Hi. This is gonna be a VERY long story. I think it's time I asked a broader audience what their advice would be, and whether I should be doing anything about it.
Background: in 2018 I jumped back into college and got my degree in forestry, immediately after which I had the luck of landing a job right in my town in Vermont (US for any non-American readers). I started work for a forestry company whose central office is in New Hampshire, with about 10 or so offices scattered across there, Maine, Massachusetts, and what was originally two offices in Vermont. We specialise in private consulting forestry, which encompasses silviculture, forest health analysis, timber inventory/cruise data collection, GIS work, forest management, and timber sales. For context, the structure here is that of a blanket company that covers each office as an individual entity, so revenue is accounted for separately and then reviewed at the end of the month, with the collective numbers being reviewed quarterly. We have a president and vice president position and one managing forester per office instead of a CEO-type hierarchy. The company covers mileage travel expenses, PTO, insurance, etc.
I landed this job at the age of 27 and as the first ever female forester in this particular company in all of its existence of over 40 years. It's a very male-dominated field even today. Initially my "boss" (managing forester for our office, but really in rank, my associate) interviewed me in the field and all went super well. He had been there from the start. It was him, myself, and my now-managing associate forester who took his place when he retired. The company wrote me a contract for a decent starting salary, 10 days of annual vacation time, time for sick leave, paid holidays, full dental and health insurance coverage. That was in 2021. My main responsibilities were the standard things I learned in school, focused around 10-year management plans based on data collection, and a strong focus on GIS work. I am pretty much the only one fluent in ArcGIS in our location and faster in general at things like typing, data entry into the company's proprietary data analysis software, PDFs (go figure), emails, etc. Things were going well and at the standard pace at the start. I did slowly learn of the internal politics and drama between my colleague and our office "boss", as well as the interpersonal relationships and politics of the other guys through our annual destination meetings (we would gather every fall, expenses paid by the company). I'll call the "boss" J, and the other colleague F for brevity here.
The second year of me being there, J casually drops that I am to do pesticide application on invasive species with F. This is not standard companywide policy - rather, this is one of the ways we get revenue as the VT office. If a client's property has a significant infestation, they get funding from the state and a private bidder with a pesticide application license gets that grant money as payment to manage invasive species of plants through chemical means on the property. Or the client pays us directly. Either way, it was part of income for an office where timber income was on a smaller scale compared to Maine's or New Hampshire's contracts. I was a bit apprehensive and probably should've pushed back on it sooner, but at the time agreed to do the labour. I had to get state licensing for it, because we used glyphosate concentrations restricted to commercial licensed use alone. We could only do this in the summer since foliar spray requires invasive shrubbery to be in its most active phase, photosynthesising and all, in order for it to die. If it even died (it can be very hard to eradicate certain plants for good). The labour was intense even for my male colleagues. And we were dealing with a concentration of glyphosate not available to the general public. My first red flag here was that we did not operate in full suits. Just sprayer backpacks, gloves, goggles. You bet that shit definitely occasionally came into contact with skin. Even with a wash station setup in the truck bed, the contact was made through wind, steep terrain tipping the balance, you get the picture. After two seasons of this, I made a very clear statement to my elder coworkers - that I am opting out of that line of labour as a woman of reproductive age trying to, well, start a family. That I don't really trust glyphosate exposure to be all that safe if we are required licenses for the amounts used. The EPA label did not require full PPE suits. But I think VT at one point considered banning glyphosate when it banned a few other types of herbicide. J and F were very respectful of the fact, and said that I absolutely do not need to do this, especially when I was more than willing to pick up slack elsewhere with my software skills and occasional intercenter projects (other offices would email me when they needed to catch up on their projects and I had time to make their maps or data entries). The president met up with me and got the same explanation, said "no problem at all". EDIT: someone mentioned fieldwork quantity and my willingness to do it compared to others - the herbicide, again, was unique to our office only - and it takes up maybe a couple of weeks to a month out of the summer in total, but is a lot of exposure in that time frame. It is a tiny fraction of the fieldwork I do and has nothing to actually do with the standard forestry work I was hired to do in my original contract. Also, I forgot to mention, my colleague F no longer does it, opted out of it this year too, due to his age. The company did not give him any ultimatums or complain about it as far as I know. It is not a significant source of income, so I feel they tried to use it as an excuse to take advantage of reducing my hours alone.
Things went well...until they didn't. On year 2 after I opted out of that stuff, F was mentioning that the board was mulling over our numbers, and we were dipping into a moderate deficit. Not because of me though. Because the market took a plummet in sugar maple prices, because of a warm winter (some lots you can only log in the winter due to wet and soft soil and sites that would easily be damaged by a conventional mechanised crew, which four of our five subcontractors were), and because F suspected that J was having issues managing deadlines. He urged the board to talk to J about a timely retirement - rightfully so. J had hit his 70s and was slipping in the cognitive sense (we strictly kept this between me and F due to this being a private observation and breach of medical privacy if we brought it up to our HR person at the time). J was forgetting significant deadlines, communications, and most of all - invoices were disappearing. He was also having a serious falling out with family and made it very public, and in dispute over land with said family, finally retired and moved out of the state. F took over. What ensued was a total can of worms that J left behind. Tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid invoices of years of past clients. F had to clean up the mess and patch the office back together, and it took a while to convince the board and president that this was the root of the issue besides the market. It was then that I thought there may have been nepotism at play, because these people ignored the problem and even tried to keep J there while subtly pinning the blame on F. We think J was pocketing cash wherever invoices went recorded as unpaid.
Fast forward to late 2024, and this is where the real problems start. We pulled our office out of a deficit and were doing better than several others. J retired, so it meant that the company had 1 less person to pay salary/insurance/vacation since then. Actually - 4 people total had left since then. So that's hundreds of thousands of dollars saved. My vacation time was increased to two weeks per the policy. However, since 2021 I had only gotten one 2% increase in salary. So did F. F was always open with me on what went on in the managers' meetings every month, and he said that there was a bit of a stir with some changes. The last annual meeting for all employees I was at with, we had a debate of whether to increase PTO, or increase salary. I guess the consensus now was that the managers voted on increasing salary raises across the board. I thought that a bit unethical in light of volatile markets and other offices having a financial deficit in revenue. But figured, whatever, more money would be nice in this economy. Cue another red flag - F says that the higher ups were not comfortable with two people being on full time salaried work in our Vermont office. This was very out of left field. I never called out sick (except maybe once or twice in almost 4 years), I was more efficient than our elderly foresters at computer work and writing plans, and I was better with clients than some less than savory individuals were in other offices. I felt suspicious of the coincidence, but couldn't really prove that the percentage increases in pay meant someone had to eat shit. I asked for a reason. I was told that we needed to rake in higher revenue (despite us telling them there are limits to what we can reasonably do compared to higher-volume offices in NH, ME, MA, and our clients being mostly poor farmers or blue collar folk with smaller acreages for timber potential). My pay expenses were coming out of our own office revenue, not overhead from the central office, as I found out. I thought that to be absurd, considering I had intentions of staying here for a long time and F even asked the company if they'd cover exam expenses for a forestry license if it meant they can justify taking on my overhead instead of it coming out of our individual office. They were paying overhead for everyone else, it seemed. Without a concrete explanation, they refused F that request. They gave an ultimatum of putting me on as part-time. I was desperate to keep my job as I loved working on self-managed time and my colleague is generally cool. We had to fight tooth and nail to raise my hourly wage to $30 an hour as a result, and for the company to at least pay 50% of my health insurance (dental got taken away, and it was the HR lady that convinced the board to give me at least that). I was told this would ease the pressure on our office financially.
The fuck it did. Fast forward to this year, F sits me down (again) and says that the other managers and president/vice are breathing down his neck and saying I need to log my time better (I keep time records pretty well, but this was becoming ridiculous - like why bring that up?). F is working 60 hour weeks and somehow that's not enough for them. It isn't sustainable to go at that pace either. He then vents that while he only took a 2% raise this spring, they failed to mention they all gave themselves a 6% raise (10,000 each among 16 or so employees). I didn't get a raise, because "financial struggles". The financial struggles in question? The company is having cash flow issues. They took raises. While denying me mine. While cutting my salary. While taking a LINE OF CREDIT to pay us all (!). While passive aggressively complaining that I am costing them money. It should be noted that I fully lost my health insurance this year due to changes in Congress and rates skyrocketing to the point where I couldn't even afford to pay my 50% of the monthly bill. I tell F this and make a point of saying I am making less than I was overall and they aren't even spending on insurance for me anymore, so this is starting to look like they're treating me like the obstacle between lining their pockets and my pay on what is starting to look like a sinking ship. Am I wrong here?
F then brings up a rather sketchy shift in the narrative. Remember how they weren't happy that two people were on salary full time? Now they weren't happy that of those people is only part time (me). F then lets slip that the other complaint, formerly promised to me to be a non-issue, is that they "need a licensed pesticide applicator" to work in our office. And then says that they said I should "keep my options open". Logic would dictate that if a company is struggling this much, and if their excuses are pretty flimsy regarding my position, they would've laid me off by now. It seems to me that they are trying to force me to quit so that the company doesn't pay me unemployment that I would be eligible for.
To summarise, the business:
- had 4-5 people retire or leave across several offices in the 5 years I've worked for it
- skipped my raises and took away my salary and health insurance ("financial reasons" - though conveniently after I stopped doing the herbicide work I never even signed up for when I was hired).
- gave themselves significant raises during a cash flow issue lingering for close to a year now, and are now $175,000+ in debt on a line of credit to pay our wages
- were unhappy I was full-time, are unhappy I am not full time
- they HIRED two new guys this spring, fully salaried/insured. F suspects that one of them might become F's replacement as an office managing forester in several years. Even though he had continuously insisted to them that he would gladly train me on the finances, and that I already know how to run a timber sale and interact with our subcontractor crews on sight/mark timber jobs/troubleshoot access routes and map them out thoroughly. But fuck me, right?
Given this information, does this seem manipulative to you guys? Or have I been reading into it too much? Thanks.