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America's Toxic Corporate Culture (and maybe elsewhere, too!)
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Maybe you've heard the horror stories about Konami. Things like making company-wide announcements if staff members took a little too long on their lunch break. Or that staff members that liked Facebook posts of former employees stating they had left Konami and found other employment finding that they got shuffled around within the company, some to degrading janitorial positions. There's a lot of these stories. Workers at Amazon warehouses die sometimes!
Most (many?) of us are fortunate to have jobs that don't go that far. But the standard for what is considered acceptable today is pretty different from what it used to be.
Consider:
There are really innumerable offenses to list. Chances are you've worked at a place that is guilty of at least a few of these things or others.
Why has this all been such a relatable thing? How did we get here?
Some would point to the decline of unions as a major contributing factor. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when union-busting became such a successful American pasttime, but most of the research I've done points to either post-WW2 or the 1970s as the two most likely periods.
Others claim that companies feel like they've had to crack the whip as other nations began to become competitive on the world stage. In other words, we were a dominant force on the world economic stage until we weren't, and back then companies could afford to be generous. After Germany and Japan recovered from the war (and others picked up on capitalism and became proficient at it), suddenly American corporations weren't on easy street anymore. (I personally find this claim dubious, but I digress)
Still others point to demographics. They accuse the Baby Boomers of latching on to the good jobs and never letting go, or of retiring en masse and forcing companies to be frugal while paying out those benefits.
I think pinpointing the various reasons this has happened are key to fixing it. Speaking of fixing it, how do we do that? There have been efforts to boycott and walk out of companies like Amazon, with marginal results. Restoring unions is one possibility, but doing so is a long road fraught with 1% vultures and hardcore, hard-nosed capitalist politicians, and in the meantime people need to put dinner on the table and pay the damn mortgage.
Personally, I think that one of the biggest pieces of this puzzle is giving antitrust laws some actual fucking teeth. You see this type of corporate behavior most often in corps that have gotten bloated and huge, where it's more about Us than You.
What this thread is:
What this thread is not:
Most (many?) of us are fortunate to have jobs that don't go that far. But the standard for what is considered acceptable today is pretty different from what it used to be.
Consider:
- Many companies have policies that provide its workers with sick days. However, management staff sometimes discourage using this time or even flat-out prohibit it. Particularly terrible companies even frown on using paid vacation days, or imply you'll be passed over when promotion time comes if you use them.
- Oftentimes a company will shift to the paradigm of keeping management full-time but only using part-time employees beneath them in order to avoid providing benefits. This can result in employees working multiple jobs with obscene hours just to make ends meet.
- Ever had a manager threaten to "take it out of your paycheck"?
- Here, you get a salaried position! Did we mention that salaried positions aren't eligible for overtime? Yeah, we're gonna need you for 60-80 hours this week.
- Occasionally, a company will just flat-out refuse to pay overtime and tell you to clock out right at 40 but keep working (which is blatantly illegal, but what are you gonna do? You need this job)
- Some places use pay grades or "levels" which assign worth to people. "That guy's only an E5, you should talk with Shaun. He's an E3."
- Companies either have a closed promotion process, meaning the upper crust gets to decide who is worthy of promotion rather than posting job openings for internal promotion to anybody interested, or post their openings outside the company for positions which could easily be filled internally.
- Instead of checking to see whether you are accomplishing tasks, you are bombarded with constant benchmarks to meet.
- Retirement schmetirement.
There are really innumerable offenses to list. Chances are you've worked at a place that is guilty of at least a few of these things or others.
Why has this all been such a relatable thing? How did we get here?
Some would point to the decline of unions as a major contributing factor. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when union-busting became such a successful American pasttime, but most of the research I've done points to either post-WW2 or the 1970s as the two most likely periods.
Others claim that companies feel like they've had to crack the whip as other nations began to become competitive on the world stage. In other words, we were a dominant force on the world economic stage until we weren't, and back then companies could afford to be generous. After Germany and Japan recovered from the war (and others picked up on capitalism and became proficient at it), suddenly American corporations weren't on easy street anymore. (I personally find this claim dubious, but I digress)
Still others point to demographics. They accuse the Baby Boomers of latching on to the good jobs and never letting go, or of retiring en masse and forcing companies to be frugal while paying out those benefits.
I think pinpointing the various reasons this has happened are key to fixing it. Speaking of fixing it, how do we do that? There have been efforts to boycott and walk out of companies like Amazon, with marginal results. Restoring unions is one possibility, but doing so is a long road fraught with 1% vultures and hardcore, hard-nosed capitalist politicians, and in the meantime people need to put dinner on the table and pay the damn mortgage.
Personally, I think that one of the biggest pieces of this puzzle is giving antitrust laws some actual fucking teeth. You see this type of corporate behavior most often in corps that have gotten bloated and huge, where it's more about Us than You.
What this thread is:
- A place to discuss predatory, draconian, backwards, or otherwise damaging workplace policies,
- how we got to this point, and
- what we can do to fix it
What this thread is not:
- A place to talk about Donald Trump or elections or 2016 or...
- chat
- A convenient thread to dump rando tweets of companies doing bad things to its employees with no personal elaboration or like a one-sentence comment that can be paraphrased as "what they did is bad and they should feel bad"
+5
Posts
I've never worked more than 40 hours in a week thanks to this.
We have laws about this.
The problem really isn't the laws (I mean, they're a problem too, yes, however), it's the fact that companies own all of the control in the employee/employer relationship and whistleblowing on them will likely get you blackballed from employment and there's no guarantee the company will even follow the law after you "quit."
Few can afford to take on an employer for violations like this.
Bad idea. This sort of policy encourages people to come in sick, lest they lose a day of actual vacation.
That's an even worse idea. Studies have routinely shown that when workers are given unlimited leave, they wind up taking less time off due to cultural pressure.
Or the loosing of financial regulations that basically allow pump and dumps and that sort of assorted nonsense; all in the name of dolla dolla bills.
From friends who have worked in unlimited time off environments, it quickly becomes apparent that the real policy is that you never actually get any time off due to internal social pressures. Having generous time off measured in hours is great, since it is harder - but not impossible - to undo fixed benefits than it is to undo nebulously "unlimited" ones.
Indeed, I can assure you that if you give combine sick and vacation days I will come in EVERY time I am capable of dragging myself into the office. The company is paying me to do it.
Everyone should get 4 weeks vacation + Unlimited Sick.
GE changed to this last year. I guarantee the change wasn't because they thought it would make things better for their employees.
Also, even if you live in a corporate culture which prevents you TAKING your time off, at least it accrues and the company is obliged to pay you out for it at the end of your employment.
Not necessarily. There are a lot of employers with "use it or lose it" policies that also make it difficult for employees to take vacations, so all the "earned" vacation time just ends up going away without compensation.
This is essentially what I have. If a doctor doesn’t think I should work for X days they say so and that’s that.
Meanwhile if I don’t take all my allotted vacation time my supervisor’s review takes an automatic hit.
They tend to hire young for one thing, and had a cafeteria that provided free breakfast and lunch. Afternoon was free snacks, with fridges full of water/soda/energy drinks etc. Plus a lot of afterwork social activities in the cafeteria. (Since I've left, they've added a coffee shop and a smoothie bar. I recommend the mango smootie.)
All of which resulted in absolutely ridiculous work hours. And the thing is, I still look at my time there fondly. The age group and social activities (and just the inordinate amount of time I spent there) meant I made a lot of good friends.
I just have to remind myself of all the 2am Monday morning e-mails I've recieved, or whenever I went in on a weekend "to just finish something" there was always at least a dozen other people at work as well.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
At least in California companies are obliged to pay you out, and to have a reasonable accrual period.
I have 30 paid vacation days, 3 consecutive day sick leave with no note required, and I am paid if I get sick and hospitalized, which actually happened to me last year. I am not sure I can ever go back to the old system.
Unlimited leave is bad because it changes the context of time off. When you receive a fixed amount of time off, that's part of your compensation - that is, it's something the company owes you. But with unlimited leave, time off becomes a grant from the company - and that makes most workers think long and hard about it.
Edit- I like your idea of antitrust laws but I also feel that small businesses do everything in their power to screw their workers over as well. Pick five restaurants at random and I bet you would find a significant amount of labor violations and unethical practices.
I think we're past thr point where a general union push can correct the status of labor in the US
Which is why I said I guarantee the change wasn't because they thought it would make things better for their employees.
Montana has laws that state that accrued leave is owed compensation, period - no "use or lose" allowed. They do have rules stating that accrual can be capped - which has forced me to take several long weekends over the past few months to avoiding capping.
Everyone I know takes more time off once they start here. They take days off when they want to. They work from home when they want to. People take multi-week vacations. There’s no “internal pressure” unless you tell literally no one and just don’t show up for work.
What bothers me is how everyone is just SO SURE that it’s terrible. I wouldn’t go back for anything.
Also, part of why they "hire young" is because a) young employees tend to not have things like spouses and kids, and b) they don't have the life experience to understand that you work to live, not live to work.
Part of the US problem is US labor unions though better than nothing are very much built for another time and another system. In a weird way the symbiotic existence of labor and corps in Japan and Germany via vertical integration does a lot more for labor than the parallel system that the US and the UK have where it is an innately adversarial relationship.
The US right now is at an odd time with its labor market. It has an overemployment problem (not going to get into the arguments of under employment verse employment). But there is a bit of a labor shortage in a lot of low paying fields due to this and it would be the best time for some labor groups to move in and "help" with works while forcing more stringent demands on the corporate side but it hasn't happened as there isn't really a system in the US to do that.
This is excluding the upcoming demographic crises in most of the developed world plus automation which will alter things a lot.
On the days off thing, a forced week off like Golden Week in Japan I think is helpful. Required minimum vacation days is also a good thing that should be borrowed from Europe. I am the odd ball who gets 21 days of PTO a year and gets guilted for not using it verse using it. But that didn't happen to me till I got to my current employer.
Netflix isn't the norm as far as corporate cultures go.
Working from home isn't taking time off. It's still working. Where I'm at, I've taken off one full week vacation in the past 3 years, and that was for a cruise because getting out of cell service is the only way I could leave my job behind. Nobody here takes multi-week vacations, because management sees that as a sign that you're not needed.
They allow it, just as they allow your career to stagnate because you're not committed enough to the job. And before we went to permissive time off, you had to have been with the company for 25+ years to get 5 weeks off.
It's been researched: people take less time off under unlimited leave systems. Furthermore, the system really only outright benefits the employer, because it removes a major liability from their books.
And the internal pressure isn't something open - it's always something more subtle, where workers become afraid to ask for leave because they're worried it will count against them to do so.
In short, it's a system that has nebulous benefits for employees, but clear benefits for the employer.
I felt the need to mention working from home on a whim because at previous jobs that wasn’t allowed either. Need to be at home because your dishwasher exploded? Don’t have to burn a magically finite number of sick or vacation days to do so.
Generous for North America, that is
Yes. But I still get shouted down for saying that unlimited vacation is great and can work. Even in this thread.
I see these articles and studies about how it’s worse for employees all the time. Usually when I click through there’s examples of companies that it works out for and people take more time off, like Kronos. And there’s companies that say no one takes more or less than before, like Gusto. Those aren’t in the headline though. They never are.
Furthermore, I hate it when the examples they use are for companies with <100 people. I don’t care what your raw number is when it doesn’t even hold muster because of your sample size.