New boss and department structure at work, they passed me over for promotion and unofficially demoted me by creating new positions above me, taking responsibilities away and pushing me down further than I was before the structure changes-I used to half run a very small department while being trained to eventually run it myself.
The office unofficially encourages the use of unpaid overtime. And one of the people they promoted above me brags to the boss (off the record) about how she does a lot of unpaid overtime.
They told me upper management was concerned I wouldn’t be physically capable of the work (desk job and I am, but I took a month off for my health earlier this year). He also said I could get promoted in 6 months if I work really hard to get there. They put me on a challenging project that wasn’t properly setup during the prelim phase, with a ridiculous timeline, zero support, and also put me on tasks that pulled my attention away. When I tried to say that the project was going to fail I was told I just wasn’t capable. Which is ironic, cause no one else in the department would be expected to take on such a challenging task.
Thinking that this project was going to be used against my promotion, but to also solidify my demotion, I put in 40 hrs of unpaid overtime over the last month to get a decent product. I notified him of 8 hours and he said he would get me compensation but never followed through.
At the end of last week, I discovered that their current claim is I’m not promotable because my degree isn’t prestigious enough (bachelors instead of a masters). My former boss had no degree at all, and they’ve been “training” me for promotion for the past year. I’m being demoted no matter how hard I try.
I also realized that the pressure they’ve been putting on me was to test how quickly I could complete projects. So if my performance drops, they can claim I’m slacking off. I don’t want a future of working unpaid till 1am. So I emailed my boss and his boss with my total overtime hours for this project and said I didn’t need compensation, just that it not happen again.
Could I be fired for this?
Edit: it appears the company is going the other direction and doubling down on the pressure to work extra hard (unapproved overtime). My boss casually yelled over the phone that our client is unhappy with our prices and that they reached out to another company. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if I were the boss, I wouldn’t announce it to the office. If it is true, then it’s unlikely to be just a price thing it’s probably more about quality.
Either way, I’m not going to fall for it again. I’m going to look for another job and watch my back in case they try to get rid of me in the process.
