And most people would agree with you. I’m not comfortable with it as a perk though.
That’s pretty standard, and offensive. I guess they think regular folk are more likely to go out on disability of they could get closer to their actual wage then management. Maybe it’s true, I have no idea.
And here I thought this would be about me finding out that “archaic” practices like having an “executive washroom” still existed. (Do they?)
I remember working one summer for an advertising agency in an old office building around 1990 with bathrooms that were locked to prevent use by vagrants - you had to get the keys from a bowl by the receptionist’s desk (there were multiple keys for both the men’s and women’s restrooms). There was also another set of bathrooms labeled EXECUTIVE with a different key. These were personally held by specific, high ranking people; I think the building only gave each tenant a fixed number, with DO NOT DUPLICATE stamped on them.
I got into there a few times, even as a summer temp college student, because the Vice President of the agency would toss his key out to anyone who claimed the regular men’s room was full up. It really was much nicer. Not quite like on The Simpsons when Homer is briefly given THE KEY, but it was cleaner, had nicer fixtures, more like a bathroom in a nice house.
I think you are right about them owning the phone. People I know with work phones know that the phone, and anything on it, belongs to the company. The company can look at pictures, documents, texts, or whatever else they want to. It was the same with the laptops we all had that we used for work. I used my own laptop for anything not school related, but lots of the teachers used their school laptop as their only computer.
I’m sure different companies have different rules, though.
I have an iPhone paid for by my permanent client and it doesn’t bother me in the least. The only reason they gave it to me is so that they can reach me 24/7 and my personal rule is that, if I have to carry a work phone, I get to use it for whatever else I want. They don’t seem to mind although I have enough sense not to use it for anything that I would be embarrassed to be asked about.
Parking spots are actually another good example of the sort of thing that can make sense, but people also get ridiculously emotionally invested in. In a school, there are certain people who really should have assigned spots–the nurse, the principal, the office managers, arguably the counselors. Those are people who often, as part of their job, have to leave during the work day and come back, possibly several times. It’s stupid for those people to have to park in the back-40, or have to spend time searching for a parking spot when they return. Schools often have terrible parking, and no assigned parking might well mean parking on the street a considerable distance away.
But somehow it never stays simple. It becomes this weird nebulous sign of power or relative worth and the slightest change results in epic, unending indignation. I’ve seen it so many times, and it’s baffingly disproportionate. It must be hormonal.
It’s interesting to me that faculty and student restrooms are always separate in schools: there seems to be this unquestioned assumption that teacher and students shouldn’t run into each other in such a private/personal space. Weirdly, in older schools, the principal’s office also will have it’s own restroom, presumably based on that same logic. Newer schools don’t seem to have this: I guess the trend is more egalitarian.
The worst parking situation was when I worked for Thomson Reuters in Minnesota. Their parking lot is HUGE. And its Minnesota, for three months a year (or so) its fucking COLD. And the rest of the year can be stormy, humid windy. Here is an map of the building and parking lot.
There is underground parking for the execs. And the first rows of parking close to the building were reserved for Directors who didn’t make the underground cut. But despite having a quarter mile walk from the back of the lot (or longer) - and if you arrived after 8:05, you were in the back of the lot, they refused to build a ramp - too expensive. There were a ton of reasons that was a screwed up company, but as RickJay said, the parking situation was the first indicator.
(They did run shuttle buses if the weather was too cold)
At the company’s I’ve worked for, sales people often get a company car. The difference is some people get an unmarked late-model vehicle and some get an older white SUV with the company name emblazoned on the side.
Exactly.
I have a work-issued iPad. It has their apps and their data and that’s it. It’s connected to a work-only iTunes account. It has exactly zero bits connected to me personally beyond stuff strictly connected to my personal job duties. We are permitted to lard it up with our own stuff as we see fit. I choose not to.
Instead I have my own separate tablet I carry with my stuff on it connected to my cloud account(s). Not theirs. It has exactly zero bits connected to my employment.
Why this Great Air-gap of LSLGuy? They own the former and are free to demand it, and everything on it, at any time. The latter? Not at all.
Their interest in their device is totally legit. Granting them carte blanche into the rest of my life is not acceptable to me. The “price” I pay for keeping them out of my e-life? Paying for one tablet & carrying two. Worth it to me. YMMV.
This TED talk might be relevant:
The whole 18-minute video is fascinating, but the really relevant part starts at 13:25, in which experimenters demonstrate that monkeys have an innate sense of fairness: when two monkeys perform the same job and one monkey sees another monkey getting paid more for it, the underpaid monkey gets pissed off about it.
I have no doubt that highly visible perks like cars, phones, and first-class travel arouse jealousy for similar reasons.
The wording is a little odd, but the concept isn’t. I know plenty of people who could save a lot of money by using only their work-issued phone and not bothering to have a personal one at all - and in terms of money, that’s no different than what hajario describes. And they have reasons for it- non-financial ones, but reasons nonetheless.
One of the things I haven't figured out is why someone in my husband's company is pushing all the salesmen to get rid of their personal phones and only use the company one. I can't figure out what the company gains by that- sure, if the salesmen don't have a personal phone they will never turn off the company phone or leave it home when they aren't working . But that doesn't mean they will answer any calls.
I think it depends on how the employee is reimbursed. For instance, my company pays me $50 a month towards my own personal phone plan, but I have to have my phone email synced with the company servers. They don’t “own” my phone, and I get more money a month that I would otherwise have to spend myself.
Key phrase: “the same job.”
Keeping in mind that with monkeys, the job is basically “being a monkey.”
It makes it harder for the salesmen to have their own list of sales contacts they keep after they leave the company. Those relationships are worth real money and the company would like to have a veto on the salesmen keeping any of them after the employment comes to an end.
To be sure, they can certainly keep records of their own. But in general salesmen are crappy IT folks and crappy administrators. So odds are that of a bunch of salesmen with company-issued and company-controlled phones, only a very few would jump through the hoops needed to keep a backup copy of their contacts. Doubly so for someone who was surprised at being fired vice somebody who’d been planning for awhile to leave.
That I understand - and it’s no doubt the reason the company issued phones to begin with ( rather than just paying the bill for a personal phone like they used to) What I don’t understand was why the company was trying to get them to lose the personal phones they had in addition to the company phone - especially since the company had no way of knowing whether they really got of them or not
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And we’re all monkeys. When executive compensation is just cash stealthily flowing into one’s bank account, the lower-ranking monkeys in a company can cling to an illusion of equality. But when an executive walks by with an obviously corporate cell phone pressed to his ear, or drives by in a company-provided luxury sports car, it’s too in-your-face for some people; the illusion of equality is shattered, and the monkey with his own budget flip-phone and piece-of-shit car gets bitter.
I think i dont mind the monetary perks, or rather i just roll then up into the general issue of pay.
But executive washrooms? Everyone deserves a nice place to take a dump ! (And a truly luxurious bathroom would seem a waste of money)
This.
There comes a level in the hierarchy where people more or less set their own perks according to their own whims. Shareholders be damned. It amounts to small-scale looting of the shareholder’s money. I say “small” because it may be a lot per executive, but there simply aren’t that many compared to the rank and file middle managers and below. Which means they can justify it just as easily as a clerk can justify stealing a box of ball-points. IOW they think “The corp will never know the difference whether they pay all my medical deductibles and co-pays plus a bonus $1000 pain-and-suffering stipend any day I decide to call in sick.”
The issue that sticks in craws is the impunity of it. “I will loot from the shareholders at will just because I can.” and parenthetically “(and you can’t. Neener neener.)”
Impunity is a nasty business. Any number of political revolutions and government overthrows have been triggered when the rank and file have finally had enough of impunity at the top layer(s). Ferdinand Marcos & his cronies are poster children here.
This is not how executive compensation works. In a publicly traded company, top executives’ compensation, including perks, are set by a board of directors who are elected by shareholders. Some information must be made public, and whatever isn’t public is damn well known by the people running the company.
One mustn’t confuse the ethics of a profit-making enterprise choosing how to compensate employees with the ethics of a government taxing its citizens to make government leaders rich.