DEFINITION OF “TOXIC” WORK ENVIRONMENT. - Machine Operator Poly Print Employee Review

I’d like to start off by saying this to any competent, hard working, person that was raised to believe working your butt off pays off, NOT HERE. Your hard work is taken advantage of, or discouraged immediately when starting. I started in Lamination where the lead plays favorites and is harshly against any sort of team work commitment with any of the other departments and would discourage me cleaning the supposedly “food safe” machines as “nobody would notice.” After a while of realizing this guy is a complete simpleton, I ask to be moved to slitting where the lead there noticed how hard I was working in lamination and quickly jumped on the chance to have me be a part of his team. I spent a year spending as much time as I can learning everything I can possibly learn in an environment where production comes before employee well being, because they had given me raises that kept me happy until the lead started being two faced and told me that the guy that started working there who was slowing the whole team down, was going to be “run out” by the operator who was returning soon when I expressed frustration that I was working extremely hard and didn’t understand why he can disappear for an hour and you don’t say anything. When the operator came back, the lead told me a completely different story than what he had said before and was derogatory. I brushed it off and continued my endeavors on learning and operating. Fast forward a few months, I am fired for writing “days in h*ll” on the machine as a way of expressing my own frustrations of not being able to utilize their HR department, as the one time I did I was told to “grow a pair” by the HR rep at that time, so I would rather deal with it and look past it than utilize the HR. I am fired and cutoff of income for Christmas and new year and get a text from the new plant manager asking me to come and talk about what happened. I come in for a meeting with the manager and one of the HR people and the writing on the machine isn’t even brought up a single time. In the meeting, I am asked if I wrote a derogatory term on a roll, and whether or not I was referring to the person mentioned earlier who was supposed to be “run out” as lazy. I was 100% honest with them and said yes, I did call him lazy because he is invisible to our boss, no I did not write a derogatory term on any roll. They brought the person in to talk with me and level out, we had a complete understanding of eachother and the plant manager told me to come back in two weeks. I come back only after texting him, I’m not really looking to come back to retaliation from the lead or anyone else, because the lead had clearly painted me as the enemy to remove me from possibly letting HR know he was being derogatory when referring to the guy dragging down the team, the one I call “lazy”. He assures me that no retaliation will be brought against me and I believe the guy. The next few weeks are nothing but problems. My helper who is 40 years older than me procrastinates like a son of a gun to the point he’s costing me production. The lead tells me a simple no when I ask to work by myself. Time goes on and we start getting jobs that are harder and harder to run, meanwhile the other two people are having a dandy time running the jobs that are easy to run. The jobs get harder, and harder to do and they test me more and more, until one night there was a job where the customer had said NO to it, but I was asked to run it and do the presses dirty work regardless of my past three weeks of effort maintaining a good bonus percentage, but they INTENTIONALLY gave me this garbage job so that the work I had legitimately put effort into, was up in flames. I found a job down the street where I sweep floors and wipe down machines for $17.75 when these people had me slaving away at the prospect I could get a bonus or a raise if I just keep playing along with whenever they feel like giving me work that was actually worth running and could provide a good percentage. The amount of pizza this place bought its employees makes its employees sick of pizza. Here guys, it’s 100 in here but there’s hot greasy pizza for you in the disgusting break room! Enjoy! I never got my remaining PTO check and was never reimbursed for purchasing the $60 worth of picture frames to frame the break room with samples of work we did, so it didn’t feel like such a cemetery with a disfigured mannequin.