Good news, I have finally acquired employment. Bad news, it's at a meat processing plant. I've been hired as a trimmer and have started my first two days, the work is technically easy but this shit absolutely sucks, there is a reason you never hear anyone talk about a career in the meat industry outside of management. from 5am to sometime in the afternoon I trim cuts of meat and prepare them to be made into jerky, there is a manual cutting station and an electric cutting station with both only trimming a single kind of cut day in day out. electric is probably the easier of the two at the cost of being significantly more dangerous and also wrecking your cutting hand after long periods of time, but otherwise somewhat chill as you work in an isolated cubby. Manual cutting is much easier on the joints although takes much more skill to be fast in, at the cost of having to actually be around many people, again fairly chill given that the people around mind their business. Biggest issue for me at the moment is joint pain, by the end of the day my back, neck, knees, and ankles are completely shot. There are no chairs nor accomodations available so it's 8-9 hours a day standing on concrete hunched over a cutting board every day, I'm not very tall and yet it still feels like all of the tables are designed for people 2 feet shorter than me. It's terrible, regardless of my posture or shoes the back pain is unrelenting and there is seemingly very little to do about it in the short term, due to the design of the stations I have to be hunched over at cutting board, if I correct my posture I can't properly see the meat, if I straighten my back and look down it destroys my neck (and upper back still), I can't modify the station nor do I have much room to move in as we are near elbow to elbow, but it is what it is.
Regarding pay, it is pretty brutal and oddly complex. We are given 30 'points' a year and once it hits 0 we are fired automatically, points are mainly dictated by attendance, late by 1 minute = -1 point, late by over 30 minutes = -2, missed a day (or late by 2 hours) = -3, being late coming back from break time will also result in lost points. points are reset once every year with no way to regain them. There are different pay levels for my position ranging from $10-14/hr, the wage for the week is decided by factory wide quotas, if the factory as a whole does not meet a certain quota then tough shit you drop pay levels. Even after meeting quotas, every lost point during a week drops your level for that week, -3 needed to send you to minimum pay of $10/hr.
Update as of 18-10-2024: I had been thinking of quitting all week, but wanted to stay until atleast next monday, today however they informed us that we were 0.4% off quota and as such all of our pay for this week would be reduced lower than the starting wage at mcdonalds. Decided fuck this and quit during break