off, EI, none of that. We were just happy to not keep working with the public.
I love that job. I’d rather be working every weekend than waiting this out, in theory. But I have no desire to go to work during this pandemic. I’m not happy about it but I’m happy about it, ya know?
The nerve of anyone that thinks service industry people would rather sit on butts and not work. People want to work but they also don’t want to get sick and maybe fucking die, ok?
So fuck this poorly balanced article and all these business owners that can’t imagine considering the health and safety of employees. The end.
