It’s not like the employees didn’t see it coming, it’s not as if the company were named “Spyndthryft”. 
Were you allowed to pack heat? “Go ahead gas thief, make my day!”
Franchised truck rental place in Virginia Beach, at the time had 3 branches, one on Va Beach Blvd, one on Military Highway and one over in Newport News.
Where to start …
At the beginning is good - training went fine, I kept all copies of my paperwork [xerox machine is my friend] I made the usual mistakes in training, but since I was supervised it was all fine. Make note of this for future reference.
I went to my branch in Mil Hwy after training, and I really liked the people I worked with. I made friends with the other office girl, and we got along and hung out together outside work. The 2 of us were the entire office staff for the branch, and we each worked 6 days a week, my day off was monday and hers was tuesday. It wasn’t so bad since these were slow days, but it left us with no reliefs, and our day ran 8 am to 6 pm, no variances. We had to punch out and eat lunch in the office because we had to take care of people if they called or walked in. Hit #1 on the illegal labor chart.
They opened a desk on saturdays and sundays at The Dump, a local furniture sales place that sold crunch and dent and remaindered furniture for a couple different furniture stores. My desk was in the corner of this absolutely huge warehouse, by the doors and the area was essentially unheated. I could have no little heater under the desk - fire hazard. I pitched a fit and they grudgingly allowed me to wear a coat. I had to punch out and eat at my desk, in case someone wandered over and wanted to rent a truck to take whatever they bought home. hits # 2 and 3 on the illegal labor chart.
I finally quit because a hurricane was rolling in, and they refused to let me close the office so I could obey the evacuation order on my residence [I lived in a cheap apartment on 13th Bay st on the beach … we got hurricane damage when we got back to look it over] and about noon my boyfriend of the time came, called the owners told them off, we locked everything up, made sure all the money and charge tickets and contracts were locked in the safe, locked the doors and shoved the keys through the door in an envelope with a letter of fuck offitude… including mentioning the 10 hour days, inadequate staffing, inhospitable freezing conditions of working in an unheated warehouse sitting at a desk, being cheated out of overtime and holiday pay, refusal to allow any vacation time to actually being taken …
So. They refused to give my both my first and last paychecks… did I mention they held my first paycheck? Yup, on the grounds that I might need to pay for some mistake I made on a contract. #4 on the list of labor department nonos. They held my last paycheck because I didn’t give them 2 weeks notice. #5 on the list of nonos … The reason they refused to give me my first weeks paycheck was a mistake made while I was in training, that I actually didn’t do - the office in Newport News checked the truck in but didn’t charge the tax. I got my friend Davina to sneak me a copy of the contract involved, showing I may have created the contract [correctly] but it was checked in at the NN ofice by someone that wasn’t me.
So, Davina and I went to the labor board, sat down with a very nice lady and recounted everything, I wanted and needed my paycheck so I could actually pay my rent. Took copies of all the salient paperwork we had copies of. I was figuring that they would tell the owners to pony up the 2 paychecks, and I would never mention them on my resume ever again, and everything would be fine.
The labor board audited them for 7 years, fined them $250,000 and made them track down and find every employee they screwed over on overtime and holiday pay … and the labor board monitored them for 3 years. They never found out that Davina helped me by giving me a copy of the contract and going to teh office for moral support … she kept her job for another 8 or 9 months =)
Me? Well you see I got to have fun after that for another 5 months until my lease ran out … my telephone number was the same except for the last 2 numbers switched … I used to get phone calls for the location all teh time. When I worked there, I told them they had gotten a wrong number, and sometimes even took messages for myself and the staff … after that I may have taken messages and forgotten to tell them that they had gotten a wrong number <devil smiley>
I work for #22 on GlassDoor’s list.
Yeah, I’ve had better jobs.
Yeah, I don’t really use the SDMB email or ever give out personal or workplace information. Plus I was in Boston for most of the mid to late 90s.
Generally, they all tend to base themselves off of the Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) model but then take it a couple steps further. Those firms all tend to hire armies of 20-somethings right out of college or out of each other’s firms. They lure them in with beer and stock options, put them through a couple weeks of Just In Time training, and then work them to death in the coding mines.
They always have a bunch of 26 year old vice presidents of whatever who just happened to be employee #8 or something and a bunch of weird know-nothing cheerleader managers who care more about how well you follow the “core values” than your actual work. And they really elevate the senior executives to mythical status.
Wait just a minute.
Just because a low percentage of the employees don’t like the CEO makes it a bad place to work?
That was a 7% approval rating, not the other way around.
Too lazy to find it right now, but I read something similar recently about which governmental agencies are best and worst in terms of morale.
The FAA came in next to last, I think. Big surprise there.
Not just that, but the article wasn’t saying “bad CEO = bad place to work”, but pointing out the correlation between low overall approval rating and overall workplace satisfaction. St. Anger, you can see on the original article that one of the bottom 10 companies’ CEO actually has a 42% approval rating. But it is implying that often the crappiness of a workplace is driven from the top down.
Well, that explains it - I had reached out once to make myself available when it sounded like you were networking. Got nuthin’ - fwiw, the email I have linked to my username does reach me; it sounds like you and I run in the same circles. I was at Accenture for ~13 years and relo’d to NYC in the mid-90’s from CA to help grow their Strat practice in Healthcare…
As for the dot.com consultancies, yeah, it was pretty much what you described. Honestly, though, that was just an…extreme…example of how consulting works in general. There’s a difference between knowing how to work the system to get ahead vs. actually knowing stuff; I encountered many consultants who embodied that…
A quick anecdote, and then a Q:
I recently worked at a company (fast food) that gave me a too small staff, and wanted me to fix the labor percentage problem on my shift. Overall, the usual crap ff kind of thing. The tie-in to msmith537’s post: We had a sign with “Co. X Core Values” on the wall. The mgr. was required to know these, and would be quizzed semi-regularly, along with some of the min. wage workers, as to some of these. Also, at one time, the District Manager once called about a complaint he had received about our store. He was going on about it and he said that the person was cursing, and raising cain in general, and then, the DM said, with almost tears in his voice, “and he came close to saying bad things about the owner of the company!” I can’t recall if he accused the man of taking the owner’s name in vain…
So, the question: Is there some book or reference that I can read in re: this sort of management style? That is, the ‘Core Value’ mentality, with the veneration of the uppers? I know there is always veneration of the uppers, but the ‘Core value’ thing makes me think that this is pandemic. From msmith537’s post, the ‘core value’ thing, and the ref. to Anderson consulting, I’m getting that drift.
Thanks,
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I’ve heard nothing but bad things about how horrid Electronic Arts is to work for. Was surprised to see it didn’t make the list.
You must be referring to this survey —> http://data.bestplacestowork.org/bptw/index
Out of 216 subcomponent agencies rated, FAA ranks out at 214. Go up a notch to 213 and you find TSA. Brothers in arms.
Which agencies were 215 and 216?
Yes. Two classic books in this genre are
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companiesand Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, both by Jim Collins.
There is also The McKinsey Wayby Ethan Rasiel, named for the white-shoe management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
The company I worked for actually handed out Built to Last to all new hires. The book has an entire chapter dedicated to creating a cult-like culture (entitled Creating a Cult-like Culture) and it’s a reoccuring theme throughout the book.
Basically it talks about creating a set of “core values” and a “mission statement”. Same bullshit every company does, right? Except they go even further. These values are constantly drilled into you during new hire orientation. They are posted in every room.
Next, you create a mythology around your top people. They had all these stories around the CEOs (before he was forced out by the SEC for stock-options backdating), senior executives, high performing teams that worked 7 days and 7 nights without ever leaving the office and married couples who met in the firm. We aren’t talking just about veneration of the senior management. We are talking about elevating them to an almost mythical status.
As with all cults, you want your people isolated from the outside. So ironically, to create a “Work / Life Balance” they would host more activities after work so that you had even less time to spend with people outside of the company. We would typically take all our dinners from a restaurant in the lobby of our office building. Many of the guys dated the waitresses who worked there.
And finally, you aggressively defend that culture. Anyone who was not a good “fit” was typically ejected from the company in short order. There is no complaining about work or joking about how stupid your manager is. It’s very 1984. You can’t just do your job. You have to LOVE doing your job. Because if you don’t love it, you aren’t doing a good job.
I’m surprised no newspaper companies were mentioned. I’ve never met anyone who had anything good to say about Gannett (the owner of USA Today and a bunch of major metro dailies). It seems the entire outfit is run like place from “Office Space.”
215 National Drug Intelligence Center (DOJ)
216 Office of Postsecondary Education (ED)
You have to select “See all”, and then the tab “Agency Subcomponents”.
Wikipedia says it’s an informations company, I think it’s a front for the Legion of Doom. The low approval rating could only be attributed to wanton “you have failed me yet again!” killings.
Really, Drain Bead? I know quite a few designers who work for EA Sports and they always have great things to say about it. Maybe it’s a location thing?
There was a major scandal awhile back about EA due to a widely publicized anonymous blog post from an EA employee’s spouse. They’ve cleaned up a bit since then due to enormous public pressures. Oh, and they were sued.