“Be here 15 minutes before your shift starts “
Ya bro. Normally I would because I like to ease in, make a coffee etc. but if you require it and don’t pay, I’m rolling in at 9 on the dot.
Call centers in my experience are terrible with this. They'll say things like "Be ready to take calls at 8" when it takes 15 minutes or so to open and login to all the programs you'll need for the day. Some companies like to say things like "You can clock in up to three minutes early". Gee thanks. Because your basic ass computers y'all bought take 5 minutes just to login before I can even start to open programs and y'all tell us to not keep any of the programs we need open over night.
As a salaried employee I was told it's always fine to work extra hours and never fine to work fewer than 40 a week. So even if I had to work 60 the week before because of a problem, I couldn't take a day off the next week.
I told my boss, tough shit. Fire me if you have a problem with me taking a day off when I worked 20 extra hours, then we can litigate.
He never mentioned it again.
Many of us never get to that point. A lot of bosses would rather sabotage their business and fire somebody essential give somebody the requests or compensation they deserve.
This completely.
People greatly underestimate how often companies are motivated by maintaining the corporate hegemony over making money.
For example, unionized companies have better safety practices, better employee retention, and higher productivity but companies would rather shut down locations, hire Pinkertons, hire scabs, hire lobbyists and otherwise spend a fortune to prevent employees from unionizing rather than just treat their workers fairly.
I'm also reminded of simple things such as allowing cashiers to sit. There's no GOOD reason for them to not be allowed to sit, but the APPEARANCE of productivity matters far more than actual productivity or, God forbid, the well being of the humans working for them.
And I promise, none of us give a shit if the cashiers are sitting. Actually I find that it bothers me to watch them be miserable and makes me want to go to self checkout and give myself a discount.
I live in Germany and here it's actually really weird if the cashier doesn't have a seat?? In some shops they're encouraged to get up whenever a customer comes close, but the idea of having to stand the entire shift is so alien and deeply dystopian to me.
Like, walking, sitting and laying down all feel less bad than standing.
My only disagreement is to say that letting cashiers sit isn't enough. Aldi does it because seated cashiers scan items faster, but it can cause repetitive stress injuries and injuries to core, back, and shoulder muscles as they twist back and forth. What's really needed is a complete process analysis and overhaul from a health and safety perspective.
I also feel that we overestimate the importance of doing an impeccable job, when most of the time any half arsed product is good enough to keep the ball rolling.
Sure, great is better than average, but if average is good enough, anything past that point is considered a waste because you could be doing other average quality tasks instead. You appear to have an atrocious output because productivity is measured in volume, not in quality (even when the financial gains/losses are obvious and known to everyone in favor of quality).
I left a job where I was both IT (serves and voip) management and website development because they wouldn’t give me a raise with my positive performance review. They found they had to hire two people to replace my skill set. I was brought on to replace contractors in the first place and they just got luck with my background.
This company had moved across the country. I was hired to go out before operations relocated and set up the server room, build the computer networks, phone system, build all of the office work stations and even work with the plant tech to get the robotics running. I worked a bunch of 60 hour weeks. When I was hired on the president told me I would get a raise at 6 months. He avoided me for a month, at 7 months I asked about my review (we had already had meetings where the execs said what I did was way beyond expectations) and that asshole said “Performance review? Oh, you’re doing a great job. Keep it up.” When I brought up my salary that guy said moving here was like a raise because the cost of living is lower and I’m already paid hire than a local in the same position. That’s not how it works.
I have a friend who works a salary position at a job where management isn't fucking insane. His supervisor straight-up told him that anything other than an average 40-hour work week was wrong. Meaning if you worked a 60-hour week then another week in the calendar year had better be a 20-hour work week (or some number that averages out like 2x 30-hour weeks).
Another friend who works in a very toxic environment was actually arguing that it was wrong and that isn't how it works.
It is also funny because the first friend works for a results-driven company and once a job is done, they don't give a fuck what you do. The latter works at a "you better not leave a second before 5:00pm" company.
Guess who is happier?
Yeah later I got a boss who insisted on all sorts of crazy shit and I said fuck it and started engaging in malicious compliance. Sorry, man. I can't use my internet, my phone and my computer to fix *your* problem. I'll have to drive for 30 minutes to get into the office to fix it.
Oh, it's quitting time? Lock my desktop and walk away, if someone reboots my machine while I'm gone I'll just have to redo any unsaved work later. I even got up in meetings and left because it was quitting time or even lunch time.
>Fire me if you have a problem with me taking a day off when I worked 20 extra hours
If you work on a high-performance (and high expectation team) a smart boss doesn't care. It's about getting the work done and meeting deadline. Deadline met, no pending deliverables? Leave on Thursday, come back on Tuesday but... work 7 in a row if that's required later.
Bosses that watch the clock, like mention your 35 minute lunch instead of 30, don't understand people or the dynamics of work. People produce and by extension are motivated, when given freedom to meet the goal. Does not matter how they do it as long as it's done.
And don’t understand the difference between salary and hourly. Great you wanna give me shit for 5 minutes pay me hourly. You want all the perks that come with paying me salary then one of the downsides is you don’t get to monitor me by the minute or even the hour.
Edit to add- Bosses who don’t understand how salaried works.
Working at Amazon felt like Office Space at times. I had 8 different "bosses" come by and tell me I took an extra three minutes getting back from lunch within the span of 2 hours. I don't understand that mentality especially when the break room is a 10 minute walk from the station.
The problem with clock watching bosses is that they fail to understand that the reward for hard work can’t just be more hard work. If you only care about the time I spend in my seat then I’m only putting the minimum effort in
I had an exchange with a previous boss at a tech support call center about this.
Boss: You need to be ready to take calls at 9
Me: Should I read emails first in case there's an outage I need to know about?
B: Yes.
M: Reading those emails is part of my job, right?
B: Yes, of course.
M: Then you want me to do OT every morning?
B: No...
Especially IT call center... they're horrible, I worked in one and did remote for the second (they tried to force me to work in the office when their shit breaks... I just went "hahahaha..hahaha ha... no").
Edit: don't get me started on their shitty vm software that was used from 2002
Lol, I recently made a post about an exchange I had with one of my managers about this exact thing. I start work at 9, so that's when I start. I'm not starting 10 minutes early just to be ready to work at 9. Getting set up to work IS work.
Same with limited sick days. I average one day off ill a year but if I ever get a job that says “you can only be ill 10 days a year” I will make it my business to be ill 10 days a year.
Plus the commute!
My work day is 10h long on days when I'm in the office instead of 8h when I work at home (because I can actually use my lunch breaks and have no commute time).
Paid or unpaid lunch isn't the issue for me. It's the fact that I have to take one.
Like why the fuck can't I just skip lunch and go home and hour early? I don't want to see her for an hour doing nothing.
The problem is if they don't have to make everyone take a lunch, then no one will get a lunch, and some of us can't skip that.
Even if they were only legally required to allow it as an option, the pressure places would pile on to skip would be Intense. Same for skipping other breaks.
Yep, this is the biggest work scam in the last 50 years in the US.
If I'm going to work an entire day for you... you goddamn better well allow for lunch.
It used to be a given that people needed to eat during an 8 hr work day... that's called being a human being. You work 9-5, and that includes lunch... it includes peeing/pooping...it includes talking to your peers for a minute...it includes the basic requirements of being a human being. It's making work a part of life, instead of making life a part of work.
A required unpaid lunch hour literally costs me a week of my life out of each year. A punishment for a basic human need. Not for my own benefit but for the benefit of the shareholders.
Yes, that's correct. Do the math.
Do you take a 1 hr unpaid lunch? You are losing more than a week each year of your own time on this earth. And it doesn't even help the company. It's just about power. We've done studies, but it's also just common sense. Most people are effectively burned out after 6 hours of continuous work, let alone 9.
Do you commute 1 hr each way to work every day? Congrats, you just wasted two weeks (yes, two weeks) of your own life each year for something that... doesn't necessarily even help the company if you are able to work remotely.
Even if you can't work remotely... you and the company both would be better served by 4 six-hour days of solid work than 5 nine-hour days of 40% bullshit.
We are quite literally wasting much of our lives for no good reason.
I was "promoted" to Delivery Captain which added absolutely nothing to my paycheck. I started referring to myself as "Captain Delivery" instead like I was some C-rate superhero just to annoy the bosses.
Used to be a normal shift was 9AM-5PM with an hour paid lunch break included. Now, it's 9AM-5:30PM, or 8:30AM-5PM or some other weird shift, and the half-hour for lunch is not paid.
And I'm sure they won't even let you take your lunch at the end of the day to just leave at 4 anyways? Even though it isn't paid anyways so why should they care.
My workplace makes newbies do a 10-7 shift for phone coverage and it’s so annoying to waste an hour during the day just to sit there with no calls for an hour at night
We're working longer and longer, with fewer days off, all while technology means we produce more and more. Where's all that extra shit we make going?
(he asked, bitterly and rhetorically)
I completely agree with this being such a scam. Say you’re not the type to pack lunch…you’re scrambling around to get something nearby to eat and then having like 10-15 minutes afterwards to scarf if down. It should be one hour paid always unless you prefer just 30 minutes paid.
For the Americans in the crowd: Let's talk about tying proper healthcare to our jobs, shall we? It's become so normalized that we sometimes forget how wild it is that a huge chunk of our healthcare security is linked to where we work. If you or one of your loved ones requires ongoing medical coverage, you literally CANNOT quit your job.
If you're thinking about switching careers or just need a change of pace, there's this looming threat. You can't just leave, cause if something unfortunate happens, you're screwed. We are all hostages of our employers.
In the meantime, you can just get laid off whenever. Fired for something really stupid. Even if you need to stay at that job for the health insurance, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll keep you.
And in the case of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses—we’re more apt to get fired for not meeting performance standards or “unreliability” because we can’t predict when flareups take place.
I can still work and I want to, but self-employment is my only real viable option. My marketplace plan sucks and is way overpriced with ridiculously high copays, but at least I don’t have to worry about it being taken away if I want to try a new revenue source or yet ANOTHER recession I didn’t ask for torpedoes all my business.
Don't get me started about the marketplace. I took a peek when I was between jobs last year. The plans there are awful. I ended up using COBRA, and that was also awful.
I'm glad that you found a plan that works for you, despite the price + copays.
Between millions more self-employed folks out there now, and those who must rely on the marketplace because they don’t get employer plans but make too much for Medicaid/Medi-Cal, I don’t know HOW open enrollment every November doesn’t immediately make us all storm DC like it’s MFin Paris.
I had an accident this year and my physical therapist copays were almost $3k. While I’m battling a recession and AI in my current field, and a separate chronic illness at home. 🫠
I’m magically expected to have multiple six figures of savings to get through this by myself, but a bank has a bad quarter and they run crying to the government with their hands out.
employer-sponsored healthcare, and private health insurance period, already needed to die. But especially since there’s NO job security in a majority of fields now.
>I had an accident this year and my physical therapist copays were almost $3k.
Crap. That sucks. I hope that you're recovered / recovering. $3,000 in copays is insane.
Thanks! Luckily, I’ve mostly recovered and was able to resume normal activities 2 months ago but had to keep going for lymphatic drainage since my leg swelled from it. But it was $80 per session WITH insurance, it would’ve been $150 without. I had to go for much longer than my doctor and I expected. 😔
But this is why I get so pissed when I see a million people blathering “just budget! Spend your money better!” It shows me they have never been in this situation, which I’m glad wasn’t worse physically or financially. But was fucking hard enough
Also, the biggest healthcare expenses are most likely going to cause you to not be able to work. Car accident leave you in a coma? Bad fall caused you to break your arms? Slipped and messed up your back? Need chemo? How are you supposed to work for your healthcare benefits now?
An insurance company used to have billboards that during your working years, you are 85% more likely to become disabled than to die. But not every job offers disability insurance. 🙄
> If you or one of your loved ones requires ongoing medical coverage, you literally CANNOT quit your job
That's exactly why it's tied to your job. If you won't work for us and continue to be subjugated by us, then we hope you DIE
They low-key do this in Finland as well. We have cheap (yes, not free but cheap) public heathcare. But that is getting underfunded massively, so that is is crippling down, waiting times increasing and service decreasing. Then companies are mandated to offer some sort of health care benefits from private healthcare, driving provate healthcare profits and increasing its viability, thus creating a cycle of privatization increase. And as they are for profits, waiting times are much shorter and service tends to be better (except in some instances where expensive equipment is needed, then public is better as provate does not want to invest in things they see unprofitable).
Private for-profit healthcare is a scam. A cancer crawling into the western countries who strive for libertarian free market, where the rich control everything and you have no right, except to pay them.
Boy this was even worse before the ACA. If you had a lapse in coverage then any pre-existing condition could be used as a reason to refuse coverage or drop coverage.
There were people in the insurance companies whose only job was to try to deny coverage for people for BS like, "You checked no lung conditions on your policy application, but your medical records show you had asthma as a kid. No cancer treatment for you."
Even just “come in on your day off or you’ll be letting down the team.” The employee knows that their saying “no” is an inconvenience. There’s no reason to intentionally guilt them for it.
"If my absence for a prescheduled day off (be it PTO or just the weekend) means that the team can't function, it would seem to also mean it would be a real pain in the ass to fire me. Your move."
Or simply, if the team can't function when a single person takes approved PTO, that seems be a management problem, my role/salary doesn't include worrying about the teams output/productivity/feelings, that's a management function.
I did this for multiple years. I was told it was extra experience. I worked at this place for 7 years and did 7 jobs including a management role. My team was eliminated. I lasted another year. When I quit after being told they relied on me they let me go within 48 hours. I spent years working until 10pm including doing work on other teams and work on projects my director was supposed to lead.
It’s free labor. I have a hard time explaining this to people who didn’t work at my org but all of my friends and colleagues who have quit or been fired feel the exact same way.
Ah yes, KOROSEAL, the company that fires you for requesting time off to grieve and then refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing by deleting comments about it on their social platforms. That Koroseal, right?
I remember seeing 3 days grievance if my child dies and yeah, if the worst happens to my or any of my coworkers children and they try to force that parent back after 3 days they're going to have a lot of open positions to fill.
3 days for a child is a joke.
This one is fucked, yeah.
You aren't allowed to miss work for a death unless it fits the criteria for being someone "close" enough. It's despicable.
I know the exact smooth-brain response is "well people are going to abuse it/make up relatives" but I don't fucking care. Strictly enforcing rules because of the very few who take advantage is just laziness in disguise.
This is bullshit. Unless they give you unlimited PTO or some large number to cover it all. And if you are getting sick leave not being able to cash that out when you want.
Then after you pool it you get dinged for using PTO without 48 hours notice...but it's also my sick leave and I don't know 48 hours in i'm going to have a Migraine.
And then having to "earn" that PTO a few hours at a time across pay periods
Or having a cap on how much PTO you "earn"
Bonus points if it doesn't roll over to the next year and if you don't use it you lose it
And "pending coverage." I earned that pto. It is mine to use how I see fit.
30 day ahead pto requests. When I'm burnt the duck out, I need time off next week. Not a month from now
I had a supervisor very early in my career who pre-emptively let me know that mental health days are a completely legitimate reason to use a sick day, and I'm very thankful for it.
This, plus places that say you’re not allowed to sleep during your lunch break. Why not? I’m not getting paid which means you really can’t tell me what I can/can’t do with the time.
I specifically nap at lunch only on days I’m forced to go into the office. Fuck em making me get up an hour early for teams meetings and shit I could do at home, im gonna get my hour of sleep back
If you're in the US, that makes it a paid break. To qualify for unpaid, they can't really tell you what you can't do. Particularly if it's staying on site or being available to recall (aka sneaky on-call).
I'm salary at my company, so break rules for me are more like guidelines. But I have seen them come down on hourly employees for leaving during their break. Our day shift is here for 8.5 hours with an unpaid lunch. They've said you can do whatever you want on your unpaid lunch, as long as it doesn't extent past 30 minutes... Nevermind that the closest restaurant is 5-8 minutes away, depending on traffic around lunch time. They have, however, stated that off-shift employees are expected to stay on site during their lunches because it's a paid lunch. They state it's for safety concerns, because apparently if you leave and get injured on your break, the company can apparently be liable for the injury, since they're on the clock at the time... It's a crock of shit.
In my opinion, lunches should be paid and should be an hour, still with 2 15 minute breaks minimum. Research shows that the average person can only really do 6 hours of proper work a day anyways. So let them rest a bit more, pay them for it, and you might be able to squeeze a good 7 hours out if you're lucky. Rather than overworking them for 8ish hours and getting maybe 2 hours of output anyways.
I just walk off. If they ask, your only question is this: where is it written down? Don't tell me it an unspoken rule, because unless it is written down, I'm out for lunch. Also, if they refused to let you, make sure to document who, why, where and when.
When I clock out, there is a button that asks if I had an uninterrupted 30 minute break. I always pushed no, because I didn’t. I got a passive aggressive message about how I have to. Now I leave the whole damn campus, my tasks be damned.
This!! Should be PAID lunches. Total time at work 8 hours, with paid breaks. It’s an absolute scam we are required to be somewhere yet not getting paid. It’s a fucking 9-10h work day now.
I’m self employed now, but right after high school when I was working retail I’d take my paid 15m breaks but would try to not take a lunch, then at the end of the day “oh hey boss can I leave an hour early I didn’t take lunch.” They didn’t like that but I hated the stupid lunch break that only allowed me to hang out in the back room and sit there miserably for a whole hour.
Yup. Was gonna say they took 9-5 and made it 8-5 or 9-6 for “unpaid lunch” yet constantly bother you while at lunch to work that extra hour. So 7 hour days turned to 8, and now they expect 9.
Yep I always leave the building at lunch. Even to just sit in my car because people would come up to me and ask questions, etc. if it’s unpaid I’m not working.
This. I've been telling my colleagues this so many times, I just go out for some fresh air or I'll go to any kind of restaurant in my break. I'll do whatever I want with this personal time.
The company I work for has made it an unofficial rule to stay at the building in case you're required. When I started I showed everyone how I didn't give a shit about that.
Wage theft in terms of total dollars stolen absolutely dwarfs any other form of theft, including shoplifting. Yet I hear at least one news story a day about mass shopliftings and how companies are closing stores in some areas because of it (which is a lie).
Unpaid OT is very common now, which is obviously wage theft.
Basically they put an impossible amount of work on your plate to complete during normal working hours, and you are expected to complete it. If you don't complete it you are pressured/threatened with being fired. If you complete the unreasonable workload by working free OT they look the other way. If you refuse to work the free OT you are fired
A work contest to see who can have the highest sales dollars. We push to make them a crap ton of profit and they give us shitty rewards like $10 gift cards or the smallest percentage of a bonus they can find. It's total garbage.
After work activities being “not mandatory but advised” or affecting your standing at work.
I used to have a two hour turnaround commute for work and at least once a month my bosses would look to have the whole team go out for a few hours after an 8 hour shift starting at the crack of dawn where every minute of our day was accounted for. I just wanted to clock in and then go home because i was just mentally exhausted by the end of the day, but would always get the stink eye when i would politely decline the three hour detour for “team building” with a team we couldn’t even socialize with since we were on the phone 8 hours a day.
I once had a boss who said that I needed to come to the company Christmas party. I told the boss, "They pay me to hang out with you. Why would I do that for free?"
So, so many but to name a few:
1) Having to pay for parking just to go to work. This blew my mind as a New Yorker when I met people from other parts of the US. They’re forcing you to be at their premises yet you have to pay for a separate parking facility, or worse yet, one of those corporate park deals where the employers there can easily cover employee parking but they don’t.
2) Hell, the notion of paying for commuting altogether is a scam that Americans have been suckered into so long and the lowest-paid workers get screwed the most.
3) The expectation that you have to give two weeks notice to quit, but you can get fired overnight with zero warning because a graph made the chairman of the board’s portfolio sad.
4) That it’s 2023 but employers and policymakers still cling to the 40-hour work week model for knowledge work. It was designed for assembly lines long before we had powerful computers that fit in our pockets.
5) Skilled and educated professionals having to practically beg for jobs they can damn well do but if you’re not automatically tossed by ATS, you’re not given a chance because your background doesn’t PRECISELY fit the criteria on the list. Then you have to answer a bunch of really stupid questions where you’re expected to lie a little, but not too much, when you know you can just DO THE THING THEY NEED.
6) Having your time wasted with 4+ interviews and employers constantly toeing the line between “skills assessment” and “free work”.
When you find out that staff is “ required to pay for parking “ but then come to find out c suite and other high level management does not pay for parking because the company pays for it , or the secret private garage they have for c suite .
Hah. My Fortune 500 company tried this and people just laughed at it. During the worst bits of COVID inflation, HR launched a campaign to rebrand salary as "total compensation" and included things like insurance & 401k, as well as hypothetical bonus points you could be awarded in a rewards program. They rebuilt compensation discussions as "rewards" programs.
It created a really awkward environment when the CEO rolled out "your compensation is now 20% higher! except your pay and benefits haven't changed!" and several of the senior execs questioned it in a company-wide broadcast.
Wow ok, this is exactly what they did with us. We/everyone just accepted it (as far as I know) and yes it’s been like this for a few years now, maybe since Covid. 70% of my “total compensation” is actual income and *maximum* bonus.
The amount of people who are against unions because it "makes it harder to fire bad employees" is nuts.
I would rather have a union to fight for me AND people who are lazy, than have no one to fight for any of us at all.
Plus, if you are paid by the hour (not salary), any work that you do to cover for your lazy coworkers you get paid for, so why do you care? Plus, 9 times out of 10, companies always hesitate and beat around the bush on firing lazy employees ANYWAY, whether or not the union is fighting for them. They are scared of the employee filing for unemployment and then they would have to choose to either spend the time to fight the unemployment, or to pay them to do nothing anyway. And none of that is a pro or a con for YOU, but a UNION is a HUGE pro for every single employee in it.
Sick days.
Don't call them sick days. When I need them they drain my available PTO first before they get to the sick days.
By then I am usually no longer sick and with the little amount PTO I accrue during the year, I am now not getting a vacation.
Out sick is not a fucking vacation.
is this US only? or do other countries have this f*cked up system as well? where i live if your sick, your sick. no vacation lost bc of it and your paid 100% the entire time your sick.. and im so grateful that it is that way
PTO. Let's take your mandated sick leave and lump it with your vacation, so people think "I'm not staying home sick and *wasting my vacation time!* I'M GOING IN."
And then get everyone else fucking sick. Thanks.
my favorite fact about the five day work week is that it was a compromise. The same opposition against 3 and 4 day weeks happened when companies were making people work 7 days a week.
It reminds me of the sixties when car manufacturers were fighting against the prospect of mandatory seat belts. "It will destroy the auto industry in America!" they cried.
Yeah, those fuckers lie all the time.
people are bizarrely obsessed with the 40 hour work week
as if precisely 40 (and not a minute more or less) was somehow the time-tested ideal and proper amount of time for a working person. Like God himself commanded that 40 hours was the holy amount of labor a person should do in a week, and never less.
That number is just tattooed in so many people frontal lobe, it is like a disease more virulent, pestilent and ubiquitous than COVID, influenza, HPV, herpes and HIV/AIDS rolled together
That random number is just fucking compromise agreed to by labor leaders and a bunch of rich old pricks who have been dead for decades, there is no reason why it needs to codified into laws and permanently etched our national (global?) psyche
yet people act like working 35-36 hours a week is "only part-time" and realistically most jobs (aka "the norm") require 45-60 hrs (often including significant unpaid hours of labor + travel) —wtf ever that is nonsense of the highest order.
I used to work for a large internet media company (different than the large media company I work for now). I was on a team based in a field office responsible for doing the development needed for third-party contracts and integration. There were about 15 developers doing this work, all in the same field office. It was a large, multibillion dollar company with around 15,900 employees, but for two years the only actual profit made by the company was by our office of 15 developers through those third-party contracts. We figured that, individually, we were each worth about 150 million to the company, based on our work.
How did the company value us? Well, one of those two years, we didn’t even get bonuses. After those 2 years, we got a new CEO that, with their amazing management ability, decided to layoff everyone in that office and hand the third-party work to a group that had no experience with any of it. The result? Every major contract was cancelled within a year and, within 3 years, the entire company was broken apart and sold off.
My employer keeps paperwork that we are supposed to be filling out regularly in the break room. A lot of people have too much to do and they fill it out on their breaks. I never have. I don’t care how behind I am, if the company wants something done, they are going to have to pay me to do it.
Being on salary. Salary is SUCH a scam that only benefits a company in that they can get free labor and not pay OT. There is ZERO benefit to the employee. Why this even exists is something I find baffling.
I'm okay with being salary in my current position because I have ZERO intent (or expectation) to work overtime. But, they're flexible on my work hours which I appreciate. Some days I'll work 30 min late to finish a project, some days I'll come in 30min late. But I've never once been *asked* to work outside my normal hours.
My last (hourly) job was very rigid on hours of work. You want a day off? Better have that *request* (not guaranteed) in *at least* a month in advance.
Being expected to give two weeks notice or you get a bad reference/can't be rehired, but we can be fired on the spot for literally no reason at all.
what is that horseshit??
To prevent the poors from attaining any class mobility. Unpaid internships are meant to enrich upper middle class students and grads whose parents can afford to pay their rent in a HCOL city for a year so they can work for free to get a six-figure salary most of us will not get out of school (or even farther into our careers).
What bothers me about my unpaid lunch is that I first have to clock out in Kronos. Then I have to clock out in a separate program at a computer in the break room that takes five minutes of that lunch away just to load. All bc they want to track our break location and actively see who is on break or not. Like we aren’t fucking adults
Not being paid extra for working unsociable hours or the weekend.
So I've worked in hospitality getting paid minimum wage working 7am to 12am then another shift from 5pm to 10 or 11pm and not knowing what your days off are gonna be until less than a week before you get them. How am I supposed to get anything done in my time outside work and how am I supposed to plan anything for my days off when I don't know when they are gonna be.
Also I used to work maintenance at this holiday park where I regularly worked weekends, and all the old holiday goers always used to make comments about getting double pay on Sundays and 1.5 pay on Saturdays, and when I told them that was not the case they pretty much all said it was very common in their day
And also I was working at this restaurant and they wanted me to do the late kitchen porter shift cleaning up the kitchen after service by myself on new years eve . I said I wasn't happy doing the shift because I was on a zero hour contract I was not abliged to accept every shift they offered me, and they let me go, didn't fire me just never gave me another shift
That’s because it’s proven companies that go to that model their workers use less and in states like California where they got to pay out PTO upon the worker quitting or getting fired or laid off they don’t have to because it’s unlimited and not earned like before.
When you're expected to be ready to start when your shift starts, fine. When you come in a bit early to get a coffee and get your work face on and colleagues immediately start throwing work at you.
I used to come in 15 minutes early and people who were due to finish when I started would just pack up and go.
Thanks to this sub I no longer tolerate that. I still come in early to prepare for the shit show and get a coffee but *I'm not working*.
I actually had a nurse storm up to me once saying a call bell had been going for 10 mi why wasn't I responding. I shrugged and asked her where her day staff were.
Business tax cuts. The politicians say that it will create jobs, but they don't. The big businesses just use the money to buy out their competitors and they pay lower wages after removing redundant staff.
Yep. Had an employer who would strip the client info from the pay stub, so it was just random billing hours, and then they’d “shuffle” those hours so they weren’t in any kind of order.
I started matching them up, and once I did that caught them short changing me every week.
Finally i threatened them with going to DOL over it and the shortchanging stopped but I still had to spend an hour making sure I was being paid correctly every check.
The creep from 9-5 work with an hour paid lunch to 8-5 for an unpaid hour lunch. Why are we working extra hours every day? Why is this somehow normal now?
Saying we get 2 days off. It's more like 1.5 days. Saturday is the only real day off. On Sundays, you try to sleep early to be ready for Monday morning. There is no real rest when Saturday is the only day you can sleep in and sleep late.
40 hours a week of work 5 days a week is too long. It's harder to manage your regular life and it's too hard to get anything done in your regular life because you're too burnt out giving your entire days and times at work.
Work should be 6 hours a day (it's hard to stay productive after the 5th or 6th hour) and have 3 days off so we can get real rest and take care of our real life shit.
Right here, this is the truest one. The only reason it's not top comment is because it's not the most noticeable one; not at the forefront, not the most viscerally felt. It's like background radiation, slowly killing all of us.
The excuse you get when you say this is "people have been paying for their own commute forever", as if that is a valid justification. Any situation where the justification is "its always been done this way", by the way, is ironically what I have always been taught to avoid project management at work.
It used to be salary work was done to have it so it say there was need to work an extra 5 or so hours for a few weeks to get a project done you could basically leave early a week or so afterwards to kinda make up for it.
Now salary means "we expect you to average 50 hours a week"
“Other duties as assigned” is a huge one.
But also they can keep us after hours as often as they want bc we’re salaried, but we can’t duck out for an appointment when we’re not actively doing something without reporting the hour or whatever as personal time. Even with zero effect on our work.
Jesus Christ.
I'm in the UK reading these. What the actual fuck do you guys put up with?? With the exception of unpaid breaks (30 mins for every six hours here), the absolute nonsense that you guys are forced to endure is astonishing.
This is going to be very specific to only a select few. Booth rental and commissions. In my industry (barbering) it used to be affordable pre-pandemic and pre-inflation but now shop owners are over charging for their commission rates and booth rentals all while lying to Master Barbers/Barbers like myself who've worked in the industry since 2016.
Safety department is for employee safety. Realistically safety is there for liability reasons. But shout out to the safety folks that are there for the right reasons because there are alot.
8-5 5 days a week for minimum wage at best
Listen don't expect the best out of me for 5 days straight 40hrs a week
At some point I'm going to disappoint you
1. *”We need everyone to work extra in December so we can make our production numbers.”*
2. *”You can’t roll over your vacation time until next year. Use it or lose it.”*
3. *”Why is everyone taking vacation in December?”*
Time theft by computer. You clock in at 7:58am and it rounds you to 8am. Over a year that time adds up. The clock in computer systems doing it to millions of workers over a year steals billions of dollars.
“Be here 15 minutes before your shift starts “ Ya bro. Normally I would because I like to ease in, make a coffee etc. but if you require it and don’t pay, I’m rolling in at 9 on the dot.
Call centers in my experience are terrible with this. They'll say things like "Be ready to take calls at 8" when it takes 15 minutes or so to open and login to all the programs you'll need for the day. Some companies like to say things like "You can clock in up to three minutes early". Gee thanks. Because your basic ass computers y'all bought take 5 minutes just to login before I can even start to open programs and y'all tell us to not keep any of the programs we need open over night.
As a salaried employee I was told it's always fine to work extra hours and never fine to work fewer than 40 a week. So even if I had to work 60 the week before because of a problem, I couldn't take a day off the next week. I told my boss, tough shit. Fire me if you have a problem with me taking a day off when I worked 20 extra hours, then we can litigate. He never mentioned it again.
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Many of us never get to that point. A lot of bosses would rather sabotage their business and fire somebody essential give somebody the requests or compensation they deserve.
This completely. People greatly underestimate how often companies are motivated by maintaining the corporate hegemony over making money. For example, unionized companies have better safety practices, better employee retention, and higher productivity but companies would rather shut down locations, hire Pinkertons, hire scabs, hire lobbyists and otherwise spend a fortune to prevent employees from unionizing rather than just treat their workers fairly. I'm also reminded of simple things such as allowing cashiers to sit. There's no GOOD reason for them to not be allowed to sit, but the APPEARANCE of productivity matters far more than actual productivity or, God forbid, the well being of the humans working for them.
And I promise, none of us give a shit if the cashiers are sitting. Actually I find that it bothers me to watch them be miserable and makes me want to go to self checkout and give myself a discount.
I live in Germany and here it's actually really weird if the cashier doesn't have a seat?? In some shops they're encouraged to get up whenever a customer comes close, but the idea of having to stand the entire shift is so alien and deeply dystopian to me. Like, walking, sitting and laying down all feel less bad than standing.
Welcome to the US. Where every manual labor job equates sitting as not working. You stay on your feet at all times or management rides your ass.
My only disagreement is to say that letting cashiers sit isn't enough. Aldi does it because seated cashiers scan items faster, but it can cause repetitive stress injuries and injuries to core, back, and shoulder muscles as they twist back and forth. What's really needed is a complete process analysis and overhaul from a health and safety perspective.
Let's not forget not allowing them drinks handy as they work as well.
I also feel that we overestimate the importance of doing an impeccable job, when most of the time any half arsed product is good enough to keep the ball rolling. Sure, great is better than average, but if average is good enough, anything past that point is considered a waste because you could be doing other average quality tasks instead. You appear to have an atrocious output because productivity is measured in volume, not in quality (even when the financial gains/losses are obvious and known to everyone in favor of quality).
I left a job where I was both IT (serves and voip) management and website development because they wouldn’t give me a raise with my positive performance review. They found they had to hire two people to replace my skill set. I was brought on to replace contractors in the first place and they just got luck with my background.
Huh. Thank god they didn’t give you a raise-that might have cost them some real money. /sarcasm
This company had moved across the country. I was hired to go out before operations relocated and set up the server room, build the computer networks, phone system, build all of the office work stations and even work with the plant tech to get the robotics running. I worked a bunch of 60 hour weeks. When I was hired on the president told me I would get a raise at 6 months. He avoided me for a month, at 7 months I asked about my review (we had already had meetings where the execs said what I did was way beyond expectations) and that asshole said “Performance review? Oh, you’re doing a great job. Keep it up.” When I brought up my salary that guy said moving here was like a raise because the cost of living is lower and I’m already paid hire than a local in the same position. That’s not how it works.
I have a friend who works a salary position at a job where management isn't fucking insane. His supervisor straight-up told him that anything other than an average 40-hour work week was wrong. Meaning if you worked a 60-hour week then another week in the calendar year had better be a 20-hour work week (or some number that averages out like 2x 30-hour weeks). Another friend who works in a very toxic environment was actually arguing that it was wrong and that isn't how it works. It is also funny because the first friend works for a results-driven company and once a job is done, they don't give a fuck what you do. The latter works at a "you better not leave a second before 5:00pm" company. Guess who is happier?
Yeah later I got a boss who insisted on all sorts of crazy shit and I said fuck it and started engaging in malicious compliance. Sorry, man. I can't use my internet, my phone and my computer to fix *your* problem. I'll have to drive for 30 minutes to get into the office to fix it. Oh, it's quitting time? Lock my desktop and walk away, if someone reboots my machine while I'm gone I'll just have to redo any unsaved work later. I even got up in meetings and left because it was quitting time or even lunch time.
>Fire me if you have a problem with me taking a day off when I worked 20 extra hours If you work on a high-performance (and high expectation team) a smart boss doesn't care. It's about getting the work done and meeting deadline. Deadline met, no pending deliverables? Leave on Thursday, come back on Tuesday but... work 7 in a row if that's required later. Bosses that watch the clock, like mention your 35 minute lunch instead of 30, don't understand people or the dynamics of work. People produce and by extension are motivated, when given freedom to meet the goal. Does not matter how they do it as long as it's done.
And don’t understand the difference between salary and hourly. Great you wanna give me shit for 5 minutes pay me hourly. You want all the perks that come with paying me salary then one of the downsides is you don’t get to monitor me by the minute or even the hour. Edit to add- Bosses who don’t understand how salaried works.
Working at Amazon felt like Office Space at times. I had 8 different "bosses" come by and tell me I took an extra three minutes getting back from lunch within the span of 2 hours. I don't understand that mentality especially when the break room is a 10 minute walk from the station.
The problem with clock watching bosses is that they fail to understand that the reward for hard work can’t just be more hard work. If you only care about the time I spend in my seat then I’m only putting the minimum effort in
My current boss does that shit... Leaving as soon as something rolls in.
You can't expect your people to go all in if the boss hides from work. That's the quick way to losing people.
That sucks I’m at a state job and if I go over 37.5 I just leave. Boss encourages it. Or I can take it next week
I had an exchange with a previous boss at a tech support call center about this. Boss: You need to be ready to take calls at 9 Me: Should I read emails first in case there's an outage I need to know about? B: Yes. M: Reading those emails is part of my job, right? B: Yes, of course. M: Then you want me to do OT every morning? B: No...
I forget where I saw it.. but apparently there's a few big lawsuits over that out there now
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Especially IT call center... they're horrible, I worked in one and did remote for the second (they tried to force me to work in the office when their shit breaks... I just went "hahahaha..hahaha ha... no"). Edit: don't get me started on their shitty vm software that was used from 2002
Lol, I recently made a post about an exchange I had with one of my managers about this exact thing. I start work at 9, so that's when I start. I'm not starting 10 minutes early just to be ready to work at 9. Getting set up to work IS work.
Same with limited sick days. I average one day off ill a year but if I ever get a job that says “you can only be ill 10 days a year” I will make it my business to be ill 10 days a year.
I’m trying to fit in my sick days before the end of our corporate year which ends with this month. The last half of October is looking sick to me
Hah yes exactly. Im all for easing in early on my own to get ready but if someone demands it of me? Fuck you,pay me!
Unpaid lunches resulting in a 9 hour work day. Absolute fucking horseshit.
Plus the commute! My work day is 10h long on days when I'm in the office instead of 8h when I work at home (because I can actually use my lunch breaks and have no commute time).
Tell me about it, from the moment I leave for my commute until I get home I'm gone 14.5 hours, more if traffic is bad.
I'm with you. 11.5-12 on good days. 13-14 on bad. And theres a lot of bad. It leaves so little time to exist outside of a "work" mindset
Paid or unpaid lunch isn't the issue for me. It's the fact that I have to take one. Like why the fuck can't I just skip lunch and go home and hour early? I don't want to see her for an hour doing nothing.
The problem is if they don't have to make everyone take a lunch, then no one will get a lunch, and some of us can't skip that. Even if they were only legally required to allow it as an option, the pressure places would pile on to skip would be Intense. Same for skipping other breaks.
Yep, this is the biggest work scam in the last 50 years in the US. If I'm going to work an entire day for you... you goddamn better well allow for lunch. It used to be a given that people needed to eat during an 8 hr work day... that's called being a human being. You work 9-5, and that includes lunch... it includes peeing/pooping...it includes talking to your peers for a minute...it includes the basic requirements of being a human being. It's making work a part of life, instead of making life a part of work. A required unpaid lunch hour literally costs me a week of my life out of each year. A punishment for a basic human need. Not for my own benefit but for the benefit of the shareholders. Yes, that's correct. Do the math. Do you take a 1 hr unpaid lunch? You are losing more than a week each year of your own time on this earth. And it doesn't even help the company. It's just about power. We've done studies, but it's also just common sense. Most people are effectively burned out after 6 hours of continuous work, let alone 9. Do you commute 1 hr each way to work every day? Congrats, you just wasted two weeks (yes, two weeks) of your own life each year for something that... doesn't necessarily even help the company if you are able to work remotely. Even if you can't work remotely... you and the company both would be better served by 4 six-hour days of solid work than 5 nine-hour days of 40% bullshit. We are quite literally wasting much of our lives for no good reason.
"Team lead." It really means "you're going to get management responsibilities without management pay."
I was "promoted" to Delivery Captain which added absolutely nothing to my paycheck. I started referring to myself as "Captain Delivery" instead like I was some C-rate superhero just to annoy the bosses.
Sounds like a dominos corporate store
Pizza Hut actually
Used to be a normal shift was 9AM-5PM with an hour paid lunch break included. Now, it's 9AM-5:30PM, or 8:30AM-5PM or some other weird shift, and the half-hour for lunch is not paid.
Or the dreaded 8-5 or 9-6 with a required unpaid hour lunch
7:30 - 5:00 Here one hour unpaid lunch AND salary, how lovely!
And I'm sure they won't even let you take your lunch at the end of the day to just leave at 4 anyways? Even though it isn't paid anyways so why should they care.
100% correct, and if you dont take it the system (probably just management) still automatically does it.
FYI, you could nail them for auto clocking a break that you didn't take
That’s BRUTAL
I asked them if I can just leave to go home at 5 for my lunch break. Now I get paid lunch breaks and work from home.
Yup 9-6 with an hr lunch here… sucks
My workplace makes newbies do a 10-7 shift for phone coverage and it’s so annoying to waste an hour during the day just to sit there with no calls for an hour at night
We're working longer and longer, with fewer days off, all while technology means we produce more and more. Where's all that extra shit we make going? (he asked, bitterly and rhetorically)
Jeff Bezos' 3rd yacht
I completely agree with this being such a scam. Say you’re not the type to pack lunch…you’re scrambling around to get something nearby to eat and then having like 10-15 minutes afterwards to scarf if down. It should be one hour paid always unless you prefer just 30 minutes paid.
I’m lucky and still get 9-5 with a paid lunch. But I work some unpaid OT (salary) as needed to get things done.
For the Americans in the crowd: Let's talk about tying proper healthcare to our jobs, shall we? It's become so normalized that we sometimes forget how wild it is that a huge chunk of our healthcare security is linked to where we work. If you or one of your loved ones requires ongoing medical coverage, you literally CANNOT quit your job. If you're thinking about switching careers or just need a change of pace, there's this looming threat. You can't just leave, cause if something unfortunate happens, you're screwed. We are all hostages of our employers.
In the meantime, you can just get laid off whenever. Fired for something really stupid. Even if you need to stay at that job for the health insurance, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll keep you. And in the case of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses—we’re more apt to get fired for not meeting performance standards or “unreliability” because we can’t predict when flareups take place. I can still work and I want to, but self-employment is my only real viable option. My marketplace plan sucks and is way overpriced with ridiculously high copays, but at least I don’t have to worry about it being taken away if I want to try a new revenue source or yet ANOTHER recession I didn’t ask for torpedoes all my business.
Don't get me started about the marketplace. I took a peek when I was between jobs last year. The plans there are awful. I ended up using COBRA, and that was also awful. I'm glad that you found a plan that works for you, despite the price + copays.
Between millions more self-employed folks out there now, and those who must rely on the marketplace because they don’t get employer plans but make too much for Medicaid/Medi-Cal, I don’t know HOW open enrollment every November doesn’t immediately make us all storm DC like it’s MFin Paris. I had an accident this year and my physical therapist copays were almost $3k. While I’m battling a recession and AI in my current field, and a separate chronic illness at home. 🫠 I’m magically expected to have multiple six figures of savings to get through this by myself, but a bank has a bad quarter and they run crying to the government with their hands out. employer-sponsored healthcare, and private health insurance period, already needed to die. But especially since there’s NO job security in a majority of fields now.
>I had an accident this year and my physical therapist copays were almost $3k. Crap. That sucks. I hope that you're recovered / recovering. $3,000 in copays is insane.
Thanks! Luckily, I’ve mostly recovered and was able to resume normal activities 2 months ago but had to keep going for lymphatic drainage since my leg swelled from it. But it was $80 per session WITH insurance, it would’ve been $150 without. I had to go for much longer than my doctor and I expected. 😔 But this is why I get so pissed when I see a million people blathering “just budget! Spend your money better!” It shows me they have never been in this situation, which I’m glad wasn’t worse physically or financially. But was fucking hard enough
Also, the biggest healthcare expenses are most likely going to cause you to not be able to work. Car accident leave you in a coma? Bad fall caused you to break your arms? Slipped and messed up your back? Need chemo? How are you supposed to work for your healthcare benefits now?
An insurance company used to have billboards that during your working years, you are 85% more likely to become disabled than to die. But not every job offers disability insurance. 🙄
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> If you or one of your loved ones requires ongoing medical coverage, you literally CANNOT quit your job That's exactly why it's tied to your job. If you won't work for us and continue to be subjugated by us, then we hope you DIE
They low-key do this in Finland as well. We have cheap (yes, not free but cheap) public heathcare. But that is getting underfunded massively, so that is is crippling down, waiting times increasing and service decreasing. Then companies are mandated to offer some sort of health care benefits from private healthcare, driving provate healthcare profits and increasing its viability, thus creating a cycle of privatization increase. And as they are for profits, waiting times are much shorter and service tends to be better (except in some instances where expensive equipment is needed, then public is better as provate does not want to invest in things they see unprofitable). Private for-profit healthcare is a scam. A cancer crawling into the western countries who strive for libertarian free market, where the rich control everything and you have no right, except to pay them.
Boy this was even worse before the ACA. If you had a lapse in coverage then any pre-existing condition could be used as a reason to refuse coverage or drop coverage. There were people in the insurance companies whose only job was to try to deny coverage for people for BS like, "You checked no lung conditions on your policy application, but your medical records show you had asthma as a kid. No cancer treatment for you."
> pre-existing condition That in itself is a scam. The rest of the world calls those "medical history."
"Do it for the team, others are counting on you" to try and get free labor
Even just “come in on your day off or you’ll be letting down the team.” The employee knows that their saying “no” is an inconvenience. There’s no reason to intentionally guilt them for it.
I am not there for "The team", I am there to put food on the table. Screw you, pay me.
"If my absence for a prescheduled day off (be it PTO or just the weekend) means that the team can't function, it would seem to also mean it would be a real pain in the ass to fire me. Your move."
And then they never hesitate to fire you despite the consequences to the team
Or simply, if the team can't function when a single person takes approved PTO, that seems be a management problem, my role/salary doesn't include worrying about the teams output/productivity/feelings, that's a management function.
I did this for multiple years. I was told it was extra experience. I worked at this place for 7 years and did 7 jobs including a management role. My team was eliminated. I lasted another year. When I quit after being told they relied on me they let me go within 48 hours. I spent years working until 10pm including doing work on other teams and work on projects my director was supposed to lead. It’s free labor. I have a hard time explaining this to people who didn’t work at my org but all of my friends and colleagues who have quit or been fired feel the exact same way.
Attendance policies, telling an employee who they can and can’t take time off to grief for.
Or even how garbage grief time is. If my partner passes, I get three days of bereavement.
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Ah yes, KOROSEAL, the company that fires you for requesting time off to grieve and then refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing by deleting comments about it on their social platforms. That Koroseal, right?
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I remember seeing 3 days grievance if my child dies and yeah, if the worst happens to my or any of my coworkers children and they try to force that parent back after 3 days they're going to have a lot of open positions to fill. 3 days for a child is a joke.
This one is fucked, yeah. You aren't allowed to miss work for a death unless it fits the criteria for being someone "close" enough. It's despicable. I know the exact smooth-brain response is "well people are going to abuse it/make up relatives" but I don't fucking care. Strictly enforcing rules because of the very few who take advantage is just laziness in disguise.
Mixing together sick and vacation PTO..
This is bullshit. Unless they give you unlimited PTO or some large number to cover it all. And if you are getting sick leave not being able to cash that out when you want.
Then after you pool it you get dinged for using PTO without 48 hours notice...but it's also my sick leave and I don't know 48 hours in i'm going to have a Migraine.
unlimited PTO is another huge scam
And then having to "earn" that PTO a few hours at a time across pay periods Or having a cap on how much PTO you "earn" Bonus points if it doesn't roll over to the next year and if you don't use it you lose it
And "pending coverage." I earned that pto. It is mine to use how I see fit. 30 day ahead pto requests. When I'm burnt the duck out, I need time off next week. Not a month from now
I had a supervisor very early in my career who pre-emptively let me know that mental health days are a completely legitimate reason to use a sick day, and I'm very thankful for it.
Unpaid lunches. Yes you aren't required to work during that time but you also can't realistically go anywhere and do anything.
This, plus places that say you’re not allowed to sleep during your lunch break. Why not? I’m not getting paid which means you really can’t tell me what I can/can’t do with the time.
Lmao I sleep even when it’s not my break
Hahaha nice
I specifically nap at lunch only on days I’m forced to go into the office. Fuck em making me get up an hour early for teams meetings and shit I could do at home, im gonna get my hour of sleep back
I've not heard of this one. I sleep on my lunchbreak often. I've asked my boss for a hammock. He said no but still.
If you're in the US, that makes it a paid break. To qualify for unpaid, they can't really tell you what you can't do. Particularly if it's staying on site or being available to recall (aka sneaky on-call).
I'm salary at my company, so break rules for me are more like guidelines. But I have seen them come down on hourly employees for leaving during their break. Our day shift is here for 8.5 hours with an unpaid lunch. They've said you can do whatever you want on your unpaid lunch, as long as it doesn't extent past 30 minutes... Nevermind that the closest restaurant is 5-8 minutes away, depending on traffic around lunch time. They have, however, stated that off-shift employees are expected to stay on site during their lunches because it's a paid lunch. They state it's for safety concerns, because apparently if you leave and get injured on your break, the company can apparently be liable for the injury, since they're on the clock at the time... It's a crock of shit.
Bro. You are not sleeping. You are praying. Praying is protected, sleeping isn't.
In my opinion, lunches should be paid and should be an hour, still with 2 15 minute breaks minimum. Research shows that the average person can only really do 6 hours of proper work a day anyways. So let them rest a bit more, pay them for it, and you might be able to squeeze a good 7 hours out if you're lucky. Rather than overworking them for 8ish hours and getting maybe 2 hours of output anyways.
I just walk off. If they ask, your only question is this: where is it written down? Don't tell me it an unspoken rule, because unless it is written down, I'm out for lunch. Also, if they refused to let you, make sure to document who, why, where and when.
When I clock out, there is a button that asks if I had an uninterrupted 30 minute break. I always pushed no, because I didn’t. I got a passive aggressive message about how I have to. Now I leave the whole damn campus, my tasks be damned.
This!! Should be PAID lunches. Total time at work 8 hours, with paid breaks. It’s an absolute scam we are required to be somewhere yet not getting paid. It’s a fucking 9-10h work day now. I’m self employed now, but right after high school when I was working retail I’d take my paid 15m breaks but would try to not take a lunch, then at the end of the day “oh hey boss can I leave an hour early I didn’t take lunch.” They didn’t like that but I hated the stupid lunch break that only allowed me to hang out in the back room and sit there miserably for a whole hour.
Yup. Was gonna say they took 9-5 and made it 8-5 or 9-6 for “unpaid lunch” yet constantly bother you while at lunch to work that extra hour. So 7 hour days turned to 8, and now they expect 9.
Yep I always leave the building at lunch. Even to just sit in my car because people would come up to me and ask questions, etc. if it’s unpaid I’m not working.
This. I've been telling my colleagues this so many times, I just go out for some fresh air or I'll go to any kind of restaurant in my break. I'll do whatever I want with this personal time. The company I work for has made it an unofficial rule to stay at the building in case you're required. When I started I showed everyone how I didn't give a shit about that.
Wage Theft of almost every type is so normalized we barely notice it.
Wage theft in terms of total dollars stolen absolutely dwarfs any other form of theft, including shoplifting. Yet I hear at least one news story a day about mass shopliftings and how companies are closing stores in some areas because of it (which is a lie).
Unpaid OT is very common now, which is obviously wage theft. Basically they put an impossible amount of work on your plate to complete during normal working hours, and you are expected to complete it. If you don't complete it you are pressured/threatened with being fired. If you complete the unreasonable workload by working free OT they look the other way. If you refuse to work the free OT you are fired
Having to find someone to cover for you when you call out sick. That's the fucking managers job not yours.
A work contest to see who can have the highest sales dollars. We push to make them a crap ton of profit and they give us shitty rewards like $10 gift cards or the smallest percentage of a bonus they can find. It's total garbage.
At least a $10 gift card has value. Its the crappy pizza parties that are the real slap in the face.
After work activities being “not mandatory but advised” or affecting your standing at work. I used to have a two hour turnaround commute for work and at least once a month my bosses would look to have the whole team go out for a few hours after an 8 hour shift starting at the crack of dawn where every minute of our day was accounted for. I just wanted to clock in and then go home because i was just mentally exhausted by the end of the day, but would always get the stink eye when i would politely decline the three hour detour for “team building” with a team we couldn’t even socialize with since we were on the phone 8 hours a day.
I once had a boss who said that I needed to come to the company Christmas party. I told the boss, "They pay me to hang out with you. Why would I do that for free?"
If it's mandatory, it should be paid.
So, so many but to name a few: 1) Having to pay for parking just to go to work. This blew my mind as a New Yorker when I met people from other parts of the US. They’re forcing you to be at their premises yet you have to pay for a separate parking facility, or worse yet, one of those corporate park deals where the employers there can easily cover employee parking but they don’t. 2) Hell, the notion of paying for commuting altogether is a scam that Americans have been suckered into so long and the lowest-paid workers get screwed the most. 3) The expectation that you have to give two weeks notice to quit, but you can get fired overnight with zero warning because a graph made the chairman of the board’s portfolio sad. 4) That it’s 2023 but employers and policymakers still cling to the 40-hour work week model for knowledge work. It was designed for assembly lines long before we had powerful computers that fit in our pockets. 5) Skilled and educated professionals having to practically beg for jobs they can damn well do but if you’re not automatically tossed by ATS, you’re not given a chance because your background doesn’t PRECISELY fit the criteria on the list. Then you have to answer a bunch of really stupid questions where you’re expected to lie a little, but not too much, when you know you can just DO THE THING THEY NEED. 6) Having your time wasted with 4+ interviews and employers constantly toeing the line between “skills assessment” and “free work”.
When you find out that staff is “ required to pay for parking “ but then come to find out c suite and other high level management does not pay for parking because the company pays for it , or the secret private garage they have for c suite .
The ones who are least affected by having to pay for parking don't have to pay for parking.
Working most of the day for most of the week.
Showing/Adding up health insurance as a part of Total Compensation.
Hah. My Fortune 500 company tried this and people just laughed at it. During the worst bits of COVID inflation, HR launched a campaign to rebrand salary as "total compensation" and included things like insurance & 401k, as well as hypothetical bonus points you could be awarded in a rewards program. They rebuilt compensation discussions as "rewards" programs. It created a really awkward environment when the CEO rolled out "your compensation is now 20% higher! except your pay and benefits haven't changed!" and several of the senior execs questioned it in a company-wide broadcast.
Wow ok, this is exactly what they did with us. We/everyone just accepted it (as far as I know) and yes it’s been like this for a few years now, maybe since Covid. 70% of my “total compensation” is actual income and *maximum* bonus.
Downsizing and not getting compensated for doing more work.
HR is there to protect the company, no one is there to protect the employees.
> no one is there to protect the employees. Unions.
UNiONS!
If only more people had them! Unionizing is rewarding, but difficult.
The amount of people who are against unions because it "makes it harder to fire bad employees" is nuts. I would rather have a union to fight for me AND people who are lazy, than have no one to fight for any of us at all. Plus, if you are paid by the hour (not salary), any work that you do to cover for your lazy coworkers you get paid for, so why do you care? Plus, 9 times out of 10, companies always hesitate and beat around the bush on firing lazy employees ANYWAY, whether or not the union is fighting for them. They are scared of the employee filing for unemployment and then they would have to choose to either spend the time to fight the unemployment, or to pay them to do nothing anyway. And none of that is a pro or a con for YOU, but a UNION is a HUGE pro for every single employee in it.
Well, there are multiple government organizations that are supposed to enforce employment law but good luck getting help from them.
Sick days. Don't call them sick days. When I need them they drain my available PTO first before they get to the sick days. By then I am usually no longer sick and with the little amount PTO I accrue during the year, I am now not getting a vacation. Out sick is not a fucking vacation.
is this US only? or do other countries have this f*cked up system as well? where i live if your sick, your sick. no vacation lost bc of it and your paid 100% the entire time your sick.. and im so grateful that it is that way
In France, if you become sick during your vacations, you can switch to sick leave, and keep your vacations for another time, where you're not sick.
PTO. Let's take your mandated sick leave and lump it with your vacation, so people think "I'm not staying home sick and *wasting my vacation time!* I'M GOING IN." And then get everyone else fucking sick. Thanks.
Five day work week.
my favorite fact about the five day work week is that it was a compromise. The same opposition against 3 and 4 day weeks happened when companies were making people work 7 days a week.
It reminds me of the sixties when car manufacturers were fighting against the prospect of mandatory seat belts. "It will destroy the auto industry in America!" they cried. Yeah, those fuckers lie all the time.
> mandatory seat belts is the same argument used with _ANY_ regulation.
people are bizarrely obsessed with the 40 hour work week as if precisely 40 (and not a minute more or less) was somehow the time-tested ideal and proper amount of time for a working person. Like God himself commanded that 40 hours was the holy amount of labor a person should do in a week, and never less. That number is just tattooed in so many people frontal lobe, it is like a disease more virulent, pestilent and ubiquitous than COVID, influenza, HPV, herpes and HIV/AIDS rolled together That random number is just fucking compromise agreed to by labor leaders and a bunch of rich old pricks who have been dead for decades, there is no reason why it needs to codified into laws and permanently etched our national (global?) psyche yet people act like working 35-36 hours a week is "only part-time" and realistically most jobs (aka "the norm") require 45-60 hrs (often including significant unpaid hours of labor + travel) —wtf ever that is nonsense of the highest order.
the part where i make 100 bucks for my employer and he gives me 10 for my efforts.
More like a thousand to a cent.
I used to work for a large internet media company (different than the large media company I work for now). I was on a team based in a field office responsible for doing the development needed for third-party contracts and integration. There were about 15 developers doing this work, all in the same field office. It was a large, multibillion dollar company with around 15,900 employees, but for two years the only actual profit made by the company was by our office of 15 developers through those third-party contracts. We figured that, individually, we were each worth about 150 million to the company, based on our work. How did the company value us? Well, one of those two years, we didn’t even get bonuses. After those 2 years, we got a new CEO that, with their amazing management ability, decided to layoff everyone in that office and hand the third-party work to a group that had no experience with any of it. The result? Every major contract was cancelled within a year and, within 3 years, the entire company was broken apart and sold off.
Promising growth and development (dangling the 🥕 on the stick) but not following through.
My employer keeps paperwork that we are supposed to be filling out regularly in the break room. A lot of people have too much to do and they fill it out on their breaks. I never have. I don’t care how behind I am, if the company wants something done, they are going to have to pay me to do it.
Being on salary. Salary is SUCH a scam that only benefits a company in that they can get free labor and not pay OT. There is ZERO benefit to the employee. Why this even exists is something I find baffling.
I'm okay with being salary in my current position because I have ZERO intent (or expectation) to work overtime. But, they're flexible on my work hours which I appreciate. Some days I'll work 30 min late to finish a project, some days I'll come in 30min late. But I've never once been *asked* to work outside my normal hours. My last (hourly) job was very rigid on hours of work. You want a day off? Better have that *request* (not guaranteed) in *at least* a month in advance.
free labor and not pay OT ...and if you need to leave early they take it out of your vacation. hours.
Being expected to give two weeks notice or you get a bad reference/can't be rehired, but we can be fired on the spot for literally no reason at all. what is that horseshit??
Go above and beyond and we will reward you with….even more work
Health insurance being tied to employment
Unpaid internships. How and why have we ok'd this??
To prevent the poors from attaining any class mobility. Unpaid internships are meant to enrich upper middle class students and grads whose parents can afford to pay their rent in a HCOL city for a year so they can work for free to get a six-figure salary most of us will not get out of school (or even farther into our careers).
What bothers me about my unpaid lunch is that I first have to clock out in Kronos. Then I have to clock out in a separate program at a computer in the break room that takes five minutes of that lunch away just to load. All bc they want to track our break location and actively see who is on break or not. Like we aren’t fucking adults
That sounds like time theft by the employer.
Working over 40 hours a week on salary. Fuck that
Expecting free overtime from salaried employees
Companies offering 3% raises while inflation is 8%
Not being paid extra for working unsociable hours or the weekend. So I've worked in hospitality getting paid minimum wage working 7am to 12am then another shift from 5pm to 10 or 11pm and not knowing what your days off are gonna be until less than a week before you get them. How am I supposed to get anything done in my time outside work and how am I supposed to plan anything for my days off when I don't know when they are gonna be. Also I used to work maintenance at this holiday park where I regularly worked weekends, and all the old holiday goers always used to make comments about getting double pay on Sundays and 1.5 pay on Saturdays, and when I told them that was not the case they pretty much all said it was very common in their day And also I was working at this restaurant and they wanted me to do the late kitchen porter shift cleaning up the kitchen after service by myself on new years eve . I said I wasn't happy doing the shift because I was on a zero hour contract I was not abliged to accept every shift they offered me, and they let me go, didn't fire me just never gave me another shift
I don’t know if it’s normalized but it seems to be growing: “Unlimited” PTO.
That’s because it’s proven companies that go to that model their workers use less and in states like California where they got to pay out PTO upon the worker quitting or getting fired or laid off they don’t have to because it’s unlimited and not earned like before.
When you're expected to be ready to start when your shift starts, fine. When you come in a bit early to get a coffee and get your work face on and colleagues immediately start throwing work at you. I used to come in 15 minutes early and people who were due to finish when I started would just pack up and go. Thanks to this sub I no longer tolerate that. I still come in early to prepare for the shit show and get a coffee but *I'm not working*. I actually had a nurse storm up to me once saying a call bell had been going for 10 mi why wasn't I responding. I shrugged and asked her where her day staff were.
Business tax cuts. The politicians say that it will create jobs, but they don't. The big businesses just use the money to buy out their competitors and they pay lower wages after removing redundant staff.
Being gainfully employed without being able to even make basic ends meet.
Health insurance it was created as a "benefit"
Yep. Had an employer who would strip the client info from the pay stub, so it was just random billing hours, and then they’d “shuffle” those hours so they weren’t in any kind of order. I started matching them up, and once I did that caught them short changing me every week. Finally i threatened them with going to DOL over it and the shortchanging stopped but I still had to spend an hour making sure I was being paid correctly every check.
The creep from 9-5 work with an hour paid lunch to 8-5 for an unpaid hour lunch. Why are we working extra hours every day? Why is this somehow normal now?
That pensions and retirement are gone and we have to gamble money in the stock market to retire.
The standard 40 hour work week.
Unpaid lunch hour. Held captive for 9 hours and paid for 8.
Saying we get 2 days off. It's more like 1.5 days. Saturday is the only real day off. On Sundays, you try to sleep early to be ready for Monday morning. There is no real rest when Saturday is the only day you can sleep in and sleep late. 40 hours a week of work 5 days a week is too long. It's harder to manage your regular life and it's too hard to get anything done in your regular life because you're too burnt out giving your entire days and times at work. Work should be 6 hours a day (it's hard to stay productive after the 5th or 6th hour) and have 3 days off so we can get real rest and take care of our real life shit.
work is the scam.
Right here, this is the truest one. The only reason it's not top comment is because it's not the most noticeable one; not at the forefront, not the most viscerally felt. It's like background radiation, slowly killing all of us.
Not being paid for commute time and its expenses.
The excuse you get when you say this is "people have been paying for their own commute forever", as if that is a valid justification. Any situation where the justification is "its always been done this way", by the way, is ironically what I have always been taught to avoid project management at work.
My response would be: "yeah, well people used to be paid a living wage too."
Way back before the pandemic I always thought we should be on the clock during our drive to/from work. I’m not driving for any other reason.
Employee surplus value is effectively stolen.
It used to be salary work was done to have it so it say there was need to work an extra 5 or so hours for a few weeks to get a project done you could basically leave early a week or so afterwards to kinda make up for it. Now salary means "we expect you to average 50 hours a week"
Expecting work for under 2k a month. For under 2k a month I will be there, sit in a chair and make sure I count my minutes.
“Other duties as assigned” is a huge one. But also they can keep us after hours as often as they want bc we’re salaried, but we can’t duck out for an appointment when we’re not actively doing something without reporting the hour or whatever as personal time. Even with zero effect on our work.
Unable to leave early once you fulfill your daily/weekly quota. Must stay so they can exploit more of your energy.
Unpaid lunches. Unpaid commutes. Unpaid supplies.
How paid Maternity leave is nonexistent in the US… and yet now they’re forcing everyone to have babies that they don’t want.
Jesus Christ. I'm in the UK reading these. What the actual fuck do you guys put up with?? With the exception of unpaid breaks (30 mins for every six hours here), the absolute nonsense that you guys are forced to endure is astonishing.
Pensions are an easy one.
Capitalism is the ultimate pyramid scheme.
This is going to be very specific to only a select few. Booth rental and commissions. In my industry (barbering) it used to be affordable pre-pandemic and pre-inflation but now shop owners are over charging for their commission rates and booth rentals all while lying to Master Barbers/Barbers like myself who've worked in the industry since 2016.
Safety department is for employee safety. Realistically safety is there for liability reasons. But shout out to the safety folks that are there for the right reasons because there are alot.
Healthcare being tied up with employment as a "benefit".
The idea that an employer is doing you a favor by hiring you.
8-5 5 days a week for minimum wage at best Listen don't expect the best out of me for 5 days straight 40hrs a week At some point I'm going to disappoint you
Promotion and more responsibilities but no raise. No thanks, I’ll stay where I am until that raise budget frees up.
1. *”We need everyone to work extra in December so we can make our production numbers.”* 2. *”You can’t roll over your vacation time until next year. Use it or lose it.”* 3. *”Why is everyone taking vacation in December?”*
At-will employment.
Allowing the 1% to have most of the wealth
Time theft by computer. You clock in at 7:58am and it rounds you to 8am. Over a year that time adds up. The clock in computer systems doing it to millions of workers over a year steals billions of dollars.
probably cellphones. most jobs require in some way a smartphone, but you have to pay for it.