There’s no sugarcoating it: times are tough out there for workers and a lot of people are struggling right now.

The guy who wrote the story below knows all about it and he explained how his life has been affected after he lost his job.

Get all the details below.

Looked for a job for a year and I think I’m getting put out again after 3 weeks.

“I’m 53,m.

The pandemic imploded my career and I still can’t get it back together.

After a year of job hunting, I desperately took a 1099 job for a gig I did 33 years ago in college.

This is a major bummer…

It’s on a 1099, and I’ve been making less, dollar to dollar, than I did in the early ’90s doing the same work.

It’s a merchandise assembly gig for a big box store.

When I did this job decades ago, I was paid $5.50 an hour plus $5 a product. It was mostly bicycles and I could do 2-3 an hour and do it well and properly set up.

I clocked $15.50-$20.50 most hours, and actually got tipped out $5-10 by a good percentage of the customers. One Christmas a relieved dad handed me a $50 for saving his rear end at 10:30 pm on Christmas Eve. IN 1993 dollars!

This new gig is straight piece work, the third party vendor that books me takes around 50 percent. I’m actually not sure, there’s no accounting. You bolt stuff together, money comes to a debit card.

Jeez…

Anyway I’ve been making about $13/hour, except there’s always an hour plus of uncompensated nonsense so it’s in reality more like $12. I’m driving 70 miles round trip to do this work. I was making $35 on my last job. It’s a hard pill to swallow.

There are equipment operations tasks I’ve straight up refused to do because I am refusing to run the industrial trash compactor when there’s no workman’s comp coverage. I asked. “Oh, you’re 1099, we don’t have to buy that”. I should mention the training was “you know how to run this, right?”

Yet the supervisors still want to control like people are on W2s.

Anyway I got into a thing with a store manager because I threw a soccer ball sized lump of plastic wrap into an office trash can rather than spending a uncompensated half hour finding some one with a key to the padlock for the trash compactor they keep trying to make me operate without workers comp insurance.

Now I’m not seeing any activity on the app I had to put on my device to track my work and I’m just waiting for the shoe to drop.

I made it 3 weeks. I used to be somebody and I’m sick of my wife having to cover my rear end.

These private equity jerks want everything both ways and I do not know what I’m going to do.

Thanks for the rant.”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person weighed in.

And another reader shared their thoughts.

It’s tough to find a good job these days…

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.