At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
It’s amazing how often I see executives talking about their cool trip, their new plane, or other rich person bullshit during the same presentation where they are telling their employees to suck up some furlough, reneg on bonus, or similar financial hardship.
Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we’d been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
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WFH was ending, and we’d all have to go back to an office that didn’t have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
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Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn’t expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
some people could just sit on the floor and work.
i hope you have a workplace safety agency where you are, because damn…
Where I was. I noped tf out of there, and a few weeks after they started enforcing RTO America set it’s records for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. We really did do COVID the way we did Vietnam: it got too expensive so we gave up, declared victory and threw a bunch of people away.
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Jesus, some people just have no awareness whatsoever.
It’s almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it’s kind of always been a thing for them to “encourage” resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It’s what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.
Quiet firings.
Quiet hirings are a thing now too…
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don’t have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It’s shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It’s actually really smart, as long as you don’t have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
I interviewed with one company I wanted to work at, but no answer after 2 months, so I interviewed elsewhere. That place had me start within a month. 6 months into working at my job, the first company said “ok, we are ready to schedule your start date”. I took that as a sign that it probably wouldn’t have been a great place to work.
That’s messed up.
That’s capitalism.
It only works when the government backs citizens over companies. Because a public company is required to put profits over everything else.
So there needs to be regulations getting passed to keep blocking whatever new bullshit someone set up.
All it would take would be requiring companies to have a start/end date on applications and only be able to hire from applications received in that window.
It’s already how the federal government does hirings. The government gets a lot of shit, but they’ve got one of the best unions around.
I worked at Cabela’s when it was bought out by Bass Pro. The sale went into effect mid-September, and in October they announced that all Cabela’s locations would be open on Thanksgiving for the first time ever and that ALL employees were required to be at work
On Thanksgiving day, when the employees who had their family time stripped away last minute were on the edge of revolt, the billionaire owner of Bass Pro made us print out and distribute an email he sent to all managers.
It was pictures of him and his family enjoying their Thanksgiving at his estate and a letter from him expressing how important it was to share the day with family and friends.
Please tell me there was a mass resignation after that email was sent.
The employees weren’t volunteers. They still had bills to pay.
And that’s why billionaires are bad. In the case of Bass Pro (probably owned by one person), one man directly controls the lives of tens of thousands of employees and there’s no recourse. He buys competing companies and crushes more lives, and makes people watch videos of his fishing trips.
And he literally thinks people love him for it. He sees himself as a benevolent provider.
That’s so disgusting, I’m sorry you had to put up with that shithead
Former CEO gathers 20-30 of us in the board room, talks about the difficult economy, proceeds to fire everyone.
The silence was deafening.
The meeting ends, he stands at the door expecting us to shake his hand as we leave.
Not a single person shook his hand.
At least he didn’t publicly share what his bonus was going to be for improving the bottom line.
Never forget that the year Lehman Brothers “collapsed” it paid the CEO 700 million dollars for one years worth of work.
We had a big mandatory meeting where an executive came in to tell us all to be happy we weren’t getting our bonuses or pay raises, and used a weird analogy about poor people being perfectly happy, because they have realistic expectations and that’s all you need to be happy.
He then had to leave early, as he quipped he was sharing a ride with a fellow executive on the private jet, and if he didn’t leave right then, he’d have to suffer flying commercial.
If you’re still there, organise your workplace. Unionise. Join the IWW - they can help you to accomplish this.
This was like a decade ago, I’m elsewhere now. Still not union, but I personally have no room to complain (reasonable hours and conditions and quite well paid).
As an autistic person with ADHD I am going to leave this one alone. 😬
I’m a physical therapist. I started as a physical therapist assistant. Way back in PTA school, our instructors brought in three people with spinal cord injuries for us to learn from. They talked about their experiences, showed us how they transfer, and one showed us his modified pickup truck that had hand controls and a crane to put his wheelchair in the back.
One of our classmates named Nancy had a habit of putting her foot in her mouth. She had absolutely zero filter. Our class guests were taking questions and one person asked about dating, in a respectful manner. Hearing about challenges related to normal stuff like that helps us to answer questions if we have a patient with a new spinal cord injury. One of the people said they had been with their gf for a few months and was talking about how they chose date activities and stuff. Pretty innocuous, nothing super personal.
Nancy makes a joke along the lines of “I’m surprised anyone would want to date someone like you,” kind of chuckling as she said it. The guest speakers seemed to take it in stride but man everyone in the class was looking around clearly horrified.
One time the company big boss did a speech telling us how we could all learn a thing or two from his protégé, and clapped him on the shoulder.
If big boss had spent more time in the office, he’d have known that Mr Protégé spent most of his working hours playing ping-pong with Big Boss’s trophy-wife.
So ping-pong is an euphemism for sex? Or was he literally playing ping-pong?
I heard this years later by my former boss. He used to work for a company that just announced some lay-offs because work was slow. Right as the lay-offs were being announced the head of the company pulled into the lot with his new Porsche lease. It was terrible timing, but the corporate lease was up and the car was ordered months prior. Just made the owner look especially tone-deaf since the car came the same say as the lay-off announcement.
In my old job, we were invited to an ultra-important Zoom call that was mandatory for everybody based in head office to attend. The meeting was scheduled at 9:30AM on a Monday morning, in the midst of our busiest week of the month when we had time-critical payment runs to get out for approval by 12PM. Hundreds were pulled from their work.
What was this ultra-important Zoom meeting about?
Our chief financial officer was announcing his resignation. I think everybody on that call would have rather gone back to their work than hear him brag about his plans to comfortably retire and “never work a day beyond 55” for twenty minutes. It was the most tone-deaf and patronizing announcement I’ve ever heard, especially in a workplace largely staffed by people who were struggling to even make ends meet.
Even my (then) line manager was like “Was that it?”
An American comedian, following a long set here in Australia, told the audience to stand up and stretch. He then tried to direct us to “bend over and pat your neighbour on the fanny”. Stone cold silence did not indicate to him his mistake, and he tried several times before eventually realising he had lost his audience goodwill entirely with this starting skit.
Turned out later that he had no clue what “fanny” means here, and had to have it explained to him.
Still a weird thing to say.
Not as weird or rude as telling them to pat their neighbour on the vulva.
Genuinely curious what does fanny mean in Australia
Had a teacher tell some students that it’s rude to speak a foreign language in school (an international school)
Not a specifically bad instance, but everywhere I’ve worked has always had that guy who has a hundred irrelevant questions at the end of a meeting, holding up 10 or so people from actually getting on with work.
After a couple of bad questions, I’ll either excuse myself, suggest we carry on separately, or (ideally) ask to be sent a list, for me to ignore at my leisure.
Sorry Greg, we’re not here to answer your dumbass questions, or indulge your hypothetical edge cases.
It’s always hypothetical rabbit holes 🙄
They think they’re like Doctor Strange trying to map out every conceivable future
If 1 person has a question, then chances are good most people have that same question but are too afraid to ask it in front of everyone.
Some people have questions because they just don’t listen when information is given, or have no ability to think for themselves.
Went to a cousin’s wedding, her parents split when she was little so I’d not seen my Uncle Mal for decades. Tbh everyone was expecting him not to show because he’s a selfish twat and knows nobody likes him.
Surprise, Mal is here. He had an inexplicably-attractive, younger date (Mal was a disgusting, horrid-breathed, lumpy old man and his date was a pretty, well-spoken woman in her 30s so we all assumed she was an escort, as Mal has no redeeming qualities).
The whole time everyone is desperately avoiding being stuck alone with him, and everyone is talking about having the same conversation… Mal has written a book, he’s a writer now, and he’s written a poem he wants to read.
He was given many hints, subtle and not-so-subtle that his poem wasn’t wanted and he agreed not to read it. Unfortunately whether due to ego or wine, he loudly interrupted someone elses toast to announce he had a poem to read. Our collective hearts sank.
It was worse than we expected, at one point including cringe-inducing references to his daughter having large breasts. It went on and on for at least 5 minutes of everyone silently looking at the floor, sneaking the occasional “No way he just said that?!” glances at each other. He eventually finished, and just stood there awkwardly for about 10 secs, I assume waiting for applause, which obviously was not forthcoming.
Read the fucking room Mal, no-one wants to hear your shitty poem and no-one cares that you’re (allegedly) a published writer now. And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
My sides
Honesty compels me to inform you that this ending sentence was shamelessly stolen from It’s Always Sunny. Highly recommend it, first season is a bit ropey as they are literally filming, writing, scripting themselves with no experience and at the start of their acting careers. An incredible show though imo!
I swear this feels like a plot point from a Righteous Gemstones episode. Sounds like you have a real life Uncle Baby Billy
I’ve been meaning to watch this show but I was put off by the evangelical-ness of it… worth watching then? This happened in the UK about 8 yrs ago!
I was the same way. Especially as someone who lives in Texas and is surrounded by those types. Not to give anything away but it is closer to mobster than evangelicals.
For months at one place I worked senior developers and even junior managers had been haranguing the higher-ups with an alarm bell on how important the Internet was going to be and how we needed to start pivoting toward outfitting our product with the ability to interact properly on the Internet. We were steadfastly ignored and our concerns were quietly scoffed at because our product was a “best of breed” product in our space.
Then we got hit by a huge wave of lost sales because we had no viable scheme in place to proper interact with Internet-based applications.
The then-CEO called a “developers all-hands” meeting in which he pranced around on the stage at the front of the auditorium to complain to us that nobody had been telling him how important this Internet thing was going to be and that we were supposed to be keeping an eye on the leading edge of technology so he can make plans for these things.
This sparked a VERY LOUD outcry as about 150 software developers who’d been ignored and scoffed at for months just flipped a switch into revolution mode. Lots of people started talking loudly (then shouting). One guy with a laptop connected it to the big projector display and started scrolling through an email folder where he’d collected the notices warning about the importance of the Internet and management’s (including the CEO’s) condescending replies. By the end of that little skirmish the CEO was making a lame excuse that he was “joking” and was “taking our feedback very seriously” after 20 people (half of them very senior) just flatly quit in front of him and walked out of the auditorium.
That’s probably the worst “read the fucking room, dude!” moment I ever saw.
New hire, brought on board comes to a Monday meeting.
The company Quality of Worklife Balance survey has been returned, and it’s awful. It’s just after the 2008 crash, and we’re barely treading water, but the company held on. The CIO brought everyone into the largest conference room, meant for hundreds (there’s a couple dozen of us standing around, the chairs weren’t setup) and we stand around her as she procedes to tell us “Why is your QWL so low, you should be talking to your managers about this! I don’t wanna see another QWL survey this bad ever!” In a very yelly tone.
One of the managers raised their hand, and asked, “Folks feel like they’re not being listened to and that they’re not getting enough leeway to make decisions.”
CIO: “Well they need to get over that.”
And that was the first meeting a bunch of developers and IT folks got to see at that company.
Many other shenanigans occurred there, but my personal favorite was the quarter million dollar genset system all setup and tested multiple times – fueled and ready to go, failed in a major power outage because someone left the key in the “test” position on the generator.
– That CIO thought they led people, they did nothing of the sort.
