The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
Testing character through hard times. My newfound sense of patriotism.
Posts
It's not a matter of taking pride in your job, or even really work ethics: it's framing the world in reasonable terms. If I told you I was an avid gardener, perhaps you'd find that interesting and impressive. If I told you I was an avid gardener, and I sat in my shed tending to the tulips from dawn unti midnight, I hope you'd think there was a problem.
It is not reasonable to partition more of your time away from your employer to use than for you to spend for yourself. I'd go far as to say that's masochistic & insane.
this isn't so for a lot of people and devoting yourself to employment is not likely to be reciprocated; a lot of people here have finely-tuned senses about that sort of attitude because it is sadly common and self-destructive.
No, it's just that you probably pissed a lot of people off by intimating that anyone not adhering to a workaholic's schedule was lazy, and that you're very 'proud' to support an ideology of irrationally long work hours & demands.
I think Tyler Durden summed up our problem with your worldview, frankly.
So do we all. The difference between you and posters here is that we want to make that goal easier. You seem to have given up on that. Not that I blame you, everyone has their limits. It's your bosses fault for the situation. You're just the victim.
You've all but admitted that it does.
People caring about how your bosses are treating you is a good thing. Compassion isn't a weakness.
The problem isn't that you want to do it. It's that you really don't have a choice because you don't have time to do it when you want.
Being compensated well only goes so far. Though at least you get that advantage, many professions don't.
It seems like you don't mind that you're sacrificing your life for a few extra bucks. Which many people disagree with.
Some people like doing that stuff by themselves or with friends and family. I wouldn't call that a flaw.
The biggest source of conflict in this thread is passive-aggressive comments like this. People disagree with you. People think your logic is faulty, your viewpoint naive and the narrowness of your data saddening. You should be trying dialectic, not rhetoric.
I don't want to dogpile on you, but you're a lawyer posting in D&D! A professional disputant posting in a forum dedicated to arguing! What did you expect?
true enough, but OP is not emphasizing that in total he gets actually quite a lot of hours off in between crunch periods, so it sounds like he's camping in the office 365/24/7. Which I think is what is setting people off.
A lot more of a given discussion than you think relies on implied or assumed information. The picture you paint with everything from what words you chose, to the order you put them in, to the punctuation and paragraph structure will influence the discussion. It's like what I said in the other thread, I'm not saying I think you personally are actually a nasty person at all. The problem is your manner of speech again appears to reflect the sensibilities of a type of person who is often heavily egoistic in assuming their personal success indicates a natural human superiority over others and in then in applying that severe egoism by being excessively cruel and uncaring towards anyone else who does not achieve at or near the same level of material success.
Like with the talk about being poor, you're sounding like a certain type of politician. If you want to break out of that mold maybe look at how some other people speak, read some arguments and try and get a feel for people who you relate to, whose values you more accurately feel describe yourself but also tend to be sociable and well liked in a given community. It will give you an idea of how to adapt yourself and your posting style so you don't end up getting misunderstood and jumped on. I tend to end up rambling more often then not myself in an attempt to prevent misunderstandings (still working on it! but it's improving!
tl:dr; If people are getting the wrong picture of you, first ask how they could possibly misinterpret your words to get that impression, then revise how you write future posts. Hope that helps.
Here here! I'll admit I don't agree with all of his beliefs but I think he's a lot nicer and most all of this anger is just being caused by silly misunderstandings. We all have to realize no one is free from bias, us especially. Republican political insanity has trained us to often be incredibly angry and blame people for saying things they didn't actually mean. Politicians do this shit because they are some combination of stupid and evil, but most voters are trained to trust them and will often adopt their speaking habits and not really look deeper at the inner workings of policy or do their own research.
He isn't even a father yet: So if anyone here is legitimately worried about anything then the most effective approach is to be humble, honest, and voice a reasonable disagreement with room for discussion. Everyone's life is their own, you can offer advice but you can never command someone into making certain choices. It just doesn't end well, as we are now seeing.
Increasing the effective wage rate of association members doesn't necessarily entail reducing work hours; defending material interest can just as easily take place by raising the bar of entry and if requiring lawyers to be capable of extraordinary crunch time is one such bar that applies to a majority of existing members, then it restricts entry and raises wages
In that time my mother has worked on the Labor & delivery floor (1pm-9pm), a doctor's office (all day from 7am-9pm), coordinator of a women's center (9am-6pm), and now as a personal nurse for a severely disabled boy (5am-7pm).
These hours are not abnormal in the medical field. But I was 15 years old 15 years ago, my baby brother was 11. I had already been making dinner for 4 years, making sure that both of us had our homework done (and correct), and at times even making certain that my brother had his bath/shower (he was young, he hated bathing). I am fine with this as an adult. I grew up with knowledge of cooking, running a household to some extent, etc. My brother, on the other hand, hates it. He hates my father, resents my mother, and everything that has gone wrong in his life (which is a decent amount) is their fault, and it all stems back to the fact that (in his mind) they were never around during his childhood. The family vacations that we went on (which we did a lot of, including England & Disney World), the fact that he had a vehicle from the time he got his license, the fact that he didn't have to worry about paying for school for himself at all, etc etc all of those things that most people in this world would be thankful for? My brother seems them as my father/parents trying to buy his love, to buy back or bribe the time that they spent away from his childhood.
Now my brother has problems, most of them psychological in one form or another and he could seriously benefit from some therapy. But my point is, my parents worked hard to get where they are today, and they gave us everything that we could possibly have dreamed of (although I did not get a mustang GT as a car. I got a ford pinto instead). I'm thankful, grateful, and ohmygod so unbelievably spoiled. My kid brother who is only 4 years younger than me hates the world. And my father the most.
It's awesome that your wife is going to stay home with your kids if/when/now that you have them. Can you afford for her to do that? That's fantastic that you can! No sarcasm, it's really fantastic that you have the option to be a one-income household open to you. Just, not everybody does.
Edit: I don't want to come off like I'm calling the OP a bad father. Definitely not. I think my dad is a great father, and he worked a lot of long hours. But different people are going to take the same situation/ideal/thing differently. That's pretty much all I'm trying to get across here. Also, my little brother is a douche.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
Right but Unions aren't just about increasing the effective wage rate of members. They did a bunch of other stuff.
anyway fwiw op i have a lot of sympathy for your sentiments. you say your immediately family immigrated? i am an immigrant and i remember the absolute wide eyed wonder i experienced when i got my first real, not cash-in-an-envelope job. i remember my first real paycheck paying taxes and being a part of the system. it was a shitty, dead end entry level job... but i'd go into the site on my days off and walk around, i was so fixated at being good at my job. now, i don't agree with everything you're saying- and i reflect on those times a little embarrassingly, because i feel like i was prostrating myself for a system that didn't care about me very much.
but if you are employed somewhere that appreciates and rewards you (socially and financially) for really going the extra mile, and you feel like you can balance that effort with a rich social and home life... more power to you.
I don't know many people who do a workday of more than 8 hours at least. My dad used to get home way later but only when he's on call and then he doesn't have to start as early. Occasionally is okay, but I don't know anyone who'd do that as an expected part of the job. (aside from part-timers and those who work different hours. I wouldn't think a longer workday would be great, at the end of my day I'm fucking tired and not up to doing anything that actually requires a lot of thought.)
edit: btw I agree with organichu. no big about working that hard if you want to, I merely don't understand why you want to since I love free time.
presumably the broad goal is pursuing the interests of members and I'm just pointing out that not controlling work schedules and indeed cheering on the increase in hours can be consistent with doing so
Kindred spirit fist-bump.
It isn't uncommon. My granddad did this and so did my dad. I can only guess that the weird sort of disconnect I feel with my dad is something that he felt about his own father at one point.
Point is, that kind of behavior does seem to get passed down and in my experience it fucks you up pretty bad. After slaving working at my first "real" job for several months I had to step back and say to myself "whoa there fella, keep this up and you'll be just like them".
Part of the problem with the general mood here is that a few people took your initial statement (and statements like this one about "taking pride in your work") and then combined it with their life experience (a common theme seems to be a mother or father that worked too much) and made you out to be something you're obviously not.
I'm not going to apologize for the other people, but based on your initial statement I assumed that you were some 60+ hour/week gunner telling us we're a bunch of lazy bastards and we'd be rich like you if only we worked more. Sorry for that, even if I never said it in a post.
I'm having trouble wording the rest of what I want to say, so I'm just going to leave it at that and go to bed.
Right but my point was they aren't replacing unions because they aren't pursuing the same interests of members that unions generally were.
They are replacing some aspects of unions, but the rest is left flapping in the wind.
Some people have jobs that are part of what they want for themselves.
It's a kooky idea.
I didn't understand my dad back when I was getting ready to go to university and he (a dentist) took me aside and urged me to go into a profession that would let me be my own boss - any profession that would let me be my own boss - so that I could set my own hours. My dad's the kind of guy who worked to live - if he wanted to go on vacation, he'd increase his patient load for the month, which would be the closest to an 8 hour day as he ever got, but otherwise, he worked 10- or noon-to-3, just enough for us to live in a working-class neighborhood but able to take weeks off and travel whenever we liked, and never have to fear unexpected bills.
Years later, as I'm asked to put in 50-60 hours to do work that wouldn't be necessary if my company would just man up and hire one extra person to cover the workload, making less money than I did when I entered the industry nearly a decade ago and with nowhere to go in this economy, I get what he was saying. Of course, he also was of the mindset that just having a degree would put me head and shoulders above the opportunities he had coming out of school, and we all know where that mindset gets you.
Oh, and if I got home at 7:30pm I'd be so infuriated I'd probably need therapy to talk me down at the end of the day. I commute because where I live is the nearest place to work I can afford to live and not fear getting stabbed, and because unemployment in my county is 14 so a new job is pretty much out of the question. And at work people aren't doing the overtime out of pride for their jobs, it's purely for the money (this is how they say it: "oh well, it's overtime pay.")
I'm really not getting what your hang up is here.
Unions pursued the interests of their members in different ways then professional organizations. They also pursued different goals.
This means that professional organizations are not performing the exact same service as unions, just some of them. They are deficient in areas some may consider very important.
The talk of billable hours for lawyers above is a perfect example.
They are setup up completely differently for completely different purposes, so why wouldn't you expect different priorities?
This is best highlighted by the fact that Unions will have arbitration and such when it comes to issues between management and a union member. What professional organization works to define things like "Overtime"? (shit, I can think of at least 2 professions where the opposite is encouraged)
Just because a union and a professional organization both serve the interests of their members in some respects does not mean they are similar or perform a similar function in at all times.
Also, professional organizations explicitly do not exist solely to serve the interests of their members.
Oh, I'm aware of that as well, and I'm aware that it might cost me one day that I wasn't jumping to be first in line to do O/T (I do do the O/T sometimes, I'm just not the guy who stays until 11pm every night, and there is that guy). I try not to think about it much, because rage isn't healthy. I'm fortunate to have a supportive family and no dependants should worse come to worst.
Though, why this? All I want is an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, but not to be exploited because it's easier to make me work evenings and weekends than to stop cutting back on contractors (since our workload has tripled in the past two years but our team has been reduced by a third).
Yes 7:30 is late. I get home at 4:20 and am in at 7:30. Wake up at 6:30 too.
Also the teachers I know go in at7:30 and take tons of work home