I make it very clear up front what our time off policy is. If someone cannot abide by it, then they should not accept the job.
Vacation days are not required by law in NJ, paid or unpaid. We give new hires two paid weeks. Sick days are not required by law in NJ, paid or unpaid. We allow vacation time to be used, even before it is earned, if an employee is truly sick. Not a family member, but an employee. We are not large enough to fall under the FMLA umbrella. Lunch breaks, paid or unpaid, are not required by NJ law for adults, but we give employees a paid lunch hour. Holidays are not required by law in NJ, paid or unpaid. We pay for a few Holidays a year.
An entry level position here pays more than double the minimum wage. A degree is not necessary. The people, with one stellar exception, are nice. There are much worse things in this world than having to hustle while scanning documents and answering the phone in a fancy climate controlled office while drinking tea and listening to Adele and munching on free gourmet fruit and snacks.
We don’t ask anyone about their parental status during interviews. That’s illegal. They volunteer it. That’s perfectly legal. When 100 people apply for a job, it’s very easy to find someone slightly more qualified who won’t have child care issues.
One woman left work three times in her first week because of child related issues. Any other employee who had to leave work three times in their first week would have been fired. I let her slide because I felt sorry for her and her asthmatic child. She had assured me at her interview that she had backup child care; her ex, her mom and two sisters who were stay at home moms. Her excuses were her ex got a new job, her sisters kids were sick and her mom was on vacation. Fine. Second week of employment starts and the school calls again and she needs to leave for the day at 11 am. I’m sorry, but that’s it. There is no law saying that we have to relax our attendance policy for employees because they are parents. I cut her three breaks in her first week, which was way more than anyone else would have done, guaranteed.
I still think that Lurker’s company is probably well known in the area as one of Those Places where people only work if they can’t get a job anywhere else, or need a job right away and only use it to mark time and pay the bills until they can find something better, which doesn’t necessarily mean “better paid”.
The problem, Lurker, is that you’re looking for a person who never gets sick and has absolutely no obligations whatsoever outside of work. Such people are, in fact, rare. Almost everyone, no matter how healthy on a day to day level, gets sick from time to time and while such a person may manage to drag him/herself to work despite being ill spraying germs willy-nilly isn’t really a good thing for the office environment. Almost everyone has family. Even people without kids have family, and in fact the childless often find that they are expected to take over elder care because they don’t have kids and are therefore “free”. :dubious::rolleyes:
You’re looking for an socially avoidant orphan dedicated to a career as a low-level office flunky.
So, your princely wages of, what, $15/hour and two weeks vacation really isn’t that great because you are expecting the employee to sacrifice every other possible obligation on the altar of your job. People who make $100,000 a year can hire other people to take care of a kid or disabled family member, they can hire people to do all sorts of other vital chores that someone making only $15/hour have to do on their own or not do at all.
Fact is, there are MUCH kinder work places. I don’t have any paid sick days, I have no paid holidays, but if I need to take time to care for an ill family member I can do so without losing my job. If I need to take an afternoon for a doctor’s appointment or to get my car fixed I can arrange it because I can negotiate someone else covering for me then cover for someone else in my turn. I can do that because we have sufficient employees that if someone has to take that time it doesn’t inflict suffering on the rest of us.
So, guess what - I’d rather make half to 2/3 what your “fine” wages are, in a gritty, dusty, filthy work environment with, at best, shaky environmental controls and clattering/banging/squealing machinery instead of Adele’s music because I know I will be able to take care of my family when needed instead of being kicked to the curb like a used snotrag. Bottom line, I get ONE family, I can get another job if I have to.
You focus on climate control and music and sipping tea as if they were some lavish things and compensate for leaving your loved one’s out in the cold. They aren’t. You don’t see how dehumanizing your company’s attendance policy is, and because you don’t, I feel sorry for you.
I’m fairly certain that discriminating on familial status is illegal, but IANAL. As a hiring manager, I would certainly discourage any talk of anything outside of the actual job requirements. Feel free to take your chances.
I started here in that exact same job after 9/11. The job was beneath my skill, experience and education level, but I took it because I really needed the money. I made it work for me. I learned the business and I moved up. I make an average of $100K a year now. I negotiated a better benefits package for myself along the way. Even my insurance is now 100% paid by the company. The only thing stopping any of these people is motivation.
It is an 8 hour day with 1 hour for lunch. They are not working 20 hours breaking rocks on a chain gang. Come in, work hard for 3 1/2 hours, take 1 hour off, work hard for 3 1/2 hours , go home.
I work very hard. I have a great social life, unless one or two of the administrative staff doesn’t show up. Then I am stuck. It falls upon me. I have to stay until their job is done, no excuses.
If the world is full of kinder work places, then why are these people out of work for years and years? Shouldn’t all these kind employers be waiting with open arms to scoop up employees who suddenly have to leave for the day at 11:00 am three times during their first week of work?
You took the job when the economy was booming, then, when average wages were rising and not falling. It’s a different environment. Also, as you stated, you were overqualified, thus making the likelihood of advancement much higher than the average person taking such a job.
Good for overqualified you. Now, think about this - how realistic is it that someone taking that job NOW who is not overqualified is ever going to rise up no matter how good and dedicated they are? Are you planning to move on any time soon? No? Then what position could they advance to?
That sort of low-level job rarely leads to an advance of any sort (with a few exceptions such as yourself). The only way for people to go up is to get a better job elsewhere, which means no, they aren’t going to be working for you very long.
Also - did you have a family with young children while you were moving up? Did you have elderly parents to take care of? Did you have any sort of obligation outside of work and yourself? Most people have to juggle multiple roles and responsibilities, so eliminating those from consideration significantly shrinks your pool of available labor.
No, what’s stopping them is human obligation to children. What’s stopping them is less than perfect health.
Uh-huh - I work an 8 hour day with an hour for lunch - an hour, I might add, I don’t have to take at a specific hour but can move around if I need to in order to run an errand on my own time. I’m not breaking rocks on a chain gang either. I do have the advantage of not needing a fancy work wardrobe, I shop for work clothes at Goodwill. I can take a day off if I’m sick without losing my job. I can take a few days off if I have to rush off to care for my elderly father or sister with severe health problems without losing my job. I prefer a job where I have some flexibility with my schedule and won’t be booted for taking care of my family, and I’m sorry it’s a shocking concept to you, but there are millions of other people who also value their families and don’t find “Adele’s music” and free tea all that compelling a counter argument.
So do a lot of other people.
Then why doesn’t your company, which is presumably doing alright, hire an extra person? Why don’t they have a contract with a temp agency to supply an admin when yours comes up short? (When I used to work as a temp I used to be sent on such assignments). For that matter, let me suggest that this is EXACTLY the sort of job situation where a contract with a temp/staffing agency might be your better option. You contract with the agency to have an admin of the required qualifications (which you have stated aren’t arduous) arrive at your workplace every morning and let THEM worry about the worker supply. You’ll have an admin every day without fail. If a particular admin doesn’t show up/calls in sick/gets a better job/whatever the agency will send a warm body just as qualified to do the work. Yes, even on short notice (I used to spend a certain number of days on call each week to fill in for last-minute temp absences). Let the agency worry about the staffing issues. Better yet, if you need a bit of extra admin work they can supply an additional warm body, yes, even on weekends or odd hours.
Seriously, consider it - everyone might be happier all around if you do it that way.
You may have missed this, being employed throughout the recession and all, but right now there’s something like 4-5 people for every job opening. Meaning if every single job vacancy was filled today there would be four times that number of people still looking for work.
The result is that every time a job opens up the prospective employer is deluged with applicants and can get very arbitrary on eliminating them - won’t take anyone over 35 (no matter how qualified) or won’t take anyone with even a small disability (even though that’s illegal) or with kids (even though that’s illegal) or who lives in the “wrong” zip code or a dozen other bullshit reasons. Worst yet is the “we won’t even consider anyone who isn’t currently employed”. If you’re less than “perfect” - absolutely healthy, proper ethnicity, young, pretty/handsome, without any family attachments whatsoever - it’s depressingly easy to go “years and years” without a job.
If you are NOT getting swamped with applications every time you advertise an open position then I’m sorry, your company have a very bad reputation in regards to being a place to work.
Yeah, it means you’re expected to be available all the time but only get paid when they call you - which may be not once in a month, then for a week you get called for the night shift, then another one it’s split hours, then another week you get one day. And you have to be available, come in fast and smile.
I repeat what I said in post # 40 :If an employer repeatedly fails to retain employees, maybe the problem isn’t the employee.
In that post, I was guessing, with very little information to work from. But after reading the next 10 posts , giving more details about your work place, I feel sorry for the poor people who are trapped working for you and can’t find a more sympathetic work environment.
You are clearly understaffed, and senior management needs to be told so. An entire organization should not be dependent on one newly hired, totally inexperienced worker who leaves work 3 hours early, even it’s for something as minor as a sick child. Suppose it was something serious,-- like a cup of coffee spilled on the printer, resulting in a 3 hour delay of work. Do you have an extra printer in the office? You need an extra worker,too–the idea mentioned above of using a temp agency seems perfect for your needs.
In the meantime, please don’t ask us to feel sorry because you can’t find a worker.
I, along with all of my nonmanagement coworkers, did just this at Former Employer. We never knew what our schedule would be for the upcoming week until it was posted on Friday afternoon. If any of us had a doctor’s appointment or became ill, management would honor it as long as you found somebody willing to switch shifts with you. You couldn’t, say, come in, work half your shift then leave . Getting somebody to switch, however, depending on how “good” your schedule was – if you were scheduled all evening shifts, for example, you would find you without any takers because nobody wanted to work them if they could help it.
Not to toot my own horn, but I was hailed a hero because at the time I had no outside-of-work obligations except to maintain the usual acts of daily living. I could work any shift, work as much OT as I wanted (there were times I worked 7-10 days at a stretch just because I was allowed to). As a result, like Lurker, I moved up the chain pretty quickly with every new skill I honed. I eventually made it to management, and although my salary came nowhere near Lurker’s, it was a pretty sweet deal for someone like me who relished the work and money to such an extent that “workaholic” was whispered about me more than a few times.
But at what cost? I never asked myself that question until a couple of years ago when I was out for a non work-related injury. I’m older now, and I no longer have that “gotta prove myself” fire because I burnt it out during those years. I gave up any kind of social life; consequently, I don’t have much one now because I could never keep up with friends, and they eventually drifted away. Ditto any kind of relationship that was more than a FWB kind of thing because I “never had enough time” or “my work schedule is too crazy to plan anything”. I never took vacations because we were allowed to get payouts for them, so I always had a nice chunk o’ change coming to me at New Year’s. I never considered myself a socially avoidant orphan – if I hadn’t enjoyed the craziness to begin with, I never would have continued with it. And, before you know it, you get sucked into it to the extent that you literally cannot see the forest for the trees until you’re forced to step back from it.
My guess is also that quite a few of the “sick child” calls Lurker deals with are actually other job interviews people are going on. At several companies I’ve worked at (even really excellent companies with good benefits) we would occasionally have someone that got hired, had their first 2 or 3 weeks where they either had a really sick kid, lots of car trouble, or other issues that would prevent them from coming into the office and then-surprise!-they would leave for another job. I know if I needed a job and just took the first one that was willing to hire me I sure as hell wouldn’t stop looking for a better job, especially if the environment was as bad as the one described here. All the tea in China isn’t going to make up for the fact that I can’t have anything going on in my life at all outside of my job without getting fired. If I can’t take an extra half hour at lunch to go to the doctor or arrange to come in half and hour early and leave half an hour early to pick up my kid I expect to be paid significantly more than $15 an hour, especially if the office is so busy that my taking a few extra minutes in the bathroom or stopping to say hello to a coworker on the way to the printer would cause a problem.
But you did know it the previous week. The people I’ve known who were on open scheduling could get calls saying “you have to be at X in half an hour” “uh, but… that’s one hour away with good traffic!”
I’ve been offered jobs like that, but I’ve never been so bad off that I needed to accept one.
Occasionally Former Employer did that to me when I was PT. It was nothing for me because I lived less than 10 minutes away.
My husband, however, briefly had a job like that a few years ago. It was a PITA because we live roughly 40 miles from it, and, without traffic, it took him almost an hour to drive there. He quit as soon as he got a lower-paying but less stressful position closer to home.
Well, I’m available M-F 8-5, I’m a supergreat employee, and I don’t expect to make a billion dollars an hour. I don’t have a lot of pertinent experience but I’m more than capable of doing that type of job and I have a BA degree.
For me personally the answer is, “Not that bad.” I’m looking for a job right now, actually, and I’ve turned down several $28,000-$34,000 jobs because they don’t pay enough. I wish those companies had put their pay range in the job ads because I wouldn’t even have bothered applying if I had known how little they pay. If our situation changed and my husband came home from work tonight and told me he had been laid off I’d take the very next job offer I received, even if I knew that I was going to end up fucking over that employer the moment I got a better offer. I wouldn’t want to do that, I’d rather take my time and find the right job at the right pay scale where I could work for the next 10 years, but if I were pushed against the wall I’d do what needed to be done. I have a college degree and 10 years of experience in my industry though, and when I was 22 and right out of college I would have jumped at that kind of opportunity and thought it was awesome. So perhaps Lurker needs to look into hiring some people right out of school?
Exactly. It’s a hell of a lot more than a lot of people around here make.
The office is beautiful, the people (with one stellar exception) are nice, free gourmet fruit and snacks, tea and music. All they have to do is show up and work. Preparing Federal Express labels, answering the phones, setting up the conference room, scanning documents, making copies, etc. in that kind of environment is a crying shame! Five days a week, seven hours a day. How awful.
It’s not a particularly awful salary even for NJ where housing costs and property taxes are sky high. But it’s an almost visceral sense of deep seated contempt that comes across in your posts in this thread that is very off putting. Who wants to work for someone who views your job with such disgust?
The best clerical runner I ever had was a high school girl who was in some sort of advanced placement situation and wanted an internship. I thought she would be texting her friends all day but she came in ready to work, and did she ever. We were only allowed to give her travel expenses, but I was so pleased with her performance and attitude that on her last day I had a car service take us to Sephora and I told her to fill up a basket on us. Her screams were deafening.
I don’t view my job with disgust. I created it. I came up with an idea for a new line of business. I make good money at it.
What my disgust is directed towards is the idea that being expected to a) show up for work each day unless you are truly ill or on vacation, and b) put in a full seven hours is something that is viewed as a thing of absolute horror by many people on this board, and from many people who have taken the job with no intention of doing so.
Work is not a “please try and come in if you can possibly make it” option in life.
It is a job. You are expected to be there. It is 7 hours out of your day. You have 17 other hours in the day and all 24 hours each day on weekends to conduct your personal affairs and have a life. Exceptions are made for true emergencies, but trust me on this, peoples idea of an emergency are not emergencies 99.9% of the time.
Contrary to comments being made, no one is tethered to their desks and gagged and no stopwatches are used during bathroom breaks.
We offer an extremely good salary for an entry level job that others in out industry pay much less for. The tasks do not require an advanced degree or years of experience. They must work quickly and accurately in lovely surroundings with pleasant people, with one exception, and that exception is far away from them.
And no matter how many times I mention this, it fails to take. There are two support people, not one. It is a two person job. We have two people.
The support people are not being mistreated or brutalized. They are expected to show up for work. That is not mistreatment or brutality.
Everyone has their own printer, etc. We have an extra everything. Desktop copier, scanner, fax, printer, iphone, supplies. I don’t take chances. I have three extra outfits in my office so I don’t miss out on any events that come up unexpectedly. I plan ahead to get ahead. What we aren’t going to do is sink another 35K a year into having a third support person hanging around every day in case one or both of the support people can’t fit coming in to work into their schedule. It’s absurd.
We get literally hundreds of applicants. If the newest person does not work out, for the next round I am dropping the salary to $10 an hour because I feel that part of the problem is that I am being too generous. I am expecting a $15 an hour attitude towards coming to work, and I am getting a minimum wage attitude towards attendance.
LavenderBlue wasn’t talking about how you view your job. She was talking about how you view your employee’s job. The only time I worked in a place with bosses who did stuff like " timed how long it took me how long it took me to walk to the copier" I left as soon as I could.
Here’s your problem: your metrics are out of whack. You have expectations that far exceed what is normally expected in the role. You make the claim that all you want is someone who “works hard, and comes to work” but your attitude betrays your words. That is not all you expect. You expect them not to “mosey.” You expect them to be “chop chop chop” all the time. You expect them to be exactly like you were many years ago when you were an ambitious go-getter wanting to make it in your industry.
You wonder why your “words fail to take.” Don’t you think its strange your company has a retention problem with this role? After so many years of having problems, maybe its time to take a step back and rethink what you are doing. Who told you that your "surroundings are lovely and the people are pleasant? Are these comments from the exit interviews or are they your own assessment?
