Even if it might be easier for Flik to keep all current staff, they have been so shady about the account takeover process at every step that it is hard to trust what will happen. Take the latest one-on-one meetings with the higher-ups: the General Manager insisted that these meetings were not interviews and not required. It wasn’t until the literal day-of that she informed the people who hadn’t signed up that actually they were required and if you didn’t sign up it was assumed that you no longer wanted a position. And sure, we could blame this problem on the GM, but none of the signage from Flik made any mention to these requirements either, and it’s a pretty significant piece of information to not mention.
These one-on-one meetings being required, beyond already the fact that they are interviews, is dubious as well. It allows them to divide us and potentially provide different information to employees, and give us different answers to different questions. In some of the meetings there was already talk about money, which brings up another concern- fair wages. A lot of people are already feeling like they’re paid less than they deserve; particularly those who have been here longer, often many years, are paid less than people who started more recently. Many people have gotten their job offers by now, and already some have been offered pay raises and some have not. Even then, raises are probably influenced by our current wages, so the end result is still unfair between all of us.
Even more so, we have no guarantee that our working conditions will improve. In fact, at that big “town hall” they held, when asked whether they will staff us better, the Flik Representatives responded “we’ll see” and “we’re on a budget”. Very reassuring.
Workplace conditions went from bad to worse back in April when the current General Manager came on board. Who’s to say things won’t continue to worsen as Flik begins it’s takeover? We had to put up with so much micromanaging and often severe verbal abuse and many good workers ended up leaving. Things could easily spiral again, and we could be left with even less staff should bad management push people out.
We cannot wait around to find out what things will be like when Flik takes over. If we mobilize some sort of effort before the account takeover, we can use our collective worker power to defend our current jobs and get fair conditions under Flik. We should have our own meeting outside of work and away from the managers to talk about what we hope for with the Flik takeover and how we can make it happen together.
