I work for a cabinet installation company that installs cabinet for a worldwide company. You may know them by the fact that their buildings look similar to the flag of the country where it started.

Over the past two years the big company has been in the process of purchasing the company I work for. Doing so means that things are changing. And they are continuing to change. One thing that changed was our holiday pay. In the past years, we would get two paid days off at Christmas and also New Year’s Day. This year because those holidays fall on a Saturday, which is a day we typically don’t work, we are getting an “observed” paid day on the Mondays following the holiday. I’m cool with that.

However, they changed the way we do things and all of the higher-ups FAILED to mention that to the other employees. Mainly the employees that do the work in the field.

We saw it on our time cards as a paid day off for the holiday, then the schedule shows up and we are scheduled for those days. No explanation, no heads up, nothing. We’ve been told that if we wanted those days off we were supposed to request that time off 4 weeks prior. How are we supposed to do that if they failed to announce the change? They didn’t give us 4 weeks notice to the change. What if we already had plans to spend that time with our families out of town? Are we just supposed to tell our families, “sorry I’ve got to go to work”?

I’ve been at a crossroads with them and how they handle things for a couple months now. There are so many issues in the field with planning, with parts that it’s becoming stressful to install a simple kitchen for people. And their scheduling sucks too. They give us job that should take 4-5 days and tell us that it has to be done in 3. And that were expected to put in the extra hours to get it done so their “schedule” doesn’t get messed up. But they also don’t want us working overtime. How are we supposed to adhere to the schedule and not work more than 40 hours?

Do I just give my family time and work for double time or do I just call out? It’s either the family is upset with me or I get written up or possibly fired. Honestly I’m okay with the write up. I’m okay getting fired too, I’d just prefer to have something else lined up first.