I’m a cleaner, at a public hospital, and with this whole plague shit, we have even less people than usual. Add to that that I’m one of a smaller group of cleaners who’s capable of cleaning the covid ward and icu, as many others have families, elderly relatives or immunocompromized people living at home. Or are kinda old, or immunocompromized themselves. Or they’re straight up scared, which is entirely understandable.
But this means that when I’m called in to work 6-7-8 day weeks, (10 being the most I’ve gone.) often at short notice, to cover for people, I feel a moral obligation to step in, no matter how tired I am, or how much I just wanna tell them to fuck off.
And it ain’t money insecurity either, because I’ve got enough hours, and our union has kept pay pretty reasonable.
On the one hand, I don’t owe it to the people paying me. They pay me for when I’m there, but that doesn’t obligate me to be there more than I can handle. But I still feel I owe it to, you know, society and shit. To my co-workers, because if I don’t do it, one of the other overworked people capable of it will have to do it on top of what they’r already doing, because it still has to get done.
Add to that my really annoying messiah complex.
How do I deal with this? How do you deal with shit like this?
You don’t have to feel that obligation. Hospital administrators routinely set up a work situation where each department only has enough people working to just marginally avoid a total operational failure. If a staffing issue causes patient harm, it’s solely the fault of those who refuse to hire enough folks.
Also, union job in healthcare? Nice!
