Work Conditions

I am considering bringing to public attention the conditions at my work place. We start out at $8.00/hour. We do not receive any holiday or vacation pay for the first year. Workers get one day off during the week and Sunday off. Every ten weeks we get two Saturday off. That means we work our regular day off in order to have two days off together. We never know at the beginning of the day at what time work is going to finish and what time we will start work the next day. There have been times when we work until after 8:00 p.m. then start the next day at 6:00 a.m. The company wonders why there are worker accidents. Workers are overworked. There is no appreciation shown for a good job. They only complain when mistakes are made. The company wastes money on bad produce. We have to go through this produce to pick out what can be used. They do this instead of paying decent wages and paying decent wages and giving holiday pay. They list Memorial Day as a holiday in the employee handbook, yet we work that day. When asked about that I was told that the company pays for eight hours extra for that day. I am in danger of losing my job, because I cannot do one of the tasks that is rarely asked of me. There are men there who are younger and stronger than I who are more able to do this task. Good jobs are difficult to find in this area, and this may be the same in the other area where the main company employs people. They say that the irregular hours are due to the fact that we deal with produce. They say that we have to supply the customers when they want the product. There are times during the year when employees are not able to live on the money they earn, and there are times during the year when we work over fifty hours every week. There is a lot of lifting. It is frequent that we do not have enough people to do what needs to be done, so more is expected from the people who are there. They act like they are surprised that they are short handed. They seem to forget that we are human. Either they forget or they do not care about their employees. Work conditions like this should not be allowed to continue.