Just about everybody has a job at some point where people are going on their merry way with blatant violations of labor law. Retail jobs are notorious for this. Myself and all my peers have all been in a situation where things work against us and nobody seems to care. I am in the process of switching jobs right now, so I’ll vent about the stuff that was aggrivating about my job.
-Unreliable breaks. The job is part-time, and since employees work only from 2 to 6ish hours tops in a day, sometimes its not a big deal. For the first year there, the idiot that I was believed that we simply didn’t GET breaks because it wasn’t the kind of job where you could just drop what you were doing for 15 minutes, and nobody could cover for you because they were too busy with their own work. Later I found out we were supposed to get breaks, the managers just never made any time/personell allowance for it. When I asked about a year’s worth of breaks I never got my manager just shrugged and said ‘sorry’. For a while I considered suing for back pay for all the 15 minute breaks I never got. Later I worked at other locations helping out other employees and learned that each location had its own flimsy policy, with some never giving them out (by scheduling employees short enough to not have to give them a break during the day) or flat-out telling them there’s no breaks, just add 15 minutes to your punch for the day to compensate.
-Time off. In order to take a day off, you have to find someone to cover for you. This might sound perfectly fair and normal but at my job it is a huge pain in the ass. The job is perpetually under-staffed, so it is really difficult to find someone that isn’t already working that day/time WILLING to do it. Last year I planned to go on a vacation during the week after xmas we are usually closed. It turned out in mid-november they changed their minds and decided to keep us open that week, so I had my boss threatening to fire me if I didn’t find someone to cover for me that week. Everybody there has trouble finding people to cover for them. There is no unified system for finding subs- employees basically have to cold-call other employees to find someone to cover for them. A coworker of mine fell and cracked his ribs but had to go to work in spite of the injury because he couldn’t find subs and possibly couldn’t afford to be out of work for a week (we have no disability/sick leave benefits whatsoever)
-Since I don’t substitute in the summer and couldn’t find another part-time job to compliment my current one, I opted to get as much hours as possible to be able to afford to survive the summer working only part-time. I got them, but my employer told me I could only work a hair under full-time. None of us can work full-time there. If the job was full-time, it would still suck, but at least it would be a liveable wage of suckage.
I’m not the only one there with these gripes- in fact the only people that don’t care are grad students who are just going to quit in 1/2 years anyway (or earlier and get something better). It is no surprise the job has a high turnover, for both my position and the managers there (since starting in 2005, about six managers have been hired and quit while I’ve been there, and probably 20 other employees)
So how about you? Have any lame gripes about your job? I know that all my problems point to ‘get a better job’ which I am; I guess I just feel like sometimes I have the most ungratifying job ever since everyone is unhappy, but nobody speaks out about it.
My only gripe is that we’re not supposed to wear open-toed shoes. Someone did some kind of study that showed piggie-related injury to be some kind of significant expense to the institution. Now, this is a hospital, but I don’t schlep patients or sharp instruments around all day. All I do is sit at a computer. Let my toes breathe!
But what does speaking up get you, besides trouble? For my part, I’m always the one guy who does speak up and willingly takes the heat. Like the Mellencamp man says “I do things my way and I pay a high price”. Most people are not willing to do that and I certainly do not blame them.
You bring a problem to management, YOU become the problem.
You suggest that your manager is doing something that makes people unhappy, you are threatening his/her ego and you will pay for it.
Shut up and do your job, leave your problems at home, quit your bitching, blah, blah, blah.
Only thing is… we’re all Human. We need to allow ourselves to feel that discontent without guilt or shame.
The things you dislike about your job are basically true for all low-level sales and/or unskilled labor jobs. Waiting tables was exactly the same, except more tiring.
The stupidest thing I can think of about my current job is really just the low pay. My degree cost me about 2.5x more than I make in a year, which, y’know, sucks.
The thing that’s bothering me currently, however, is simply how bored I am. I’ve had all my testing done since 11:30 this morning and since then have had only intermittent spasms of actual work, and even that’s something a robot could do. On days like these, I leave feeling like I’ve just spent 17 hours in this place. Blah.
In my opinion, if you’re en employee then you shouldn’t have to worry about who’ll do your job when you’re not there. That’s managements job.
This is the first time I’ve ever worked for a company that has union labor (I’m 36 yrs old) and it’s disappointing to see how ineffective the unions are at their jobs. There are several crafts that are covered by more than one union where I work. But some crafts overlap each other, meaning that you need only join one of the two unions. This has been a useful tool for the company to divide and conquer both unions.
The unions fight each other for scraps and the company has way more control than is healthy for the workers.
Hah! I start work at two am. And no days off, either - it’s a seven day a week job. But that’s not irritating, at least not yet. Right now my biggest irritation is the fact that it’s outdoor labor in Florida summertime humidity, which means I’m sweating all night. Which wouldn’t be too bad, if it didn’t make me so thirsty. Which would still not be irritating if it weren’t for the fact that there are no freaking bathrooms near my route! Any place that’s open 24 hours is either way off my route or has such a disgusting bathroom that I get the dry heaves just thinking about it. So every night I have to walk the fine line of drinking just enough water so that I’m not totally dehydrated when I get home, but not so much that I’ve got a full bladder screaming at me for half the night.
The stupidest thing about my job, which is a salaried office job, is having to fill in time sheets. Divided into six-minute increments. To account for every frickin thing I do all day. Thing is, I do about a million things a day. We’re a busy council office, so I’m registering births, deaths and marriages, making arrangements for people to be buried, taking payments for and answering questions about council tax and rent, producing invoices for hiring of halls and for burials, helping people figure out their benefit applications, taking phone calls on every subject under the sun (because, since we’re a council office, ya know, we must know everything) and lots more. I simply don’t have time to make a note of what I’ve just done every time I do something.
So yes I fill in the time sheet. Is it an accurate reflection of what I’ve done each six-minute block of the day? No chance.
Student evaluations. My college is obssesive about them, and every single frickin’ student in every frickin’ class has to evaluate the course and the instructor. The great, wisdom-fraught insight that students can give aside, everyone’s evals are basically the same every quarter and even though raises are supposedly based on the student evals, we all get the same measley 2% every year.
Also: committee work. Faculty get together and make big plans and argue for two hours; Dean shoots the plan down due to financial reasons. Wash, rinse, repeat.
This reminds me of what happens at my job during meetings. The manager insists on keeping open communication at our center- if you have a comment/concern, voice it. The problem is 99% of our legitimate concerns are shot down, even if all of us are in agreement with it. Example:
At our job, we tutor kids. We get paid one hourly rate for teaching them, and one hourly rate for prep work. The teaching is consistent time, but the prep work isn’t, which causes some problems (some people work more slowly than others, some people have tight schedules before/after work, etc).
Our idea, based on another center’s model, was to hire a high schooler at minimum wage to help out by prepping each student’s materials. The task is simple enough for a motivated high schooler to do, and there’s plenty of miscellaneous things to do around the center to keep it from being tedious. We were told no, because they don’t have money in the budget.
This annoyed me, because with all the prep work they wouldn’t have to pay us to do, they’d have more than enough to pay some kid to do it for us. Every week we constantly get kids coming in for a job, only to have them turned back (yet we are still under-staffed :mad: ) I certainly wouldn’t mind getting payed slightly less to have a significantly more organized and less hectic day. But the managers at our center just don’t see it that way.
Ah yes, college hijinks. These are familiar to me. Fortunately, our contract stipulates that the evals need only be done every other year once the faculty member has been there for a certain amount of time.
Other stupid stuff: having to fill out surveys of all kinds–ridesharing, college organization, and so on-- even at the end of the term when we really don’t have time, and if you don’t fill them out, the people who sent them will bitch you out until you do.
I have to do that, but for a whole bunch of people. It’s a computer program, and I have to enter what everybody was doing to the minute. Not too bad if everyone’s doing the same thing, but they never do, so it’s a royal pain in the arse. Then I discovered that as long as the hours balance, nobody ever knows or cares, so I became slack. Ten people for eight hours? That’s eighty hours’ worth of work, and if I can show eighty hours of various activities, the administration team is happy, so I simplify the crap out of it.
Oh so many stupid things to choose from. How about stupid managers and HR people who tell you to let bad employees get away with absolutely everything, and not to even say anything to them, let alone write them up, because of the hassle involved with finding and hiring new people if they get upset and quit over it? :rolleyes:
I have that (plus the 6 min timesheet increments). Everyone’s a freakin middle manager and no one does shit. Typical career path is everyone came over from a Big-4 accounting/consulting firm or IT firm where they started right out of college and worked as an analyst for 2-3 years. They come here and get promoted to project maangers in a year or two, never having managed shit before. And then they refer their 25 year old friends with the same junior background who think they will come on as Senior Director of Strategy of some shit.
And then I end up interviewing them and telling them that since they don’t have ten years of management and/or technology consulting experience (or any REAL leadership experience) or an MBA (or any masters degree for that matter), they should stop smoking crack. Of course they give me the “it’s either a management position or nothing” ultimatum and I have them ejected by that guy from Showtime at the Apollo. And then they go work at our competition, which is perfect. I want nothing more than my competetors run by stupid arrogant kids.