Bullying and Disability Discrimination

My mother and brother are incredibly unsupportive about any kind of disability so I rowed with the latter last Sunday. The former helpfully suggested that I may wish not to disclose my disabilities to any future enployer. Gee thanks.

I am therefore technically still employed at the care home (well, as much as anyone can be on a pesky zero hours contract.) I attended a domestic staff team meeting yesterday afternoon and was sat facing one of the bullies. It wasn't nice, nor was the content of the meeting, quite frankly.

Anyway, today is the day I bit the bullet and made a formal written complaint about the discrimination and bullying I'd been experiencing during the six week period I'd worked there. The General Manager replied straight away, asking me to come in for a meeting next week, so I phoned the job retention officer at the local charity and sought his advice. He suggested that I make myself unavailable. I will be doing that as she made me burst into tears back in July.

2024: The Year of Crap Jobs

The problem with having a gap in one’s CV the size of the Mariana Trench is that the only escape is via National Minimum Wage (NMW) jobs. Please allow me to elaborate.

In June I attained a job in a local branch of Wetherspoons. It paid £11.67 or suchlike (NMW is, at time of writing, £11.44). This particular building contained far too many steps as it is a converted bank and bizarrely had two roof gardens!? The app made it more of a waitressing job and the shifts were all over the shop. The pub closed at midnight and clearup took 90 minutes to two hours, so I ended up getting home at half two in the morning. I managed a total of three shifts, resigning with immediate effect.

In July I forwarded my CV to a local care home. They were offering zero hour bank care work, so I was duly interviewed and offered the job on the same day. Unlike Wetherspoons I was given a whole raft of paperwork to complete and then a huge amount of online training. I attended an in-house 'moving and handling' course, finding that everyone there had worked in care since leaving school, unlike me. 

I had a really bad reaction to the CPR etraining, allied to the fact that I was being interviewed for a DfE role on the same day. This led to me seeking assistance from a local disability charity. The head of retention came along to a meeting with me, the General Manager and her deputy. It wasn't great - I was admonished for not declaring that I had bipolar and I didn't accept the job.

Time went on ... I was interviewed for office jobs and a Co-op role. Nothing succeeded. I then decided to re-look at the care home job and I started on 9th September. The first week was great - I was shadowing an absolutely lovely Care Assistant, but sadly this wasn't yo last.

My second weekend (Saturday 8am-8pm and Sunday 8am-8pm) was bloody awful. There was an absolutely foul care assistant I was teamed with on Saturday who picked on me all day. She and the senior care assistant made me accompany one of the residents to A&E, meaning that I was there for hours and ended up having to call the Deputy Manager to relieve me. On the Sunday there was a bossy Care Assistant who was a nightmare to work for so I ended up in tears, going home early. Following this, I did ask the deputy manager for Reasonable Adjustments via email, but they were never granted.

I worked there for twelve shifts in total. Although I never completed another 12-hour care shift, I didn't like it as the atmosphere was so strange, cliquey and unfriendly. I'd already changed my number to a burner phone so that I'd never see the WhatsApp messages which popped up all day every day. 

I don't regret it whatsoever.