Work!

I am more-or-less officially back to work at the bakery! I asked for, and was granted, shifts starting at noon unless requested/bargained for otherwise, with Saturdays being the exception (partly because AI meetings, partly because PoGO; I am weak to Community Days and boosted shinies). I'm having a mostly good time being back, aside from the fact that the night inevitable "staying past the time I was scheduled to leave" thing has already begun. I truly, deeply, and sincerely wish this was not A Thing in the hospitality industry.

Other improvements include our most recent pastry chef having left; of the three pastry chefs I've worked for at the hotel so far, she was the best, but uh. That's a low bar to clear. Pretty sure her middle name is "Karen", if that gives you any idea. The person who I'm fairly certain is our new Lead Cook (position just below Pastry Chef in the hierarchy, with pastry chef at the top) is on the spectrum as well, which should make communicating a lot easier for me.

Other losses include the majority of my coworkers in the bakery; we're down to three people besides me, one of whom can only work on Tuesdays, and those sparingly. Our previous Lead Cook was awesome, ended up realizing she was too awesome for the job, and left (while encouraging us to leave as well). Teacher Coworker is still working in the building, but only as a teacher and not at all with hotel stuff. Our newest employee also left, possibly because things... really aren't as good as they could be at the hotel, TBH. So it's down to us: The few, the bold, the stubborn, the all too easily exploitable.

That said, both of the coworkers I see on the regular have proven open to the idea of unionizing, so fingers crossed that we can work together and change something for the better. I mostly like my job, but I'm also partly afraid of trying to find somewhere else to work (the "information" that Karen!Pastry Chef drilled into me is that everywhere in the food industry is like this, which is all too plausible, and I'm doubtful of my other skills).

Oh, well. At least, for the foreseeable future, I won't have to depend on unemployment...

(no subject)

Labor idea that I'm filing under "Has promise, but needs more nuance before execution" (and also "Will happen in approximately the same labor wave as the twenty hour work week"): Mandatory time-and-a-half for any hours worked on Saturday and Sunday, for all employees.

Service jobs tend to get slammed on the weekend, because that's when people in other job types tend to go out and patronize restaurants, retail stores, entertainment venues, etc. Oh, sure, they do this in the evenings and on lunch breaks as well, but never to the same degree as on weekends. In the service industry, an hour in the middle of the day on a Monday or Thurday is rarely the same amount of labor as an hour in the middle of the day on a Saturday, and we should be paid to reflect that. And for everyone else, it'll give the bosses a little extra pause before scheduling them for extra time over the weekend.

An excellent potential addition would be time-and-a-half for all time that you're working off schedule; maybe then TPTB at the hotel would be looking for more ways that my coworkers not to work twenty-two hours of overtime in a single week and/or three hours past their scheduled shift ends.