Gen United

I worked on nightfill/grocery for (I don’t want to name it incase I get in trouble somehow) supermarket in Adelaide after high school. We never did any kind of training on safe practices, but got sent a link to some online work quiz module that I clicked my way through. The shifts were 10.5 hours, I was working between 30-50 hrs per week, and it was such physical work that I started to have to take no-doz caffeine pills to get through shifts. One day towards the end of a 10.5 hr shift where I’d been busting my ass unloading boxes cause my prick manager had been yelling at me to hurry up, I herniated three of my spinal discs. It didn’t hurt immediately, but when I woke up the next day I couldn’t move. I went to a physio who diagnosed it via an examination. I went for a meeting with my bosses, where a lawyer from the SDA attended – when my boss told me to not get any diagnostic scans confirming it was slipped discs “so that they wanted to just write it off as a strain “so they could keep me on”, basically threatening me with losing my job to make me not get any more help for my injury. After 5 years I went through the proper channels and got a compo payout for about 16k. It’s ten years later now, I’ve hung on to most of that but I got constant nerve pain and a weaker right leg.

Nick, 19

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