Accidental Manager

Can’t be fired/laid off without a reason

1-hour unpaid lunch hour, instead of the 30 min required by law

Two 15-minute paid breaks, instead of the 10 min required by law

Better vision insurance than the company offers directly

Swarms of discounts that the union has negotiated with other companies

Free education for self & family

Emergency auto care - roughly equivalent to AAA service

Death benefit, on top of the company life insurance

Strike fund access, if there’s ever a strike

Negotiation support for working conditions & equipment access.

Things that are kinda like “more pay” but not actually more pay:

7-hour workday, not 8… with overtime kicking in after 7 hours

A forty hour work week is considered full time.

It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)

A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.

Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.

Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.

I walked away and closed the door behind me because I’ve been ordered to be nicer to him, or at least not mean, and he never listens to my criticism anyway. But immediately after I left he wandered over to my other coworker and started talking about a different visitor and how she was, in his opinion, too fat, and proceeded to list all the far women he knew and whether or not it “worked” for them. And every time we have Black families visit he swoops down on them to talk about how bad racism is and how he has Black Lives Matter signs in his yard and what a great ally he is. He insists this is to “make them more comfortable” in a conservative area but the idea that maybe they’re here to learn about nature rather than what an empathetic white guy he is is inconceivable to him.

I’ve confronted him so many times and told him I don’t want to hear his weird opinions about women’s appearances or sordid speculations about strangers’ personal lives but it’s like he’d incapable of writing any new social programs whatsoever. It’s useless. My boss hates him but doesn’t feel that any of his transgressions are worth firing him over (he has said the n-word to a visitor). And he has no plans to retire! I wish dueling were legal…

If being confrontational isn’t working and ignoring isn’t working, a fun middle ground (assuming you haven’t tried it) could be to say, “What a weird thing to say” or, “It’s so weird that you’re focusing on this” and walk away. Most likely, he will try to engage further and defend himself, but if you don’t take the bait and just insist that, “No, it’s weird” maybe he’ll eventually realize he’s not getting what he wants from you and he’ll leave you alone.

These HBR clickbait articles are usually so fluffy that they aren't really useful but this one is about all the teleconference phrases I hate, why they suck, and includes some suggestions about alternatives that suck less:

"We are going to wait five minutes for everyone to join."

"You're on mute."

"We're building the plane while flying it."

"Let's take this offline."

The icing on the cake is when she asks to be removed from informative email threads and THEN asks us to fill her in on what happened in the email thread.

And her manager is on these calls. So I’m just like

Making a separate post because that rambling post is already hella long.

For example, if your goal is to get more staff, a tactic like Work To Rule (where you take all your breaks to the letter and cut no corners ever) can be great for exposing them problems that you want solved. It also leaves you more room to escalate if you need to, e.g. to a slowdown strike or a full work stoppage, and it may be easier to talk coworkers into because it "feels less illegal" (though check it against the laws where you are for whether it is illegal, I'm not a lawyer).

So here’s what I do: I go through the Turbotax process and kind of follow along on the IRS forms. Every time I click something that adds to my refund amount I make sure to figure out what that was and put it in my forms. Then I X out of Turbotax and file on the IRS site for free! 😁 It’s a little extra work but I actually get a couple hundred more usually, because I just get overwhelmed if I try to do it myself and I miss things. (my state has this credit that I ALWAYS forget about because the name of it makes me think it doesn’t apply to me.) Thanks Turbotax 👍😉

Brilliant, you jewel-encrusted monarch butterfly!! Thanks for sharing with the rest of the class!

This is true! And it's one of my favorite laws in support of wage equality.

And here's proof that it works:

I (Piggy) live in Colorado. I noticed my old boss was posting my old job, and when I read the job description I was thrilled to see a salary range listed. This was right after the law was passed, and I didn't know about it yet. So I reached out to my old boss to congratulate him on his commitment to wage equity through salary transparency. I waxed poetic about how important it is to narrowing the gender and racial wealth gap and reduce discrimination in hiring practices.

He responded: "Yeah, well, it's the law now so I had to do it."

Which basically confirmed why I no longer work for that guy. But it also confirmed that the new law is forcing employers to do the right thing even if they otherwise wouldn't bother.

More on why this law is important and other states should adopt similar labor-friendly laws:

My grades slid dramatically. I was having to appeal nearly all my results with my professors, and was mercifully granted extensions by all but one of them. (Which, if you’re out there Ronald: stub your toe and step on lego for the rest of eternity.) And then our Revolutionary Cultures prof. assigned a group project, and paired us at random with our classmates. And I knew, I knew I was just going to be a dead weight so I went to my new buddy and told them we should go to the profs office and ask for her to be switched to someone else who wasn’t just going to drag them down. And my new best buddy for the rest of the semester looked at me, looked at our assigned project, and very gently started to cry as she told me “I was just about to say the same thing to you,” and then tearfully told me her mum was dying, and the only reason she hadn’t dropped out to take care of her was because her mum wanted to see her graduate. She’d been given six months and we graduated in five. Provided we finished this class. And we were both out of appeals and leniency time.

It’s probably one of my most vivid memories from the whole college experience, just sitting on the floor of the Renaissance Lit corridor hugging someone who until a moment ago had been a relative stranger known only in passing, and trying to tell them it would be okay, we’d get the paper done. And we did. We scraped a C- together between the two of us and we managed to coast over the passing mark for the class and were allowed to graduate with abysmal but passing marks.

And I still think about her all the time. Especially when I wind up in group projects for work, and it feels like no one else is shouldering any of the burden, I make a note to reach out and say “hey, you don’t seem to be engaging with this much, are you okay?”

And a lot of the time it shocks people. They’re not expecting earnest concern for their lack of interest, and you find out things like their kid is sick, their dog just died, they’ve got health issues going on, or sometimes they just don’t know where to begin with the project and didn’t want to tell you that because they were frightened of being judged or perceived as lazy when they’re just overwhelmed.