Troop 6000 by Nikita Stewart

Author:Nikita Stewart [Stewart, Nikita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The next week, David walked into work at Vapiano on Thursday and a manager told him that he’d been terminated. “No show, no call” was the reason given. That meant David hadn’t called in to find out whether Vapiano needed him, nor had he shown up to check his schedule. David acknowledged that two days earlier, unable to meet Vapiano’s on-call last-minute demands, he had simply not shown up to work as requested. David hadn’t had time to figure out his schedule with Kiara. Before the renovations, David had arranged for a friend to pick Kiara up at school when he was unable to, and the friend was the one who first dropped her off at the Scout meetings. At other times, David left work, picked Kiara up from school, and returned to work, while she sat in the dining area and did her homework.

David had worked at Vapiano locations from Washington, D.C., to New York City, and he had never felt stable. His schedule was dependent on the whim of managers. As he was the single parent of a child with a health challenge, this uncertainty created conflicts that were sometimes unavoidable—not to mention a huge amount of stress and desperate eleventh-hour searching for childcare.

No rights, no health care, and little gain at minimum wage—these were the hazards of working in fast food and retail. Two weeks before David was fired, Mayor de Blasio and the city council signed a package of legislative bills to put an end to the unstable schedules and unsteady paychecks of fast-food workers. Under the new laws, employers had to give workers their schedules fourteen days in advance, end back-to-back shifts, and offer current employees shifts before hiring new employees. David would have had the right to object to his termination except for the fact that the laws were six months away from going into effect.

David had never been to culinary school, but after toiling for nearly a decade as a line cook at Vapiano, he’d aspired to move up to management and become a chef or a caterer. There was no way that would happen now.

“Mom, I’m not going to have any money for me and Kiara to eat this weekend,” David confided in his mother on the phone as he moved chairs and tables to get the breakfast room ready for a troop meeting.

“What are we going to do?” Kiara asked.

David hadn’t meant for her to overhear him. “Maybe this is what I needed,” he said a little more optimistically. “What, was I was gonna work at Vapiano for the rest of my life?”

When David told Giselle the news she tried to encourage him, telling him that he would land another job, but she had her own problems. Her struggle to find an apartment wasn’t getting any easier. Taking notice of her increased duties with Troop 6000, the Girl Scouts of Greater New York had given Giselle a $10,000 raise. She was now making nearly $50,000, but other potential tenants were beating her to apartments; they had better credit scores and more money saved.

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