By all accounts I have a cushy job. And yet my coworkers constantly complain about how overworked they are. I can only assume it is because they have no idea what real work is. My last job as a consultant, we used to pull all-nighters. Work weekends. Travel extensively. People didn’t complain really. Oh they might complain about travel glitches or some specific issue, but whiners didn’t last. I mean it’s like being a lawyer and then complaining about how long you have to work. You didn’t know that ahead of time?
I used to be a supervisor over a dozen and a half union workers. They were skilled telecom workers and, because of overtime, would routinely earn more than I did.
They measured everything measurable to make sure they they didn’t do an ounce more work than what was required by the contract. They also watched everybody else to make sure that nobody did an ounce of work that was part of their job description.
There was no incentive to excel since the wage rate was fixed based on seniority regardless of the quality of their work. The process for management to discipline somebody for poor performance was such a series of high-jumps that we all became complacent about mediocre performance.
After years of doing this work, I finally decided that it’s the union’s job to make sure you’re dissatisfied with your work. If you were adequately paid with a safe work environment & good benefits they’ve lost their hold on you. Their task, in order to justify their jobs, was to convince you that you were unhappy and that they, the union, were there to fix that for you.
If they didn’t do that, the union leaders would be out of a job.
That said, I also agree that it’s part of everybody’s DNA to bitch about their jobs. If I didn’t bitch every now and then, I’d explode.
I often see prisoners here used to clean out the sewer sludge. It makes me have little sympathy for most other job whiners.
PRECISELY. I have long believed that the quality of our workforce would benefit greatly from every citizen spending a required year in a service-related position, sort of like mandatory military service.
Same here. My mom (a secretary) once came to speak to me at work (fast food) and saw the rush. She later told the family that I worked harder in a day than she did in a week. Now I’m a secretary, and was she ever right! I get a private chuckle out of people complaining that they have to go use the copier “all the way in the other room”.
My current job is a union job. After years of working non-union jobs in the same field (foodservice), I was utterly appalled by what I saw in the current job. I decided to write my own Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” commercial:
Bud Light Presents: Real Men of Genius!
(male singer: Real Men of Genius …)
Today we salute YOU, Mr. Union Member With Seniority! You alone know how to get the most out of a day at work. You know the true purpose of a labor union isn’t to ensure fair pay for a job well done, but rather to ensure that if your job isn’t well done, you can’t be fired.
Why are you just sitting there? You’re on break. You know the answer to the question, “Hey Buddy, can you give me a hand with this?”
(male singer: That’s not my job!)
You know what to say when a coworker suggests a better way to do something!
*(female singers: You’re not the boss of me!)
*
But most importantly you know, O Captain of the Contract, that if you just stick around long enough, you can eventually get paid top dollar … for doing nothing at all.
(male singer: Mr. Union Member With Seniority Guy!)
It’s not just laziness-it’s that there’s a pervasive…I don’t know…mediocrity of talent rising to the top here.
And that attitude of mediocrity and hackneyed management tropes percolates from the top down. I realised I had to figure out some way to leave government service after our new regional counsel cheerfully, and without the slightest bit of irony, announced that in the future we would be doing less real lawyering but more accounting of what work we did.
Before HQ noticed our numbers lagging and kicked up a bloody fuss, he reduced our workloads and made us spend least 1.5 hours a day systematically entering the same work items into 5 separate workload tracking systems. The inducement was being rated lower if we didn’t comply.
Right now he’s pissed because he hired 14 douchebags fired from various law firms for his office and wants to know why our office, with 5 lawyers, manages not to have a backlog of transactions and actually completed half of his office’s workload last year. He has convinced himself it’s because we’re not doing our work as well.
There are actually really smart people in government but I find that 90% of the ambitious and talented ones leave, while the 10% that stay are rarely recognized, smoulder and b*tch privately and try to ride out management idiocy in the hopes that someday someone with a lick of sense will come along or they’ll get promoted. I’ve seen what happens to them-eventually they just kind of go on autopilot and take advantage of the hours to concentrate on other things in their life. And they almost NEVER get promoted. I actually work with one of the most engaging lawyers I’ve ever met but he’s way too smart alecky for the type of blands that populate the civil service.
And in fairness-there are plenty of private sector industries that function the same way. My father worked for Alcan Aluminum for 40 years and recently told me about how one of his plant directors admonished him for producing “too many patentable inventions and not enough pure research.”
Or they’ll say the moon’s atmosphere is severely lacking in oxygen and the stars are several thousand degrees too hot. Pansies, the lot of them!
Probably the best argument against socialism I can think of.
I have one of the most relaxed, laid back jobs right now and people are constantly whining about something. I actually look forward to coming in to work every morning. Even though we’re extremely busy and there’s been mandatory overtime for the last few months, it’s the least stressful (and highest paying) job I’ve ever had. Because people would constantly complain about the overtime, the company actually decided to outsource half the work to another company. But they always find something else to whine about.
When I first went back to work after being a SAHM for 9 years, I was flabbergasted at my co-workers’ bitching about the cafeteria. Costs were subsidized by the employer, so prices were really low. You got free soft drinks and coffee all day. The lunches were ordinary stuff, but well made, especially for the low price. But the complaining! “They only have 5 kinds of soda! There isn’t any root beer!” “Oh, no, not cheese steaks AGAIN!” Hey, it’s better than PB&J or Chef Boyardee. And you don’t have to make it or clean up after it. Nobody was stopping anyone from bringing their own lunch, for heaven’s sake.