I don't think meritocracy is necessarily bad, but I think there should be upper bounds on expected output for a "normal" person.
If you can't measure someone's output, then meritocracy can't be used in that position.
If you have an assembly line and someone assembles widgets every day, and they do 10% more than everyone else, maybe they deserve a raise or a bonus. But if you're using the average to pay people less if they perform less, then no, that's bad.
Imma stop you right here.
An assembly line is pretty much the quintessential example of where merit pay makes no sense. You can not do better on an assembly line. The line is going to have a throughput that is the production rate of the slowest station. If I can bang out a gizmo in 5 seconds flat it is irrelevant if I'm fed gizmos only every six seconds.
What assembly lines could operate on is Fuck Up Penalties. If you're supposed to give me a gizmo every six seconds but you average twelve then everybody has a bad day.
The issue is the psychology of the set up. If I say "You do good I'll give you cash!" everybody is cool with this. If I say "Fuck up again and you're getting docked" well, that specifically is illegal, but any kind of negative is going to go badly. In the realm of pure geekery we can say there shouldn't be a difference between a reward from baseline for above average and a reduction in baseline for below average but in the realm of actual people it just doesn't work well.
...and of course even in these environment good people can do better. When I was a supervisor in a similar scenario I could handle the work of two different people at once when giving breaks. Now that wasn't really directly recognized (and I did it for half an hour most times, not the same as an 8 hour shift) but it was indirectly recognized as there was a reason I was a supervisor rather than an operator.
There are areas where you can measure (reject rate for one) though they get a bit tricky because in my industry it's more about catching mistakes by the machine rather than you failing to do something properly.
As far as at will goes....I got to hear some senior management talking about how they expect somebody getting a new job to be told to walk away right then regardless of two weeks notice. It wasn't really about our company practices, just the general way things are done, but still super cheery and positive to hear guys.
Plus, y'know. the guy assembling the gizmos in 5 seconds flat is probably making some other trade-off to get good time. There's almost always a trade-off of some sort; meritocracies smack to me of chasing after the ubermensch phantom.
There are so many factors that go into the dynamic of a successful team, whether in business or anything else. Maybe the lowest numbers guy/girl is the person who keeps everyone charged-up during the day, or maybe their methodical work is the only reason your product's quality remains at or above acceptable thresholds as far as consumers are concerned, or maybe they're friends with your best worker & the reason that said worker is so loyal to you, etc. You can't mathematically model that shit, and it's every bit as important as your raw figures for who cranked-out the most widgets / who scored the most sales / etc.
I feel this is where someone should post the video about the correlation between financial incentive and increased productivity.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I feel like the gizmos analogy is relevant to a thing in a place where I used to work when I first moved to NYC...
I was a presser for a shirt company which did custom t shirts with hand-set type
the number of "letters" you laid out per day was sort of a way of tracking your abilities (also your number of shirts screwed up per day, which would count against you, heh)
There was an absurdly high daily standard -- I think 600? which I usually just barely hit daily until I got into the swing of it -- and there was a bonus that you could get after 1,000 letters in a single day. I felt like crap for months because I'd never get within spitting distance of that 1k day until I found out that only one employee who was there at the time had gotten one, ever, and then I felt a lot better about the whole thing.
Anyway
so yeah, that labor trade-off comes at a cost; all the highest "letter" producers consistently also had the highest number of fuckups, even among the longtime employees (except maybe the magic 1k girl)
as for at-will employment, I am of two minds about it; having worked for the same employer for nearly ten years, it's exasperating that legally he could fire me for no reason (though at this point I'm sure after the amount of time I've been there they could cobble together a reason if they actually wanted to be rid of me) but it's also sort of... I feel like I wouldn't want to be under contract, and while I labor unions it feels like unionization would probably not help my current employment situation because of our organically-grown internal structure. Shit is complex. I'm not sure there is a better way that wouldn't eventually turn into another thing that businesses can use as a cudgel against employees.
I feel like the gizmos analogy is relevant to a thing in a place where I used to work when I first moved to NYC...
I was a presser for a shirt company which did custom t shirts with hand-set type
the number of "letters" you laid out per day was sort of a way of tracking your abilities (also your number of shirts screwed up per day, which would count against you, heh)
There was an absurdly high daily standard -- I think 600? which I usually just barely hit daily until I got into the swing of it -- and there was a bonus that you could get after 1,000 letters in a single day. I felt like crap for months because I'd never get within spitting distance of that 1k day until I found out that only one employee who was there at the time had gotten one, ever, and then I felt a lot better about the whole thing.
Anyway
so yeah, that labor trade-off comes at a cost; all the highest "letter" producers consistently also had the highest number of fuckups, even among the longtime employees (except maybe the magic 1k girl)
as for at-will employment, I am of two minds about it; having worked for the same employer for nearly ten years, it's exasperating that legally he could fire me for no reason (though at this point I'm sure after the amount of time I've been there they could cobble together a reason if they actually wanted to be rid of me) but it's also sort of... I feel like I wouldn't want to be under contract, and while I labor unions it feels like unionization would probably not help my current employment situation because of our organically-grown internal structure. Shit is complex. I'm not sure there is a better way that wouldn't eventually turn into another thing that businesses can use as a cudgel against employees.
/anecdotal
A workplace analogy also comes to mind for me, but this is a vidya forum so instead I'll use a hilariously terrible example because I'm sure most people are familiar with it:
How important is your KDA in a game of League of Legends? Is the rager who has, say, 3:1 average KDA more likely to move up the ladder than the team player who nets 1:1 KDA or maybe even negative values? We already know the answer: nope. In fact, most ragers stay in Bronze League regardless of their individual metrics.
There's nothing wrong with trying to model performance, but the way it's usually done - boiling everything down to a stupidly simple score card - isn't useful, and can be destructive when you try to use a performance metric in one specific area with a goal that's actually unrelated to that metric (i.e. KDA vs moving up the ladder in LoL)
I don't think meritocracy is necessarily bad, but I think there should be upper bounds on expected output for a "normal" person.
If you can't measure someone's output, then meritocracy can't be used in that position.
If you have an assembly line and someone assembles widgets every day, and they do 10% more than everyone else, maybe they deserve a raise or a bonus. But if you're using the average to pay people less if they perform less, then no, that's bad.
Imma stop you right here.
An assembly line is pretty much the quintessential example of where merit pay makes no sense. You can not do better on an assembly line. The line is going to have a throughput that is the production rate of the slowest station. If I can bang out a gizmo in 5 seconds flat it is irrelevant if I'm fed gizmos only every six seconds.
What assembly lines could operate on is Fuck Up Penalties. If you're supposed to give me a gizmo every six seconds but you average twelve then everybody has a bad day.
The issue is the psychology of the set up. If I say "You do good I'll give you cash!" everybody is cool with this. If I say "Fuck up again and you're getting docked" well, that specifically is illegal, but any kind of negative is going to go badly. In the realm of pure geekery we can say there shouldn't be a difference between a reward from baseline for above average and a reduction in baseline for below average but in the realm of actual people it just doesn't work well.
...and of course even in these environment good people can do better. When I was a supervisor in a similar scenario I could handle the work of two different people at once when giving breaks. Now that wasn't really directly recognized (and I did it for half an hour most times, not the same as an 8 hour shift) but it was indirectly recognized as there was a reason I was a supervisor rather than an operator.
There are areas where you can measure (reject rate for one) though they get a bit tricky because in my industry it's more about catching mistakes by the machine rather than you failing to do something properly.
As far as at will goes....I got to hear some senior management talking about how they expect somebody getting a new job to be told to walk away right then regardless of two weeks notice. It wasn't really about our company practices, just the general way things are done, but still super cheery and positive to hear guys.
Plus, y'know. the guy assembling the gizmos in 5 seconds flat is probably making some other trade-off to get good time. There's almost always a trade-off of some sort; meritocracies smack to me of chasing after the ubermensch phantom.
There are so many factors that go into the dynamic of a successful team, whether in business or anything else. Maybe the lowest numbers guy/girl is the person who keeps everyone charged-up during the day, or maybe their methodical work is the only reason your product's quality remains at or above acceptable thresholds as far as consumers are concerned, or maybe they're friends with your best worker & the reason that said worker is so loyal to you, etc. You can't mathematically model that shit, and it's every bit as important as your raw figures for who cranked-out the most widgets / who scored the most sales / etc.
Nah. There are legitimate superstars, who are easily worth as much as any other two people, though less likely via pure widget outputs vs. say, having decent wdiget output, and also being a widget making trainer, and also have the best ability to perform repairs to the widget machines.
TLDR: "He warned her, "if you see my pants bulging, you'll know your clothes are too revealing." - a legally valid reason to fire someone (the woman, not the sexually harassing piece of shit)
US employees need far, far more regulations. One extra, of a billion, would be giving all benefits to any employee regardless of part time / temporary status, either at a flat level, or at the least in proportion to their hours and/or duration of employment. A temporary employee who works for a quarter should get a quarter's vacation days or the cash equivalent.
And speaking of vacation, the legal minimum needs to be increased. Directly duplicating the UK on this matter would be a good foundation, although perhaps earning leave while on leave might be overly generous. https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement
Nah. There are legitimate superstars, who are easily worth as much as any other two people, though less likely via pure widget outputs vs. say, having decent wdiget output, and also being a widget making trainer, and also have the best ability to perform repairs to the widget machines.
And let me guess, those 'legit superstars' are people who act & look just like you, right?
How do you feel economic issues should figure into the equation, pertaining to layoffs and the like? If I'm an employer in a non-at-will state and my sales go down, to what extent am I allowed to lay people off? Do I have to first prove my revenue is down? What if I want to upgrade my machinery in such a way that I need fewer employees to maintain productivity?
Generally this is handled with some form of severance.
I'm not sure there are any systems where employers are forced to employ people. You just have to pay them or give them some specific amount of notice.
The idea being that people shouldn't have to lose their income stream with no warning.
Seniority - and seniority based wage scales are a decent way of protecting the worker from arbitrary vs. necessary job loss.
A LIFO system means that the workers who are likely to lose their jobs are the lowest paid workers, and unnecessarily cutting jobs is only going to create a larger workload (and usually more overtime) for the higher paid senior workers. Unless demand or workload has decreased to the point that the current workforce is unnecessary and those lower paid / less senior workers aren't being utilized, cutting staff is only shooting yourself in the foot.
Yes because as if its not hard enough to enter the workforce in a meaningful way for millennials.
Seniority is a god damn nightmare, it is directly opposing any kind of meritocracy. It is the 'All animals are equal, some are just more equal' of US unions.
It's interesting that you bring up unions, since the last time you really brought up unions, you made roughly zero coherent points. I fail to see how anything you posted here does a single thing to change how wrong you have, historically, been about unions and how they work, and where the real issues are in the U.S. labor market.
Since I'm gay, that means there are 29 states in this country where I can be fired just for being out at work. Even if I'm not fired, I'm considerably more likely to be denied promotions or subjected to harassment without any form of recourse, all because at-will trumps so hard that I need congressional action to not be shitcanned for no reason that is based on my job performance.
You keep working off this idea that corporations are going to naturally select the best people for the job and compensate them properly and laissez faire labor markets produce the best outcomes and the only way you can actually think that is if you are entirely ignorant of the history of labor in this country.
It's also worth noting that there's no reason for there to be an ironclad connection between not being able to fire people willy-nilly and not having a meritocracy.
Collective bargaining can do funny things to wage differentials in certain professions, having to give notice/severance not-so-much. Having it cost you money to fire someone doesn't mean you can't reward your most productive employees.
Seniority is a form of meritocracy, its a direct result of "this guy has been working for us for a long time without jumping ship to rival company and without screwing up badly enough to get fired". For a business that is actually a valuable trait in an employee. Institutional memory is a thing and having an employee that knows how everything works from memory is often better then having a 1000 page database on the same thing(cause who has time to read a 1000 pages when you can just ask Carl).
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I don't know what the lack of union growth and power has to do with anything, those are the realities of the world around us.
Workers should get more protections, and I think they probably will over time, all I was saying was that the world we're talking about hasn't ever existed yet. It's still something To Be.
Historically workers getting more protections isn't something that happened naturally, but as a consequence of unions / workers fighting for them. If you can't see the connexion between the decline of unions and the loss of worker power in the US I don't really know what to tell you.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
I don't think meritocracy is necessarily bad, but I think there should be upper bounds on expected output for a "normal" person.
If you can't measure someone's output, then meritocracy can't be used in that position.
If you have an assembly line and someone assembles widgets every day, and they do 10% more than everyone else, maybe they deserve a raise or a bonus. But if you're using the average to pay people less if they perform less, then no, that's bad.
Imma stop you right here.
An assembly line is pretty much the quintessential example of where merit pay makes no sense. You can not do better on an assembly line. The line is going to have a throughput that is the production rate of the slowest station. If I can bang out a gizmo in 5 seconds flat it is irrelevant if I'm fed gizmos only every six seconds.
What assembly lines could operate on is Fuck Up Penalties. If you're supposed to give me a gizmo every six seconds but you average twelve then everybody has a bad day.
The issue is the psychology of the set up. If I say "You do good I'll give you cash!" everybody is cool with this. If I say "Fuck up again and you're getting docked" well, that specifically is illegal, but any kind of negative is going to go badly. In the realm of pure geekery we can say there shouldn't be a difference between a reward from baseline for above average and a reduction in baseline for below average but in the realm of actual people it just doesn't work well.
...and of course even in these environment good people can do better. When I was a supervisor in a similar scenario I could handle the work of two different people at once when giving breaks. Now that wasn't really directly recognized (and I did it for half an hour most times, not the same as an 8 hour shift) but it was indirectly recognized as there was a reason I was a supervisor rather than an operator.
There are areas where you can measure (reject rate for one) though they get a bit tricky because in my industry it's more about catching mistakes by the machine rather than you failing to do something properly.
As far as at will goes....I got to hear some senior management talking about how they expect somebody getting a new job to be told to walk away right then regardless of two weeks notice. It wasn't really about our company practices, just the general way things are done, but still super cheery and positive to hear guys.
I was talking more about situations where there's assembly lines that run in parallel. Not one gigantic assembly line.
You see this in places like UPS and FedEx.
Parallel assembly is better than serial!
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
And I definitely agree with @joshofalltrades . On paper, it's a two-sided coin. But it's not. At every turn I urge those I know who work in at-will states, to not treat their employers as colleagues, friends or anything else that might compel them to take a human approach to changing or leaving their current job. Because unfortunately, the fact exists that given the chance, the company in question will most assuredly NOT afford them with the same courtesy. And, unfortunately, this dynamic inevitably leads to an erosion between employee/employer, and isn't really beneficial for either in the long run.
EDIT: Though it's definitely worth noting, though, that if those who worked in at-will states actually exercised their rights in this manner, there are a lot of companies out there that would really feel it.
I think this is a very notable point. The relationship between an employer and employee should be treated entirely as a business arrangement by both parties. As an employee, you are selling that employer your time - you are, quite literally, a supplier of labor. An employer certainly sees things this way, and considers their employees no differently than they would treat any supplier.
As an employee there may be intangibles or other incentives that keep you with one employer over another, same as any business relationship, but at it's core an employee should have no loyalty to an employer beyond what makes economic sense by that employee's metric. Maybe an employer provides a positive work environment for that employee which that employee values more than a higher wage elsewhere, but that's not loyalty - it's an economic factor.
It's no different than the same factors that kept people from making 'strategic defaults' in the 2008 housing crisis. There are a great many people who wouldn't stop making payments throughout the foreclosure process and eventually walk away from their mortgage - even if it made perfect economic sense. This was out of a sense of blind loyalty and responsibility to emotionless businesses which absolutely had no issue kicking those people out of their homes in a second. Even more importantly, those people were paying (through things like PMI) the costs of them walking away - them walking away is a risk that the banks / lenders directly assumed.
Loyalty to employers and businesses should not be treated like a value until / unless those businesses demonstrate the same loyalty to their employees and customers. This is the same PR battle that business has won in hurting unions. People need to recognize that unless they are a shareholder, business don't and won't ever act in their best interest beyond what's required by law and economic sense (and even then, not so much).
Arguments about meritocracy are the same Randian bullshit that comes from privilege and completely ignores reality for the vast majority of people out there. If you ask any CEO's nephew, he'll swear up and down - and probably believes - that the reason for his meteoric rise through the ranks is meritocracy. Doesn't make it true.
In any system - even a seniority based system - there are ways to reward merit. An assembly line doesn't operate in a vacuum, and if a company isn't rewarding merit - perhaps by hiring from within or promoting line employees to skilled trades or trainer or white collar / management positions - you should really reconsider how valid arguments about meritocracy really are. Because...as far as I can tell...that's not how companies work anymore.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I don't know what the lack of union growth and power has to do with anything, those are the realities of the world around us.
Workers should get more protections, and I think they probably will over time, all I was saying was that the world we're talking about hasn't ever existed yet. It's still something To Be.
Historically workers getting more protections isn't something that happened naturally, but as a consequence of unions / workers fighting for them. If you can't see the connexion between the decline of unions and the loss of worker power in the US I don't really know what to tell you.
You people are arguing against a point I'm not making. I'm saying the worker hasn't lost power, we've never had it. There was a period where unions were stronger, but outside of Chicago and the movies they were never a prolific cudgel against the capitalists that we've built them up into being for most of the country.
I'm not arguing unions shouldn't exist, try to see the forest beyond the trees.
And I definitely agree with @joshofalltrades . On paper, it's a two-sided coin. But it's not. At every turn I urge those I know who work in at-will states, to not treat their employers as colleagues, friends or anything else that might compel them to take a human approach to changing or leaving their current job. Because unfortunately, the fact exists that given the chance, the company in question will most assuredly NOT afford them with the same courtesy. And, unfortunately, this dynamic inevitably leads to an erosion between employee/employer, and isn't really beneficial for either in the long run.
EDIT: Though it's definitely worth noting, though, that if those who worked in at-will states actually exercised their rights in this manner, there are a lot of companies out there that would really feel it.
I think this is a very notable point. The relationship between an employer and employee should be treated entirely as a business arrangement by both parties. As an employee, you are selling that employer your time - you are, quite literally, a supplier of labor. An employer certainly sees things this way, and considers their employees no differently than they would treat any supplier.
As an employee there may be intangibles or other incentives that keep you with one employer over another, same as any business relationship, but at it's core an employee should have no loyalty to an employer beyond what makes economic sense by that employee's metric. Maybe an employer provides a positive work environment for that employee which that employee values more than a higher wage elsewhere, but that's not loyalty - it's an economic factor.
It's no different than the same factors that kept people from making 'strategic defaults' in the 2008 housing crisis. There are a great many people who wouldn't stop making payments throughout the foreclosure process and eventually walk away from their mortgage - even if it made perfect economic sense. This was out of a sense of blind loyalty and responsibility to emotionless businesses which absolutely had no issue kicking those people out of their homes in a second. Even more importantly, those people were paying (through things like PMI) the costs of them walking away - them walking away is a risk that the banks / lenders directly assumed.
Loyalty to employers and businesses should not be treated like a value until / unless those businesses demonstrate the same loyalty to their employees and customers. This is the same PR battle that business has won in hurting unions. People need to recognize that unless they are a shareholder, business don't and won't ever act in their best interest beyond what's required by law and economic sense (and even then, not so much).
Arguments about meritocracy are the same Randian bullshit that comes from privilege and completely ignores reality for the vast majority of people out there. If you ask any CEO's nephew, he'll swear up and down - and probably believes - that the reason for his meteoric rise through the ranks is meritocracy. Doesn't make it true.
In any system - even a seniority based system - there are ways to reward merit. An assembly line doesn't operate in a vacuum, and if a company isn't rewarding merit - perhaps by hiring from within or promoting line employees to skilled trades or trainer or white collar / management positions - you should really reconsider how valid arguments about meritocracy really are. Because...as far as I can tell...that's not how companies work anymore.
I think homes are a bad example of "economics"
Homes represent a lot of things to a lot of people. Memories being the most notable. If I can afford to pay an upside down mortgage, fuck it, it's still better than renting.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Hey guys, I read that post, you can pull the Batsignal out of it now. :P
I'd like to see the collective bargaining power of unions applied universally to the American workforce. Right now it's a pipe dream because if there are people lobbying for workers, they aren't particularly powerful or numerous, and I can't think of one workforce lobby organization off the top of my head. If it was written into law that you have to give either notice or compensation when firing someone without specific, legislated causes, I think we would see a lot fewer personally-motivated terminations.
Example (true story): I worked at a bookstore in the Dallas area about 10 years ago. I had three different performance reviews when I worked there: the first said I was a mediocre employee, the second said I was literally the most valuable asset in the entire store, and the last one said I was a worthless waste of wages. I didn't change my work habits significantly between these three performance reviews. They were given by three separate managers with three separate agendas. The first was given by a guy who had been managing the store for ages, but hid in his office all day and hardly saw what anybody did at all. The second manager came during a period of turmoil in the company when people started telling corporate that the first guy wasn't doing anything. She was an interim manager and she interviewed everybody regularly to see what changes they'd like to have implemented. She noticed that I had completely overhauled our Sci Fi and Computer sections and that sales had gone drastically up as a result, and so she gave me a raise and recommended I be looked at for promotion.
The final manager was the newly installed GM and she was aggressively upward-mobile and cutthroat. She began firing literally everybody at the store and replacing them with the people she had employed personally at her former store. I still worked just as hard, but when someone is determined to fire the entire staff and replace them with people of her own choosing in an at-will situation, it's impossible to argue. After the review, I quit my job because I saw the writing on the wall, and many other employees did too.
The point is that if firing everybody for no real, documented reason would have led to the company paying everybody the same salary, but not getting the labor, this probably wouldn't have happened (try explaining that loss of profits to corporate!), or if it did, at least I (and several other older people who, without a working wage, would have to rely entirely upon a fixed income) would have had a safety net between jobs to mitigate some of the lying awake at night wondering if I was going to be homeless in a month.
Yeah they're not the people you picked, but are they fucking up?
I've been in that situation. To the GM, the fact that they aren't the "chosen team" is an automatic fuckup. Everything else extends from there. It's not hard to find a fault when you really, really want to find one.
An idea that's been lost in our post-union days is the awareness that managers are political creatures and make decisions for reasons that have nothing to do with work performance. While there are plenty of politics among rank-and-file workers, the entire basis of the idea of "solidarity" is that workers must stand together to protect themsevles from the ambitions and power-games that have always characterized management in every industry.
Hey guys, I read that post, you can pull the Batsignal out of it now. :P
I'd like to see the collective bargaining power of unions applied universally to the American workforce. Right now it's a pipe dream because if there are people lobbying for workers, they aren't particularly powerful or numerous, and I can't think of one workforce lobby organization off the top of my head. If it was written into law that you have to give either notice or compensation when firing someone without specific, legislated causes, I think we would see a lot fewer personally-motivated terminations.
Example (true story): I worked at a bookstore in the Dallas area about 10 years ago. I had three different performance reviews when I worked there: the first said I was a mediocre employee, the second said I was literally the most valuable asset in the entire store, and the last one said I was a worthless waste of wages. I didn't change my work habits significantly between these three performance reviews. They were given by three separate managers with three separate agendas. The first was given by a guy who had been managing the store for ages, but hid in his office all day and hardly saw what anybody did at all. The second manager came during a period of turmoil in the company when people started telling corporate that the first guy wasn't doing anything. She was an interim manager and she interviewed everybody regularly to see what changes they'd like to have implemented. She noticed that I had completely overhauled our Sci Fi and Computer sections and that sales had gone drastically up as a result, and so she gave me a raise and recommended I be looked at for promotion.
The final manager was the newly installed GM and she was aggressively upward-mobile and cutthroat. She began firing literally everybody at the store and replacing them with the people she had employed personally at her former store. I still worked just as hard, but when someone is determined to fire the entire staff and replace them with people of her own choosing in an at-will situation, it's impossible to argue. After the review, I quit my job because I saw the writing on the wall, and many other employees did too.
The point is that if firing everybody for no real, documented reason would have led to the company paying everybody the same salary, but not getting the labor, this probably wouldn't have happened (try explaining that loss of profits to corporate!), or if it did, at least I (and several other older people who, without a working wage, would have to rely entirely upon a fixed income) would have had a safety net between jobs to mitigate some of the lying awake at night wondering if I was going to be homeless in a month.
A poor performance review is a "real documented reason", I hate to be the one to break it to you.
The one time I was fired it was for bullshit reasons. But a manager spent a month manipulating my metrics so it would look good to HR. Which was trivial to do.
Hey guys, I read that post, you can pull the Batsignal out of it now. :P
I'd like to see the collective bargaining power of unions applied universally to the American workforce. Right now it's a pipe dream because if there are people lobbying for workers, they aren't particularly powerful or numerous, and I can't think of one workforce lobby organization off the top of my head. If it was written into law that you have to give either notice or compensation when firing someone without specific, legislated causes, I think we would see a lot fewer personally-motivated terminations.
Example (true story): I worked at a bookstore in the Dallas area about 10 years ago. I had three different performance reviews when I worked there: the first said I was a mediocre employee, the second said I was literally the most valuable asset in the entire store, and the last one said I was a worthless waste of wages. I didn't change my work habits significantly between these three performance reviews. They were given by three separate managers with three separate agendas. The first was given by a guy who had been managing the store for ages, but hid in his office all day and hardly saw what anybody did at all. The second manager came during a period of turmoil in the company when people started telling corporate that the first guy wasn't doing anything. She was an interim manager and she interviewed everybody regularly to see what changes they'd like to have implemented. She noticed that I had completely overhauled our Sci Fi and Computer sections and that sales had gone drastically up as a result, and so she gave me a raise and recommended I be looked at for promotion.
The final manager was the newly installed GM and she was aggressively upward-mobile and cutthroat. She began firing literally everybody at the store and replacing them with the people she had employed personally at her former store. I still worked just as hard, but when someone is determined to fire the entire staff and replace them with people of her own choosing in an at-will situation, it's impossible to argue. After the review, I quit my job because I saw the writing on the wall, and many other employees did too.
The point is that if firing everybody for no real, documented reason would have led to the company paying everybody the same salary, but not getting the labor, this probably wouldn't have happened (try explaining that loss of profits to corporate!), or if it did, at least I (and several other older people who, without a working wage, would have to rely entirely upon a fixed income) would have had a safety net between jobs to mitigate some of the lying awake at night wondering if I was going to be homeless in a month.
A poor performance review is a "real documented reason", I hate to be the one to break it to you.
The one time I was fired it was for bullshit reasons. But a manager spent a month manipulating my metrics so it would look good to HR. Which was trivial to do.
In my case, though, it may have been possible to go to court and show that she had done this to every single employee and cast doubt on her bullshit performance reviews were it not for at-will employment justifying her shitty firings explicitly.
I don't know what the lack of union growth and power has to do with anything, those are the realities of the world around us.
Workers should get more protections, and I think they probably will over time, all I was saying was that the world we're talking about hasn't ever existed yet. It's still something To Be.
Unions got out PR'd, especially among the working class.
I never hear about good things Unions do and routinely hear shit about stupid things Unions do. I KNOW they do lots of good things, I just never hear about it.
This is so incredibly true. Two of the people in my IT group are Union employees, and my boss and I are overtime exempt salaried employees, because that's how the job codes were set up however fuck long ago. Know what that means for us? That means when we have events that we have to start filming at 5:00am, my boss and I are showing up to set up by ourselves because the Union workers cannot start before 6:30. If we have an all day event to film, we're doing both set up and break down alone because the Union worker cannot stay more than 8 hours. We have to film on Saturday next week, and we need one of our Union members there, so he gets a day and a half off during the week since we're asking him to work a Saturday.
The problem is, that at some point, when the Unions actively work against getting the damn job done in a lot of industries, they earn a lot of negative opinions.
I've never heard of these rules for union workers. I worked at UPS, and we pretty much had shifts 24/5.
It sounds more like "We have to pay them more for overtime hours, so, uh, we're not going to." The old cookie joke applies here.
a CEO, an exempt employee, and a union worker are all sitting at a table when a plate with a dozen cookies arrives. Before anyone else can make a move, the CEO reaches out to rake in eleven of the cookies. When the other two look at him in surprise, the CEO locks eyes with the exempt employee. "You better watch him," the executive says with a nod toward the union worker. "He wants a piece of your cookie."
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
And comp time like that is definitely a thing when management don't want to pay time and a half in OT. Notice how it's exactly 1.5 times the time he's worked?
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Different Unions negotiate different rules. Though requiring time and half off in lieu does sound like a way out of paying OT.
I get the management side frustrations and part of the PR issues is exactly that. The management side appeals to shit like "We want to get this done." The labor side is fighting a battle to try and get the most they can and too often that appears to descend into empty legalism. If you give it a good think through you can see why the Union wouldn't want to make "Just this once" exceptions, even if individual members are willing, but in the moment? Fucking frustrating.
Different Unions negotiate different rules. Though requiring time and half off in lieu does sound like a way out of paying OT.
I get the management side frustrations and part of the PR issues is exactly that. The management side appeals to shit like "We want to get this done." The labor side is fighting a battle to try and get the most they can and too often that appears to descend into empty legalism. If you give it a good think through you can see why the Union wouldn't want to make "Just this once" exceptions, even if individual members are willing, but in the moment? Fucking frustrating.
Yeah. I can see the frustration, but I have also seen what happens when "Just this once" starts to happen on a routine basis as constant crunch time and emergency becomes a crutch for poor management and sloppy planning. One of the things unions try to do is promote a workplace that allows for lifelong careers.
It doesn't help that routinely burning out and replacing workers is actually a net benefit for immediate bottom-line oriented organizations. You lose experience and institutional knowledge, but you also lose a lot of employees who drift away before they begin accruing seniority pay.
Penny-wise and dollar foolish. It looks great in the short term, but hurts the long term longevity of the company. Which is why publicly traded companies are shit, they're more concerned with what happens quarter to quarter, but not decade to decade. They'll pull their money out once they see a good ROI. A business owner that needs to make an income for the next 45 years isn't so lucky, so they need to plan ahead.
But both of those companies are playing the same game, so they treat their employees exactly the same. Disposable cogs in a wheel.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Penny-wise and dollar foolish. It looks great in the short term, but hurts the long term longevity of the company. Which is why publicly traded companies are shit, they're more concerned with what happens quarter to quarter, but not decade to decade. They'll pull their money out once they see a good ROI. A business owner that needs to make an income for the next 45 years isn't so lucky, so they need to plan ahead.
But both of those companies are playing the same game, so they treat their employees exactly the same. Disposable cogs in a wheel.
Which is another reason deregulation being awesome is one of the worst lies the working public ever ate up. Companies are not your friends or your advocates. Obviously not all companies are cut from the same cloth. By and large, though, if they can put another hundred bucks on their bottom line by fucking you over without consequences, they'll do it.
I don't know what the lack of union growth and power has to do with anything, those are the realities of the world around us.
Workers should get more protections, and I think they probably will over time, all I was saying was that the world we're talking about hasn't ever existed yet. It's still something To Be.
Unions got out PR'd, especially among the working class.
I never hear about good things Unions do and routinely hear shit about stupid things Unions do. I KNOW they do lots of good things, I just never hear about it.
This is so incredibly true. Two of the people in my IT group are Union employees, and my boss and I are overtime exempt salaried employees, because that's how the job codes were set up however fuck long ago. Know what that means for us? That means when we have events that we have to start filming at 5:00am, my boss and I are showing up to set up by ourselves because the Union workers cannot start before 6:30. If we have an all day event to film, we're doing both set up and break down alone because the Union worker cannot stay more than 8 hours. We have to film on Saturday next week, and we need one of our Union members there, so he gets a day and a half off during the week since we're asking him to work a Saturday.
The problem is, that at some point, when the Unions actively work against getting the damn job done in a lot of industries, they earn a lot of negative opinions.
This is crab bucket thinking.
Shouldn't you be more upset that - as an exempt employee - you're being expected to work at least 9.5 hours (and most likely significantly more) without additional compensation? Instead of complaining about the union rules, you should be complaining about the company that is exploiting you.
Or are you being compensated for your extra time through a higher salary?
I've also never heard of a union that won't allow their members work overtime at all. I have heard of unions that won't require their members to work overtime, or unions that require fair compensation (shift premiums, actually paying overtime rather than comp time bullshit, etc) for their members to work overtime.
On the other hand, I have heard of many, many employers that simply refuse to pay their employees overtime, but failure to get work done - regardless of the workload - negatively impacts those employees.
But we're getting away from the point of the thread...we've got a dedicated labor thread for unions. The big thing is that it's easy to 'other' people. We've got an example right up the page about how a new GM 'othered' the existing employees because of her relationship to 'her' people. It negatively impacted performance evaluations, and while the GM could easily have doctored performance evaluations and cut the people she didn't like without real cause, there would at least need to be some kind of paper trail.
Penny-wise and dollar foolish. It looks great in the short term, but hurts the long term longevity of the company. Which is why publicly traded companies are shit, they're more concerned with what happens quarter to quarter, but not decade to decade. They'll pull their money out once they see a good ROI. A business owner that needs to make an income for the next 45 years isn't so lucky, so they need to plan ahead.
But both of those companies are playing the same game, so they treat their employees exactly the same. Disposable cogs in a wheel.
Which is another reason deregulation being awesome is one of the worst lies the working public ever ate up. Companies are not your friends or your advocates. Obviously not all companies are cut from the same cloth. By and large, though, if they can put another hundred bucks on their bottom line by fucking you over without consequences, they'll do it.
I'd insert the limiter "immediate monetary" in front of consequences. I don't think most of them think that there is no consequence for that kind of behavior, it's just not immediate enough to show up this quarter/year/term as CEO and so is Somebody Elses Problem.
But we're getting away from the point of the thread...we've got a dedicated labor thread for unions. The big thing is that it's easy to 'other' people. We've got an example right up the page about how a new GM 'othered' the existing employees because of her relationship to 'her' people. It negatively impacted performance evaluations, and while the GM could easily have doctored performance evaluations and cut the people she didn't like without real cause, there would at least need to be some kind of paper trail.
This is what I wanted to say, thanks.
And a paper trail is really not a high bar to clear. Managers exist so that they don't get bogged down in the day-to-day operations of the store and can sit at their desk to file paperwork on problem employees. If you have so much paperwork to file on every single one of your employees that it becomes a detriment to your other managerial duties, something really fishy is going on.
And yeah, keep union-specific talk to the union thread please. If you think they're the solution to at-will, then great, otherwise it's not the point of this thread.
But we're getting away from the point of the thread...we've got a dedicated labor thread for unions. The big thing is that it's easy to 'other' people. We've got an example right up the page about how a new GM 'othered' the existing employees because of her relationship to 'her' people. It negatively impacted performance evaluations, and while the GM could easily have doctored performance evaluations and cut the people she didn't like without real cause, there would at least need to be some kind of paper trail.
This is what I wanted to say, thanks.
And a paper trail is really not a high bar to clear. Managers exist so that they don't get bogged down in the day-to-day operations of the store and can sit at their desk to file paperwork on problem employees. If you have so much paperwork to file on every single one of your employees that it becomes a detriment to your other managerial duties, something really fishy is going on.
And yeah, keep union-specific talk to the union thread please. If you think they're the solution to at-will, then great, otherwise it's not the point of this thread.
I do think they are the solution. Depending on the benevolence of state and federal legislatures has proven to be a shitty compromise option, as history shows their commitment to worker rights diminishes pretty damned quickly when the strength of labor organizations wane and political donations from industry waxes.
Unions are pretty damned ancient for a reason. They work. Even the Romans - who were in no way averse to crucifying uppity citizens - had to deal with them.
I think unions have a lot of baggage that will keep them from ever applying to a majority of the workforce. Enough people genuinely dislike them that you'll never see them be a dominant force. What would be so bad about essentially codifying the collective bargaining power of unions into law? It would eschew the baggage and accomplish the same thing.
I think unions have a lot of baggage that will keep them from ever applying to a majority of the workforce. Enough people genuinely dislike them that you'll never see them be a dominant force. What would be so bad about essentially codifying the collective bargaining power of unions into law? It would eschew the baggage and accomplish the same thing.
Because legislative law is incredibly fluid. It reacts extremely quickly to which way the money is flowing. If it's flowing from capitalists, as it currently is, then we get the situation we're in now. If unions are strong enough to turn on the spigot, then you'll get some laws benefiting labor. As one waxes or wanes, the laws change. That's the important thing. You can't just expect laws to be passed and enforced until the end of time. Just as soon as the pressure dries up, things change.
I think unions have a lot of baggage that will keep them from ever applying to a majority of the workforce. Enough people genuinely dislike them that you'll never see them be a dominant force. What would be so bad about essentially codifying the collective bargaining power of unions into law? It would eschew the baggage and accomplish the same thing.
It doesn't work? The principle you are advocating is essentially the stated policy of the U.S. Federal government from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s. Two fairly close elections in the U.S. and UK - Reagan and Thatcher's conservative revolution - demolished that policy within a generation.
And I am also seeing a lot of signs that "what people believe" in general about governance and labor is changing rapidly as the Baby Boomers and older age out of the workforce and existence. A lot of current American attitudes were formed in that era when the Federal government saw its duty as maintaining peaceful balance between labor and industry. Too many people are getting fucked over in our exciting new economy for those ideas to remain steady over the next decades.
I think unions have a lot of baggage that will keep them from ever applying to a majority of the workforce. Enough people genuinely dislike them that you'll never see them be a dominant force. What would be so bad about essentially codifying the collective bargaining power of unions into law? It would eschew the baggage and accomplish the same thing.
Mjeh. The advantage of maintaining union negotiation is that it means that both parties to a negotiation has a vested interest in making the end result work. There's no elected politican with non-industry related concerns who can come in and do whatever because reasons. It literally cannot accomplish the same thing, because you'd need a patchwork, industry adapted, legislation that - even worse - had to be able to adapt with the economic climate.
You don't have a legislature that could actually do that. Sweden doesn't think it has the legislature to do that, and we're a country of under 10 million with a legislature that can pass a budget.
That isn't to say that you can't make broad improvements to general conditions of employment - notice and severance being two great examples - but you can't legislate away the need for unions.
I think unions have a lot of baggage that will keep them from ever applying to a majority of the workforce. Enough people genuinely dislike them that you'll never see them be a dominant force. What would be so bad about essentially codifying the collective bargaining power of unions into law? It would eschew the baggage and accomplish the same thing.
Mjeh. The advantage of maintaining union negotiation is that it means that both parties to a negotiation has a vested interest in making the end result work. There's no elected politican with non-industry related concerns who can come in and do whatever because reasons. It literally cannot accomplish the same thing, because you'd need a patchwork, industry adapted, legislation that - even worse - had to be able to adapt with the economic climate.
You don't have a legislature that could actually do that. Sweden doesn't think it has the legislature to do that, and we're a country of under 10 million with a legislature that can pass a budget.
That isn't to say that you can't make broad improvements to general conditions of employment - notice and severance being two great examples - but you can't legislate away the need for unions.
In the U.S., it has also been true that you can't even make broad improvements to the general conditions of employment without the support of union-backed politicians. This has been one of the reasons that the GOP has multiple local, state and federal efforts underway to prevent unions from directly supporting candidates, while also backing efforts to limit campaign contributions from businesses and wealthy donors.
I don't know what the lack of union growth and power has to do with anything, those are the realities of the world around us.
Workers should get more protections, and I think they probably will over time, all I was saying was that the world we're talking about hasn't ever existed yet. It's still something To Be.
Unions got out PR'd, especially among the working class.
I never hear about good things Unions do and routinely hear shit about stupid things Unions do. I KNOW they do lots of good things, I just never hear about it.
This is so incredibly true. Two of the people in my IT group are Union employees, and my boss and I are overtime exempt salaried employees, because that's how the job codes were set up however fuck long ago. Know what that means for us? That means when we have events that we have to start filming at 5:00am, my boss and I are showing up to set up by ourselves because the Union workers cannot start before 6:30. If we have an all day event to film, we're doing both set up and break down alone because the Union worker cannot stay more than 8 hours. We have to film on Saturday next week, and we need one of our Union members there, so he gets a day and a half off during the week since we're asking him to work a Saturday.
The problem is, that at some point, when the Unions actively work against getting the damn job done in a lot of industries, they earn a lot of negative opinions.
This is crab bucket thinking.
Shouldn't you be more upset that - as an exempt employee - you're being expected to work at least 9.5 hours (and most likely significantly more) without additional compensation? Instead of complaining about the union rules, you should be complaining about the company that is exploiting you.
Or are you being compensated for your extra time through a higher salary?
I've also never heard of a union that won't allow their members work overtime at all. I have heard of unions that won't require their members to work overtime, or unions that require fair compensation (shift premiums, actually paying overtime rather than comp time bullshit, etc) for their members to work overtime.
On the other hand, I have heard of many, many employers that simply refuse to pay their employees overtime, but failure to get work done - regardless of the workload - negatively impacts those employees.
But we're getting away from the point of the thread...we've got a dedicated labor thread for unions. The big thing is that it's easy to 'other' people. We've got an example right up the page about how a new GM 'othered' the existing employees because of her relationship to 'her' people. It negatively impacted performance evaluations, and while the GM could easily have doctored performance evaluations and cut the people she didn't like without real cause, there would at least need to be some kind of paper trail.
I'm compensated, and the long hours were clearly stated in the job description when I took it. On top of it, I enjoy the work I do, and on non event days, basically get to set my own schedule a lot of the time. It just gets to be the point of literally not being possible to properly set up and film without an extra body or two sometimes, and we are restricted from having said bodies. I'm not sure who sets the rules on whether we can let the Union guys get overtime or not, but it's not my boss, or else he would absolutely let this guy get paid time and a half to help out.
Again, I absolutely, fully support the idea that my boss can't arbitrarily make this guy work whenever he decides he wants to, with no recourse. But goddamned if the general rules don't conform at all to what we actually do. It's not a "exception", this is something we've been doing three times a month for two years now, and both of the Union people we hired came on board after we started. Doesn't matter, we couldn't alter the job descriptions of the position to include those duties or work out anything because of "reasons". Why that is, I doubt I will ever properly find out, but it definitely colors my experience.
I don't know what the lack of union growth and power has to do with anything, those are the realities of the world around us.
Workers should get more protections, and I think they probably will over time, all I was saying was that the world we're talking about hasn't ever existed yet. It's still something To Be.
Unions got out PR'd, especially among the working class.
I never hear about good things Unions do and routinely hear shit about stupid things Unions do. I KNOW they do lots of good things, I just never hear about it.
This is so incredibly true. Two of the people in my IT group are Union employees, and my boss and I are overtime exempt salaried employees, because that's how the job codes were set up however fuck long ago. Know what that means for us? That means when we have events that we have to start filming at 5:00am, my boss and I are showing up to set up by ourselves because the Union workers cannot start before 6:30. If we have an all day event to film, we're doing both set up and break down alone because the Union worker cannot stay more than 8 hours. We have to film on Saturday next week, and we need one of our Union members there, so he gets a day and a half off during the week since we're asking him to work a Saturday.
The problem is, that at some point, when the Unions actively work against getting the damn job done in a lot of industries, they earn a lot of negative opinions.
This is crab bucket thinking.
Shouldn't you be more upset that - as an exempt employee - you're being expected to work at least 9.5 hours (and most likely significantly more) without additional compensation? Instead of complaining about the union rules, you should be complaining about the company that is exploiting you.
Or are you being compensated for your extra time through a higher salary?
I've also never heard of a union that won't allow their members work overtime at all. I have heard of unions that won't require their members to work overtime, or unions that require fair compensation (shift premiums, actually paying overtime rather than comp time bullshit, etc) for their members to work overtime.
On the other hand, I have heard of many, many employers that simply refuse to pay their employees overtime, but failure to get work done - regardless of the workload - negatively impacts those employees.
But we're getting away from the point of the thread...we've got a dedicated labor thread for unions. The big thing is that it's easy to 'other' people. We've got an example right up the page about how a new GM 'othered' the existing employees because of her relationship to 'her' people. It negatively impacted performance evaluations, and while the GM could easily have doctored performance evaluations and cut the people she didn't like without real cause, there would at least need to be some kind of paper trail.
I'm compensated, and the long hours were clearly stated in the job description when I took it. On top of it, I enjoy the work I do, and on non event days, basically get to set my own schedule a lot of the time. It just gets to be the point of literally not being possible to properly set up and film without an extra body or two sometimes, and we are restricted from having said bodies. I'm not sure who sets the rules on whether we can let the Union guys get overtime or not, but it's not my boss, or else he would absolutely let this guy get paid time and a half to help out.
Again, I absolutely, fully support the idea that my boss can't arbitrarily make this guy work whenever he decides he wants to, with no recourse. But goddamned if the general rules don't conform at all to what we actually do. It's not a "exception", this is something we've been doing three times a month for two years now, and both of the Union people we hired came on board after we started. Doesn't matter, we couldn't alter the job descriptions of the position to include those duties or work out anything because of "reasons". Why that is, I doubt I will ever properly find out, but it definitely colors my experience.
Maybe you should hire more people then. Maybe you should find out why you aren't just paying them overtime.
Maybe you should actually understand the situation before blaming the union for it.
I don't know what the lack of union growth and power has to do with anything, those are the realities of the world around us.
Workers should get more protections, and I think they probably will over time, all I was saying was that the world we're talking about hasn't ever existed yet. It's still something To Be.
Unions got out PR'd, especially among the working class.
I never hear about good things Unions do and routinely hear shit about stupid things Unions do. I KNOW they do lots of good things, I just never hear about it.
This is so incredibly true. Two of the people in my IT group are Union employees, and my boss and I are overtime exempt salaried employees, because that's how the job codes were set up however fuck long ago. Know what that means for us? That means when we have events that we have to start filming at 5:00am, my boss and I are showing up to set up by ourselves because the Union workers cannot start before 6:30. If we have an all day event to film, we're doing both set up and break down alone because the Union worker cannot stay more than 8 hours. We have to film on Saturday next week, and we need one of our Union members there, so he gets a day and a half off during the week since we're asking him to work a Saturday.
The problem is, that at some point, when the Unions actively work against getting the damn job done in a lot of industries, they earn a lot of negative opinions.
This is crab bucket thinking.
Shouldn't you be more upset that - as an exempt employee - you're being expected to work at least 9.5 hours (and most likely significantly more) without additional compensation? Instead of complaining about the union rules, you should be complaining about the company that is exploiting you.
Or are you being compensated for your extra time through a higher salary?
I've also never heard of a union that won't allow their members work overtime at all. I have heard of unions that won't require their members to work overtime, or unions that require fair compensation (shift premiums, actually paying overtime rather than comp time bullshit, etc) for their members to work overtime.
On the other hand, I have heard of many, many employers that simply refuse to pay their employees overtime, but failure to get work done - regardless of the workload - negatively impacts those employees.
But we're getting away from the point of the thread...we've got a dedicated labor thread for unions. The big thing is that it's easy to 'other' people. We've got an example right up the page about how a new GM 'othered' the existing employees because of her relationship to 'her' people. It negatively impacted performance evaluations, and while the GM could easily have doctored performance evaluations and cut the people she didn't like without real cause, there would at least need to be some kind of paper trail.
I'm compensated, and the long hours were clearly stated in the job description when I took it. On top of it, I enjoy the work I do, and on non event days, basically get to set my own schedule a lot of the time. It just gets to be the point of literally not being possible to properly set up and film without an extra body or two sometimes, and we are restricted from having said bodies. I'm not sure who sets the rules on whether we can let the Union guys get overtime or not, but it's not my boss, or else he would absolutely let this guy get paid time and a half to help out.
Again, I absolutely, fully support the idea that my boss can't arbitrarily make this guy work whenever he decides he wants to, with no recourse. But goddamned if the general rules don't conform at all to what we actually do. It's not a "exception", this is something we've been doing three times a month for two years now, and both of the Union people we hired came on board after we started. Doesn't matter, we couldn't alter the job descriptions of the position to include those duties or work out anything because of "reasons". Why that is, I doubt I will ever properly find out, but it definitely colors my experience.
Those reasons are "there is a collective bargaining agreement in place" and "if you want to add those duties, the the CBA needs to be renegotiated". And I would not be surprised if the case is that the CBA does allow overtime and early starts - as long as they are properly compensated. So your employer, realizing that you aren't under those rules, just expects you to pick up the slack, instead of just paying the differential.
This is why your argument is crab thinking - instead of being angry at your employer, you're angry at the union workers because they're looking out for their interests.
Posts
Plus, y'know. the guy assembling the gizmos in 5 seconds flat is probably making some other trade-off to get good time. There's almost always a trade-off of some sort; meritocracies smack to me of chasing after the ubermensch phantom.
There are so many factors that go into the dynamic of a successful team, whether in business or anything else. Maybe the lowest numbers guy/girl is the person who keeps everyone charged-up during the day, or maybe their methodical work is the only reason your product's quality remains at or above acceptable thresholds as far as consumers are concerned, or maybe they're friends with your best worker & the reason that said worker is so loyal to you, etc. You can't mathematically model that shit, and it's every bit as important as your raw figures for who cranked-out the most widgets / who scored the most sales / etc.
I was a presser for a shirt company which did custom t shirts with hand-set type
the number of "letters" you laid out per day was sort of a way of tracking your abilities (also your number of shirts screwed up per day, which would count against you, heh)
There was an absurdly high daily standard -- I think 600? which I usually just barely hit daily until I got into the swing of it -- and there was a bonus that you could get after 1,000 letters in a single day. I felt like crap for months because I'd never get within spitting distance of that 1k day until I found out that only one employee who was there at the time had gotten one, ever, and then I felt a lot better about the whole thing.
Anyway
so yeah, that labor trade-off comes at a cost; all the highest "letter" producers consistently also had the highest number of fuckups, even among the longtime employees (except maybe the magic 1k girl)
as for at-will employment, I am of two minds about it; having worked for the same employer for nearly ten years, it's exasperating that legally he could fire me for no reason (though at this point I'm sure after the amount of time I've been there they could cobble together a reason if they actually wanted to be rid of me) but it's also sort of... I feel like I wouldn't want to be under contract, and while I
/anecdotal
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
A workplace analogy also comes to mind for me, but this is a vidya forum so instead I'll use a hilariously terrible example because I'm sure most people are familiar with it:
How important is your KDA in a game of League of Legends? Is the rager who has, say, 3:1 average KDA more likely to move up the ladder than the team player who nets 1:1 KDA or maybe even negative values? We already know the answer: nope. In fact, most ragers stay in Bronze League regardless of their individual metrics.
There's nothing wrong with trying to model performance, but the way it's usually done - boiling everything down to a stupidly simple score card - isn't useful, and can be destructive when you try to use a performance metric in one specific area with a goal that's actually unrelated to that metric (i.e. KDA vs moving up the ladder in LoL)
Nah. There are legitimate superstars, who are easily worth as much as any other two people, though less likely via pure widget outputs vs. say, having decent wdiget output, and also being a widget making trainer, and also have the best ability to perform repairs to the widget machines.
That said, at will employment is bullshit, as a good example in case right here: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/iowa-woman-fired-attractive-back-moves/story?id=19851803&singlePage=true
TLDR: "He warned her, "if you see my pants bulging, you'll know your clothes are too revealing." - a legally valid reason to fire someone (the woman, not the sexually harassing piece of shit)
US employees need far, far more regulations. One extra, of a billion, would be giving all benefits to any employee regardless of part time / temporary status, either at a flat level, or at the least in proportion to their hours and/or duration of employment. A temporary employee who works for a quarter should get a quarter's vacation days or the cash equivalent.
And speaking of vacation, the legal minimum needs to be increased. Directly duplicating the UK on this matter would be a good foundation, although perhaps earning leave while on leave might be overly generous.
https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement
And let me guess, those 'legit superstars' are people who act & look just like you, right?
It's interesting that you bring up unions, since the last time you really brought up unions, you made roughly zero coherent points. I fail to see how anything you posted here does a single thing to change how wrong you have, historically, been about unions and how they work, and where the real issues are in the U.S. labor market.
Since I'm gay, that means there are 29 states in this country where I can be fired just for being out at work. Even if I'm not fired, I'm considerably more likely to be denied promotions or subjected to harassment without any form of recourse, all because at-will trumps so hard that I need congressional action to not be shitcanned for no reason that is based on my job performance.
You keep working off this idea that corporations are going to naturally select the best people for the job and compensate them properly and laissez faire labor markets produce the best outcomes and the only way you can actually think that is if you are entirely ignorant of the history of labor in this country.
Collective bargaining can do funny things to wage differentials in certain professions, having to give notice/severance not-so-much. Having it cost you money to fire someone doesn't mean you can't reward your most productive employees.
I was talking more about situations where there's assembly lines that run in parallel. Not one gigantic assembly line.
You see this in places like UPS and FedEx.
Parallel assembly is better than serial!
I think this is a very notable point. The relationship between an employer and employee should be treated entirely as a business arrangement by both parties. As an employee, you are selling that employer your time - you are, quite literally, a supplier of labor. An employer certainly sees things this way, and considers their employees no differently than they would treat any supplier.
As an employee there may be intangibles or other incentives that keep you with one employer over another, same as any business relationship, but at it's core an employee should have no loyalty to an employer beyond what makes economic sense by that employee's metric. Maybe an employer provides a positive work environment for that employee which that employee values more than a higher wage elsewhere, but that's not loyalty - it's an economic factor.
It's no different than the same factors that kept people from making 'strategic defaults' in the 2008 housing crisis. There are a great many people who wouldn't stop making payments throughout the foreclosure process and eventually walk away from their mortgage - even if it made perfect economic sense. This was out of a sense of blind loyalty and responsibility to emotionless businesses which absolutely had no issue kicking those people out of their homes in a second. Even more importantly, those people were paying (through things like PMI) the costs of them walking away - them walking away is a risk that the banks / lenders directly assumed.
Loyalty to employers and businesses should not be treated like a value until / unless those businesses demonstrate the same loyalty to their employees and customers. This is the same PR battle that business has won in hurting unions. People need to recognize that unless they are a shareholder, business don't and won't ever act in their best interest beyond what's required by law and economic sense (and even then, not so much).
Arguments about meritocracy are the same Randian bullshit that comes from privilege and completely ignores reality for the vast majority of people out there. If you ask any CEO's nephew, he'll swear up and down - and probably believes - that the reason for his meteoric rise through the ranks is meritocracy. Doesn't make it true.
In any system - even a seniority based system - there are ways to reward merit. An assembly line doesn't operate in a vacuum, and if a company isn't rewarding merit - perhaps by hiring from within or promoting line employees to skilled trades or trainer or white collar / management positions - you should really reconsider how valid arguments about meritocracy really are. Because...as far as I can tell...that's not how companies work anymore.
You people are arguing against a point I'm not making. I'm saying the worker hasn't lost power, we've never had it. There was a period where unions were stronger, but outside of Chicago and the movies they were never a prolific cudgel against the capitalists that we've built them up into being for most of the country.
I'm not arguing unions shouldn't exist, try to see the forest beyond the trees.
I think homes are a bad example of "economics"
Homes represent a lot of things to a lot of people. Memories being the most notable. If I can afford to pay an upside down mortgage, fuck it, it's still better than renting.
I'd like to see the collective bargaining power of unions applied universally to the American workforce. Right now it's a pipe dream because if there are people lobbying for workers, they aren't particularly powerful or numerous, and I can't think of one workforce lobby organization off the top of my head. If it was written into law that you have to give either notice or compensation when firing someone without specific, legislated causes, I think we would see a lot fewer personally-motivated terminations.
Example (true story): I worked at a bookstore in the Dallas area about 10 years ago. I had three different performance reviews when I worked there: the first said I was a mediocre employee, the second said I was literally the most valuable asset in the entire store, and the last one said I was a worthless waste of wages. I didn't change my work habits significantly between these three performance reviews. They were given by three separate managers with three separate agendas. The first was given by a guy who had been managing the store for ages, but hid in his office all day and hardly saw what anybody did at all. The second manager came during a period of turmoil in the company when people started telling corporate that the first guy wasn't doing anything. She was an interim manager and she interviewed everybody regularly to see what changes they'd like to have implemented. She noticed that I had completely overhauled our Sci Fi and Computer sections and that sales had gone drastically up as a result, and so she gave me a raise and recommended I be looked at for promotion.
The final manager was the newly installed GM and she was aggressively upward-mobile and cutthroat. She began firing literally everybody at the store and replacing them with the people she had employed personally at her former store. I still worked just as hard, but when someone is determined to fire the entire staff and replace them with people of her own choosing in an at-will situation, it's impossible to argue. After the review, I quit my job because I saw the writing on the wall, and many other employees did too.
The point is that if firing everybody for no real, documented reason would have led to the company paying everybody the same salary, but not getting the labor, this probably wouldn't have happened (try explaining that loss of profits to corporate!), or if it did, at least I (and several other older people who, without a working wage, would have to rely entirely upon a fixed income) would have had a safety net between jobs to mitigate some of the lying awake at night wondering if I was going to be homeless in a month.
Yeah they're not the people you picked, but are they fucking up?
I've been in that situation. To the GM, the fact that they aren't the "chosen team" is an automatic fuckup. Everything else extends from there. It's not hard to find a fault when you really, really want to find one.
An idea that's been lost in our post-union days is the awareness that managers are political creatures and make decisions for reasons that have nothing to do with work performance. While there are plenty of politics among rank-and-file workers, the entire basis of the idea of "solidarity" is that workers must stand together to protect themsevles from the ambitions and power-games that have always characterized management in every industry.
A poor performance review is a "real documented reason", I hate to be the one to break it to you.
The one time I was fired it was for bullshit reasons. But a manager spent a month manipulating my metrics so it would look good to HR. Which was trivial to do.
In my case, though, it may have been possible to go to court and show that she had done this to every single employee and cast doubt on her bullshit performance reviews were it not for at-will employment justifying her shitty firings explicitly.
This is so incredibly true. Two of the people in my IT group are Union employees, and my boss and I are overtime exempt salaried employees, because that's how the job codes were set up however fuck long ago. Know what that means for us? That means when we have events that we have to start filming at 5:00am, my boss and I are showing up to set up by ourselves because the Union workers cannot start before 6:30. If we have an all day event to film, we're doing both set up and break down alone because the Union worker cannot stay more than 8 hours. We have to film on Saturday next week, and we need one of our Union members there, so he gets a day and a half off during the week since we're asking him to work a Saturday.
The problem is, that at some point, when the Unions actively work against getting the damn job done in a lot of industries, they earn a lot of negative opinions.
It sounds more like "We have to pay them more for overtime hours, so, uh, we're not going to." The old cookie joke applies here.
I get the management side frustrations and part of the PR issues is exactly that. The management side appeals to shit like "We want to get this done." The labor side is fighting a battle to try and get the most they can and too often that appears to descend into empty legalism. If you give it a good think through you can see why the Union wouldn't want to make "Just this once" exceptions, even if individual members are willing, but in the moment? Fucking frustrating.
Yeah. I can see the frustration, but I have also seen what happens when "Just this once" starts to happen on a routine basis as constant crunch time and emergency becomes a crutch for poor management and sloppy planning. One of the things unions try to do is promote a workplace that allows for lifelong careers.
It doesn't help that routinely burning out and replacing workers is actually a net benefit for immediate bottom-line oriented organizations. You lose experience and institutional knowledge, but you also lose a lot of employees who drift away before they begin accruing seniority pay.
But both of those companies are playing the same game, so they treat their employees exactly the same. Disposable cogs in a wheel.
Which is another reason deregulation being awesome is one of the worst lies the working public ever ate up. Companies are not your friends or your advocates. Obviously not all companies are cut from the same cloth. By and large, though, if they can put another hundred bucks on their bottom line by fucking you over without consequences, they'll do it.
This is crab bucket thinking.
Shouldn't you be more upset that - as an exempt employee - you're being expected to work at least 9.5 hours (and most likely significantly more) without additional compensation? Instead of complaining about the union rules, you should be complaining about the company that is exploiting you.
Or are you being compensated for your extra time through a higher salary?
I've also never heard of a union that won't allow their members work overtime at all. I have heard of unions that won't require their members to work overtime, or unions that require fair compensation (shift premiums, actually paying overtime rather than comp time bullshit, etc) for their members to work overtime.
On the other hand, I have heard of many, many employers that simply refuse to pay their employees overtime, but failure to get work done - regardless of the workload - negatively impacts those employees.
But we're getting away from the point of the thread...we've got a dedicated labor thread for unions. The big thing is that it's easy to 'other' people. We've got an example right up the page about how a new GM 'othered' the existing employees because of her relationship to 'her' people. It negatively impacted performance evaluations, and while the GM could easily have doctored performance evaluations and cut the people she didn't like without real cause, there would at least need to be some kind of paper trail.
I'd insert the limiter "immediate monetary" in front of consequences. I don't think most of them think that there is no consequence for that kind of behavior, it's just not immediate enough to show up this quarter/year/term as CEO and so is Somebody Elses Problem.
This is what I wanted to say, thanks.
And a paper trail is really not a high bar to clear. Managers exist so that they don't get bogged down in the day-to-day operations of the store and can sit at their desk to file paperwork on problem employees. If you have so much paperwork to file on every single one of your employees that it becomes a detriment to your other managerial duties, something really fishy is going on.
And yeah, keep union-specific talk to the union thread please. If you think they're the solution to at-will, then great, otherwise it's not the point of this thread.
I do think they are the solution. Depending on the benevolence of state and federal legislatures has proven to be a shitty compromise option, as history shows their commitment to worker rights diminishes pretty damned quickly when the strength of labor organizations wane and political donations from industry waxes.
Unions are pretty damned ancient for a reason. They work. Even the Romans - who were in no way averse to crucifying uppity citizens - had to deal with them.
Because legislative law is incredibly fluid. It reacts extremely quickly to which way the money is flowing. If it's flowing from capitalists, as it currently is, then we get the situation we're in now. If unions are strong enough to turn on the spigot, then you'll get some laws benefiting labor. As one waxes or wanes, the laws change. That's the important thing. You can't just expect laws to be passed and enforced until the end of time. Just as soon as the pressure dries up, things change.
It doesn't work? The principle you are advocating is essentially the stated policy of the U.S. Federal government from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s. Two fairly close elections in the U.S. and UK - Reagan and Thatcher's conservative revolution - demolished that policy within a generation.
And I am also seeing a lot of signs that "what people believe" in general about governance and labor is changing rapidly as the Baby Boomers and older age out of the workforce and existence. A lot of current American attitudes were formed in that era when the Federal government saw its duty as maintaining peaceful balance between labor and industry. Too many people are getting fucked over in our exciting new economy for those ideas to remain steady over the next decades.
You don't have a legislature that could actually do that. Sweden doesn't think it has the legislature to do that, and we're a country of under 10 million with a legislature that can pass a budget.
That isn't to say that you can't make broad improvements to general conditions of employment - notice and severance being two great examples - but you can't legislate away the need for unions.
In the U.S., it has also been true that you can't even make broad improvements to the general conditions of employment without the support of union-backed politicians. This has been one of the reasons that the GOP has multiple local, state and federal efforts underway to prevent unions from directly supporting candidates, while also backing efforts to limit campaign contributions from businesses and wealthy donors.
I'm compensated, and the long hours were clearly stated in the job description when I took it. On top of it, I enjoy the work I do, and on non event days, basically get to set my own schedule a lot of the time. It just gets to be the point of literally not being possible to properly set up and film without an extra body or two sometimes, and we are restricted from having said bodies. I'm not sure who sets the rules on whether we can let the Union guys get overtime or not, but it's not my boss, or else he would absolutely let this guy get paid time and a half to help out.
Again, I absolutely, fully support the idea that my boss can't arbitrarily make this guy work whenever he decides he wants to, with no recourse. But goddamned if the general rules don't conform at all to what we actually do. It's not a "exception", this is something we've been doing three times a month for two years now, and both of the Union people we hired came on board after we started. Doesn't matter, we couldn't alter the job descriptions of the position to include those duties or work out anything because of "reasons". Why that is, I doubt I will ever properly find out, but it definitely colors my experience.
Maybe you should hire more people then. Maybe you should find out why you aren't just paying them overtime.
Maybe you should actually understand the situation before blaming the union for it.
Those reasons are "there is a collective bargaining agreement in place" and "if you want to add those duties, the the CBA needs to be renegotiated". And I would not be surprised if the case is that the CBA does allow overtime and early starts - as long as they are properly compensated. So your employer, realizing that you aren't under those rules, just expects you to pick up the slack, instead of just paying the differential.
This is why your argument is crab thinking - instead of being angry at your employer, you're angry at the union workers because they're looking out for their interests.