Working at the gym means you can stay and exercise after your shift. Sometimes employees can eat leftover snacks from the hotel, and the work itself is not particularly tiring.

The system is absolutely terrible: regardless of the position—front desk, lifeguard, trainer, or supervisor—everyone starts with hourly pay. This is already questionable, but full-time employees are paid less than hourly workers (what?). Because of the system, even when there is a staff shortage, no one is hired. There is a half-hour gap between the end of the morning shift and the start of the evening shift when no one is there, so the morning-shift staff have to stay an extra half hour without pay. The half-hour break during the shift is also unpaid. If you stay late to work overtime, there is no overtime allowance after eight hours; it is paid at the regular hourly rate.

The administration is absolutely terrible: I still remember the interview vividly. When I asked about employee benefits, salary, and workplace hazards, the administrator did not know the answer to any of them. I eventually let it go after learning that she had only recently started, but she was arrogant toward people and careless in her work. A colleague who interviewed later said their interview experience with her was similar. She made no effort whatsoever to learn the things she did not know. After the colleague who had trained her left, her attitude became even worse. She even dared to talk back to colleagues who were more senior than her. She clearly picked on the weak and feared the strong, and loved making things difficult for new employees. Once, an evening-shift colleague, “A,” felt unwell and went to the emergency room. Since A could not come to work that day, the morning-shift colleague, “B,” had to stay and work overtime. B later asked to be paid overtime for that day, so the administrator asked A to pay the overtime fee. Is that reasonable?

The supervisors are absolutely terrible: simply put, it is “not necessary to solve the problem—just solve the person who raised it.” Raising issues about salary and the system is useless, and the same goes for other gym-related problems.

The coworkers are absolutely terrible: they steal credit, form cliques, and the trainers disappear...

The most outrageous incident I have heard about: A typhoon came, and the company initially did not announce a work stoppage. Later, the winds became too strong, so it announced that work would stop in the afternoon. However, the unwritten rule in the hotel industry is that employees still have to work even when a work stoppage is announced. So the evening-shift staff took taxis to work during the strongest winds—when taxis were most expensive. Later, because the winds became too strong, management assessed that hardly anyone would come to the gym and decided to suspend gym operations as well. The colleagues who had rushed to work then had to turn around and go home, during the strongest winds. Normally, employees who work on a typhoon day should receive double pay. However, since no work stoppage had been announced during the morning shift, the day’s pay remained unchanged. (Even if a holiday had been announced for the morning shift, the pay still would not have been doubled, as you can tell from the overtime policy.) The evening-shift staff had it even worse: they could not get reimbursed for the taxi fare there and back because they did not end up working that day. They also had to use their own annual leave to make up for the day off. Worst of all, because they did not have enough working hours for the month due to the day off, money was deducted from their pay. Absolutely outrageous!