Nonsense. I’ve had numerous students thrilled with their internships and who got to do great work and get college credit for it. It was a huge win.
Health insurance is linked to work because employers offered it to entice employees. Offering insurance came first.
That’s not true in all states. It’s not true in California, for example.
I don’t know if it’s real or apocryphal, but the story about taking a retiring employee out for a celebratory retirement lunch, plying him with drinks, and once back at the office, making him submit to an alcohol test to screw him out of his retirement.
With the MBAs I’ve met in the past few years, I have no reason to doubt that it has happened.
Up selling. It’s embarrassing for the poor employee and (I’m pretty sure) most customers hate it. I KNOW what I want, your “and would you like to try our XYZ today” is annoying (but totally not your fault, I am also aware that your stupid corporates are making you do it). I can SEE your “new XYZ” right on the menu, if I wanted it, I am perfectly capable of ordering it.
One of my former employers fired the entire night shift on Christmas Eve. There were problems and he was too lazy to sort it out. All he accomplished was doubling the work load of the graveyard shift . . . who had to stick around on Christmas to get all the work done.
There’s a difference between the doors being locked so people can’t get in and being locked so people can’t get in or out.
I don’t work at Walmart, but one entrance to the place where I works has the same general style of doors - sensor open, sliding apart. Anyone who is inside the building can always leave through those doors - the inner sensors never turn off (I assume in a power failure they would but the doors also have crash bars and open manually), so on, say, our annual in-service day, we can all exit through the main doors. To get back in we’d have to go to another entrance and swipe our IDs, but getting out is not a problem.
As for the OP, it’s hard for me to say what the cruelest thing is. I feel like one of the most inhumane is running people at just below the level where they’d get benefits - say, you get them at 35 hours per week, but only get scheduled for 34. I know, business decision, blah blah blah. I still can’t see it as right.
I read this article a while ago. Losing your job because you attend the birth of your child, damaging your knees running, not being allowed to have a phone with you for if your children call because the house is on fire, breaks that mean choosing between the toilet and lunch, electric shocks! :eek:
I have no idea what is and isn’t legal in there, but I find it all shocking.
Split shifts. I worked a Pizza H, and they’d schedule waitress for 11-2 and 5 “til.” Til= whenever the manager decided you could leave. Used up a whole day but you never got 8 hours.
That was the food prep area of the McDonald’s!
Why? If you have no skills, experience or knowledge that would make you any different than any of the other dozens of applicants for your job or the other employees, the employer’s main concern is going to be that you show up, do your job well, don’t steal or destroy stuff, and don’t cost them extra money by crying, whining, or doing any other stuff that would cost undue management attention and/or cause you to do your job less effectively. Why should they give a shit if they can replace you with someone marginally less whiny/sick/bitchy/larcenous at a moment’s notice? In those jobs you are literally interchangeable and they know it.
It sucks, but that’s how it rolls when you’re on the short end of that particular bargaining chip. They really ought to explain this in middle and high schools so that people tempted to do stupid stuff like drop out or fuck around too much might actually understand what the consequences are.
I dunno. Giving a shit is part of the social contract of human society? 
I live in a country where shits are given, so it surprises me and seems cruel to me. That’s what the thread is about.
It’s not true anywhere in the US.
A few years ago my business insurance stopped covering people who were not paid. So I could no longer afford to have unpaid interns (or even students who would come in to observe for a few days).
I’ve had a few very unhappy individuals.
And the paid office worker, who didn’t get a job?
The one whose office grunt work got mislabeled as “educational”, & fobbed off on some poor college kid, who was too dumb to tell you to go take your unpaid office clerk job & take a leap?
The guy who didn’t get a job?
That guy?
:mad:
^Seriously?
There’s a difference between internships for college credit (short-term labor contracts, usually a few months long) versus unpaid “internships” (which are generally illegal, but who wants to sue their employers and effectively get blacklisted?) where college graduates trying to break into a competitive field act as office grunts for a year or two or however long until they crack.
Unpaid internships for educated workers really are just another form of slavery, only instead of feeding the slaves, you give them false promises that maybe if they’re good they’ll be fed at some later time. They really do need to be made illegal. Especially as people are taking advantage of these interns, in all sorts of ways.
As I understand it, unpaid internships are illegal if the intern is not actually learning something, but is “employed” doing grunt work. But it is essentially impossible to enforce.
I have the distinct impression that there is a strong correlation between how a company treats an employee and how the employee treats a customer. On more than one occasion, having been exceptionally well-treated, I have asked if this was a great place to work for and the answer is yes.
My previous employer had a good one. Put your employee on the lowest salary possible in the state that’s still considered a salary (look it up; it’s usually remarkably low). Then demand unpaid overtime every single day.
Depending on the state, your work hours can be increased by another 50% or more without the employer having to pay you anything extra by law.
Of course, if you refuse you will be fired.
Now add on every bit of extra psychological crap (yelling, demands, asking for one thing then getting mad and saying they didn’t want it, constant nitpicking, belittlement, etc) and you’ll go far in creating an environment from hell.
Oh right, and no sick days, no vacation days, no health insurance, and always the threat of unemployment so rather than take an unpaid day, you’d work sick.
Requiring that you get one bathroom break of no longer than x minutes, or you’re fired.
Usually these practices don’t work well in the long run, but with the economic climate like it is, the threat of unemployment is a very serious one and will goad employees to greater degrees of working hell than it usually would.
When you’re a business that offers benefits to fulltime employees (40 hours) and then caps everyone at 35 hours, yeah, that’s an asshole move. Hourly employees also suffer from shitty employers signing them up for split shifts as described upthread.
One of the most draining jobs I’ve heard of is game testing, where since testers fall under special provisos that allow near unlimited overtime in most states, some employers have the testers on unlimited crunch time with a mere 8 or 9 hours break between shifts for months on end (I’m talking 100+ hour workweeks folks). Their job will consist of doing the same game tests, over and over on broken games, in a warehouse without windows. Often they will be crammed together in small rooms and since there is barely enough time between shifts to sleep, much less bathe…well.