You just never know

Ironically after I wrote that last post, I realized that Ireland is just not a pregnant friendly place, especially not in the work place. People get so hyped up about racism and equality in the work place. But no one ever thinks about the equality between pregnant and non pregnant women.

I have one friend Cara who's originally from Latvia and she was working for a cosmetic company for almost 2 years. Unfortunately for her it wasn't two months. On Friday she did a product training for some new interns in the company. Then directly after she was given the boot.

What a way to go. You see pregnant women are only entitled to get maternity leave benefit if they have been working for a company for 2 years. In addition you can't claim redundancy either if you haven't been employed for 2 years. So yeah its a real pickle.

Nonetheless, It doesn't leave a nice after taste in your mouth. Its a cruel world we live in right now. As women gain more equality in some sense, we lose it in others. Eventually were going to grow into a nation of all career women with no children.  Your damned if you do and your damned if you don't.

So I have put the yes to babies on the long finger obviously lol.

The downside of overtime

Recently I wrote about how my boyfriends hours at work have completely fluctuated,(here) He went from working an average of 40 hours per week between June and November. Then in December we had a huge snow storm and his hours at work became less and less. Last week he worked a measly 4 hours because the restaurant wasn't busy at all.

He was quite disheartened all week. Then yesterday he went to work 1pm-5pm and was asked to work overtime til 10pm. However it was midnight and I hadn't heard anything from him since 7pm so I thought something must be wrong with him and text him and rang him and couldn't get through to him... Then he rang me at 12.30 and he told me that  his head chef, Paddy had asked him to stay even later...  

Normally this would be a really good thing, the more hours the better, but not this time. All I felt was sick to my stomach. His head chef had asked him to sell burgers at a barbecue outside in the beer garden while a musician played, in front of all the costumers while the head chef himself drank with his friends. 

Maybe I am jumping to conclusion but it screams racism, whether its indirect or direct or accidental racism I don't know but to me it sounded disgusting. No Irish person in their right mind would agree to do this type  of  task. In my head it was like a puppet on a string,

You say jump, I say how high.

He told me today that he had never felt so embarrassed and uncomfortable in his whole life, he said everyone was staring at him and joking about him and someone even commented to his head chef  

"Paddy your here drinking and you left poor him doing the burgers"

The problem is he just wouldn't say no because he was afraid he would lose his job. However to make matters worse. He was told that a bar man would give him a lift home and when he finished at 2am, the barman told him to pack up quickly because presumably he wanted to go home. This morning when he went to work he found out, in the rush he left the burgers outside... Being the good hearted person he is insisted on paying for the burgers 30 euro! Furthermore in the end he had to get a taxi home because the bar man left him waiting in the cold. The taxi cost 10 euro.

So in the end he made 50 euro selling burgers, had to pay 30 euro for the wasted burgers and 10 euro for the taxi and was left with 10 euro for all the embarrassment. I have a good mind to complain to the restaurant about this disgraceful treatment.