Lone Meat Cutter Told Job 'Isn't For You' After Nearly Fainting Due to Workload

If you asked a blue-collar worker to describe their job position using three words, they would most likely be: understaffed, overworked and underpaid. Exploitation isn’t limited to hard labour either. Many entry-level corporate jobs have inherently-similar terms of employment, with salary and responsibilities in disproportion.While class consciousness isn’t a recent phenomenon, social media has, over the past decade, established itself as a primary platform for work-related . On Reddit, r/antiwork is one such sub-forum where people anonymously share the good, but mostly the bad and the ugly of their roles.The community recently brought to light a manager’s seeming lack of compassion for their burnt-out employee. As the story goes, a meat cutter at Price Chopper, a supermarket chain in the United States, nearly fainted due to workload, only to be told that the job position isn’t for them.The assistant meat manager, who said they make $21 an hour, detailed it all in a post.“Our payroll at work is cut so low that I'm doing the entire meat department alone several days a week. All the cutting, paperwork, breaking down holiday loads, filling 30 pounds turkeys, frozen loads, customer orders, EVERYTHING alone,” they explained.The lone meat cutter said they were throwing freight as quickly as possible to catch up with the target, trailing it by a whole truck. This was just the loading part, and the employee had not even gotten to cutting meat, when they started to feel weak.Their vision slightly dimmed, so they decided to sit down in the breakroom. The meat cutter said they drank some cold water, ate their peanut-butter sandwich and felt a little better, only for their head to start hurting.“I'm sitting in my car outside right now after talking to my store manager,” the employee wrote further. “I said I think I need to leave a few hours early because I almost passed out trying to catch up on throwing freight as fast as I could. I said I can't be left like this much longer. I said I'll do as good an order for the next truck as I can, but I may go to walk-in right after that just to be sure I'm ok.”In response, the manager said, "I mean...maybe this position isn't for you. This is how intense the meat department gets."The post grabbed attention online, some people sharing their own, similar brushes with the meat department, which is characteristically understaffed and overburdening.Some others argued the meat cutter shouldn’t have let their boss get the impression that the amount of is humanly possible to do.“You need to show management that it's not possible to have one person working a department alone. Yes, almost fainting should be a big enough hint... but what hurts them the most? Low sales and low displays,” read a comment.