Fuck right off. You’re putting words in my mouth and I don’t appreciate it one bit.
I’m finding it hard to see how he’s painting you in a less sympathetic light than you did with your own words.
Various hours-manipulations, many already described above. Others include asking a employee to clock out due to a slow day, but to stick around in case things pick up again.
You can do very well on federal minimum wage IF you are able to get enough hours in. When one part time job makes it impossible to get a second part time job, you’re kind of screwed.
There’s a difference between saying WHY a company might do something, and in thinking that it’s a good, fair or humane idea. Businesses ARE amoral, and it’s the way the world works. I was just pointing out how they think when it comes to unskilled workers. Understanding why something happens doesn’t necessarily equate to agreeing and championing it. Neither does being pragmatic about the way the world works; I have better things to do than be some kind of activist or revolutionary.
That’s also not inconsistent with saying that if you manage to get to adulthood without any marketable skills, that it’s likely a sign of poor planning and is likely to get you an no-expenses paid trip to a cruddy life. Nothing very controversial there. It’s like saying that if you cover your hands in gasoline and get near a fire, it’s going to ignite.
And just how do you go through school and not screw around and end up as an unskilled laborer? I suppose that’s true if you expect somehow to graduate from high school and have that actually be useful or mean anything at all. But that hasn’t been true for 30 years; anyone with a lick of sense should know that you need a college degree or some sort of trade degree or certification or apprenticeship of some kind if you hope to be successful.
Not having one of those things is pretty much dooming you to be an unskilled laborer or retail drone or any number of those exact jobs where employers treat you like shit… because there’s nothing you bring to the party that any other warm body brings to the party.
Other than touchy-feely do-gooder stuff about human rights and the like, what pragmatic reason does a company have for putting in a bunch of work-life balance stuff for people who are literally interchangeable and utterly replaceable for the jobs in question? From the corporate perspective, if it costs $100 to give the unskilled worker a comfy chair so they don’t complain, take breaks, etc… that’s $100 they could have saved by simply firing the person who’s bitching, since they can get someone just like them (from the corporate perspective) who won’t bitch since they’re glad to have that $7.25/hr.
It’s not right for companies to do that, but ultimately the best recourse is not to be a person who can be easily replaced, and that takes some forethought and directed action; nobody else is going to do that for you.
My experience with internship (at a recycling research outfit) is that we were mostly given pointless make-work assignments. This was in exchange for class credits, so I didn’t feel cheated (except for the time I could have been spending doing something marginally useful, like checking my bellybutton for lint). The type of internships you see on movies (where the interns are worked like chattel slaves until they drop and/or have an emotional breakdown, then get fired) is a whole other kettle of fish. That’s just slavery, and it’s evil.
Well, the thing is, the company usually has to hire a person to handle hiring people if they go through a lot of turnover. I hear it costs a lot to hire another person. Turnover isn’t free. There’s interviews to do, paperwork to file, background checks to go through…
If they make their employees happier by providing a better work environment then the employees will (usually) work harder, work longer, and won’t quit as often.
There’s been reports on the San Francisco law from 2007 that made sick leave mandatory for most businesses to provide, and in general it seems to be favorable. Employees are happier, customer service is better, you don’t have people working sick and knocking out the whole office, children aren’t sent to school sick as often, costs weren’t nearly as high as they worried about, so on and so forth. So if you want some proof that providing better working conditions will improve employee morale and productivity, there you go.
This article even points out that the money spent on implementing sick leave is earned back by reducing turnover, leaving businesses about even in the long run, but with happier employees overall. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-20/is-paid-sick-leave-good-for-business
Businesses aren’t nearly as smart as the free market makes them look. There’s a whole lot of small businesses out there run by not so bright people (a large amount are only average high school graduates), and we have to force them to implement better business practices sometimes. Not just for the humane aspect, but for the bottom line.
Let’s keep personal politics shots out of this thread and just stick with the subject at hand.
If you have a problem with anyone, feel free to Pit them or take it to GD if you wish to argue how political viewpoints might color opinions on this matter.
No warning issued.
Warning issued.
You should know better than to make posts like this outside of the Pit. Take it there if you wish to call others names or insult them.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled OP:
I’ve found the worst working conditions are were the company uses an employee ranking system. Especially when the economy is bad, the company has been laying off people for years and probably will continue to do so for the near future. It’s obviously a way to figure out who to “downsize” but getting any actual work done is impossible.
Allan’s ranking is based on how quickly they get a project done. But he needs some information from his co-worker, Bob. What is Bob’s incentive to give Allen the information? With the information, there is a chance that Allan could be ranked higher than Bob. Without the information, Allan is guaranteed a lower ranking. Sucks to be Allan.
I was Allan. And, boy, did it ever suck. But Bob* got laid off too, because she couldn’t get any info for her project out of Charlie*. HA!
*Names changed because after 10 years, it doesn’t matter.
In what context is a 36 hour workweek not considered full-time? For example, under the ACA, workers who average 30 hours or more a week are considered full time and the company must provide benefits to them or pay a penalty.
Before ACA, most companies considered 40 hours full time.And those that had a lower floor, most employees were scheduled just under that. Also, as pointed out upthread, six hours out of each day is just enough to make personal business difficult to do while only leaving one day a week off.
You won’t get any argument out of me there! To me it seems like executives are totally chosen by being popular and good looking… or because someone else somewhere else anointed them as executives at one point. There’s no guarantee that an executive at a company making hundreds of millions of dollars annually is remotely competent.
Case in point- some of the execs where I work botched multiple things so badly that me, a guy with an MBA and no executive experience was starting to make a mental pool as to when and why they’d get fired; there were multiple things these clowns had done poorly or not at all.
They finally get fired, which is just, but instead of being busted back down to not being executives because you know… they’re incompetent, they get hired somewhere else as executives again. Meanwhile, competent, hard working and committed people within the company can’t buy a freakin’ promotion.
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You can’t be “screwed out of your retirement” even if you are fired for cause. It’s money you put into the system and it’s yours to take out once you turn 65.
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Most MBAs I know don’t seem to have a problem with drinking on or off the job.
So by working harder you earn more money. The system works.
I haven’t seen a whole lot of behavior that I would describe as maliciously “cruel”. But a lot of companies do expect you to work extremely hard for your six figure income.
I’ve worked for some managers who were a-holes or incompetent or both, but not to many places where there was an institutionalized jerkishness.
This thread reads like the Radio Shack Employee Manual. Except some of these jobs don’t sound that bad.
Internships aren’t supposed to be “work for free”. It’s almost always for college credit – do you pay students to do their classwork? I did an internship (unpaid) my senior year at a local museum and I absolutely loved it. It also worked out double for me because I was writing my thesis paper at the time, and their archives had a lot of material that I needed.
And I utterly disagree. Its not useful because it’s not. It’s like having your 3 year old helping you fold laundry. You do it because you want to them to be useful one day. These folks are mentoring these students because they want to help them excel one in the field. It’s like the undergrads who work in my academic lab- it takes months before they actually contribute something, and it’s a huge amount of work me to supervise them, but my profession is better because we do this for them. The people I work with lose productivity by having these interns, but they recognize the value of it for the students and for their industry as a whole, so it makes up for it.
I actually do know what I’m talking about here. There are lousy internships out there, I’m sure. But by definition, an unpaid internship for a month is not even close to the “cruelest thing” an employer can do to someone.
We pay our interns. And we don’t hire so many that we don’t have time to train them, and we hire good enough interns so that they do useful work.
As for cruelty to employees, I give you Enron and their 401Ks. First, they strongly encouraged employees to put their 401K money into company stock, even as the top execs knew they were inflating its value. (Besides this being a terrible idea in the first place.) Then they locked down the accounts so people could not take money out during the period they announced their first loss and the bottoms fell out.
Nice guys.
Different fields will be different. I don’t know what field you were in, but I promise it wasn’t about the quality of our students or the investment the mentors were making.
Our students weren’t being asked to wash bottles or put away glassware or do other scut work. They worked side-by-side with researchers (who took a huge amount of time to work with them) applying techniques they learned in class. However, applying a technique you learned in a teaching lab to a research lab takes time, no matter how skilled you are. The students who were getting paid internships from my program tended to be doing longer internships. The students getting unpaid ones tended to be doing shorter ones to get exposure and some experience. Even still, they often get job offers because their didactic knowledge was high, they had enthusiasm for what they were doing and the researcher saw promise and potential.
But they were not creating publication quality work or helping adding to the data in bringing a new drug to market. It was just not that sort of situation. No one else’s job was in jeopardy because they were there for a few weeks and no one was being exploited. They got class credit and real life experience for their effort and made a connection to industry professionals.
Recently one of my co-workers was bullied and threatened by her supervisor badly enough that the HR department “convicted” her supervisor of harassment. Did the harasser get fired, demoted, docked in salary, or punished in any way? Why of course not! That co-worker is still being supervised by the same harasser…although my co-worker has been advised not to try to be in the same room or hallway as the harasser at any time, a difficult thing when the harasser works two rooms down the hall. Apparently this is “legal” according to our HR office and attorney (I have a sinking feeling though that the shit is going to hit the fan about it very soon, though).
Oh, but the following the incident the rest of the office got subjected to a “leadership skills seminar” which no doubt set the organization back probably a good five figures.
There is no way that will end well. It sounds like Dogbert runs your HR department too.
Yep, nothing like a zipline ride to improve those people skills!