This was years ago at a job I don’t add to my resume.
I was the incident. I worked at a plastic bottle factory as a packer, and I had gotten this job through a friend. The 2 of us got along with the manager pretty well. Had common interests and about the same mindset about being employed there. A few positions opened up and he came to us and asked if we’d like to move up to one of them. I chose to move up to forklift operator, he chose machine operator. We both liked the jobs a lot more after that. Of course with a promotion comes a raise right?
The manager that had us promoted actually found a new job shortly after we had been trained and were starting to handle our jobs independently, he brought us into the office along with his replacement that he was currently training and told us that we were due raises and he had started the ball rolling on that. The new manager said he was informed of everything and would follow up on it to make sure we were taken care of.
3 months go by, our old manager is long gone, and we were still making the same pay. We approached the new manager about this. “I just need you to bear with me, I’m still working on that”
Ok fine whatever…3 more months go by and we don’t see a dime. 6 months we’ve been making less than we should be now. Hell people are being hired at a higher rate than we make at this point. We confront him again. “Bear with me” he says again. I beared with him until about noon that day. I parked my forklift. I got in my car and left. All afternoon I’m getting calls and texts from people. My buddy tells me “you have no idea how many people days you just fucked up”.
I gently reminded him that we were getting taken advantage of. That we’ve been working for a lower wage than new hires after getting a promotion for 6 months. I also spilled these beans to other coworkers texting me about what happened. It didn’t take long…my buddy left mid day, 2 other machine operators left mid day. A string of packers stopped showing up, all but one daytime forklift driver either quit or walked out. They lost 10 people of varying positions in a month.
I couldn’t help but grin when my buddy told me he was done and one of my coworkers told me how many people quit before they left. I felt like my walkout made a difference that time.
Most satisfying comment in the thread. A true “fuck around and find out” story
I am a union member so this isn’t a thing that happens. If management does something unacceptable, we do a strike authorization vote which, if passed by the membership, starts a clock ticking down to strike time and management knows that they are on notice and need to start negotiations.
All of which is just to say that unions are good for workers, regardless of what kind of bullshit you may have been led to believe.
I didn’t think judges were unionized! Good for y’all!
That strike authorisation is very interesting, I don’t even know if we have that here. Great idea!
They drastically altered the shift patterns from a relatively simple 2 day, 2 night, 4 off to a pretty complicated 5 on 3 off with 7 start times that you would cycle through each week. (5 straight 2100-0700 shifts suuuucked.) They also made us bid for team assignments. The real wtf moment was when they didn’t bother posting enough vacancies for everyone to bid on because of the anticipated attrition.
The told us that remote work was being ended and we needed to to return to the office. By that time people had built whole lives far from the office.
Yep. That was the organization exodus for my last job. Without any warning or planning, a state government agency, demanded everyone come back first week June 2021 when not a single other state office was even considering it. It was way out of left field and threatened to completely fuck up many people’s lives and there was a mass exodus. Staff left agency wide. I think it was somewhere around 300 employees of a several thousand. Which may not seem like that much, but when 300 people quit in one agency over the course of two weeks, it’s extremely noticable lol. The leadership at the top got berated publicly by the governor and they had to reverse course to stop people from leaving. But hey, I got a promotion, a huge raise, and got to demand my telework schedule because I instantly became more important hahaha.
The next exodus was my specific division. The deputy director we all liked and the media relations manager we all liked were fired out of nowhere by the same agency leadership that fucked up in the telework debacle. They placed their own drones in the two spots and it absolutely decimated morale. Not to mention the stool pigeons they selected are two of the most incompetent people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. I took a high-paying job with a federal contractor and bounced. Four people left in the few months following. They hired new people, two of which left within three months. I still talk to the social media manager who’s still there and she fills me in on all the bullshit they’re continuing with. Out of a public affairs division of 14 people, there’s only six still there that were there when I left last September.
A couple executive-types gathered the more senior developers for an “open” discussion about recruitment and retention. They suggest multiple ideas that would destroy morale (like non-compete clauses, poorly designed work-role pipelines, etc), and all of us suggest against them, and provided alternatives instead (like a shift in direction of certain efforts, more autonomy and less micromanaging, etc). They end up accusing us of not supporting our company’s mission and tell us that if we don’t agree then they don’t want us there and we should just quit. I think after that meeting, only 2 people stayed out of about 30, and hiring numbers have significantly declined.
Probably the impetus for the mass exodus at my old job was the “We’ll Miss You” Zoom call we had for a beloved senior developer. The company had recently added a new manager role that hadnt existed before and things were fine. The new guy started micromanaging like crazy. The SD who was leaving basically went off during the call about how the company didn’t need NG’s role and how it was burning people out.
I stuck around for another year-ish, and NG managed to make a group of about 20 developers dwindle to 5-ish. Saw the writing on the wall after getting shafted, changed jobs and am now making double that salary along with far less stress.
“We {company owners/founders} are excited to announce that {company} is partnering with {venture capital firm} to take {company to the next level}. {company owners/founders} will be moving to the board of directors and a new CEO is coming aboard. It’s a very exciting time for {company}.”
Received a few of those emails in my time… it’s always bad news and might as well get your resume together right then.
Many years ago - many jobs ago, we got a new CEO, and she wanted to make a big splash, so she started firing people. And this is a public, non-profit job, so most people were working in less than stellar conditions simply because they were passionate about public service.
I was two days away from putting in my 2 weeks’ notice because I had landed another job, but they fired me and gave me two months’ severage. So instead of having to work another 2 weeks, I didn’t have to go another day. I said “Sorry it didn’t work out.” and held my smile till I got out the door.
I was expecting most issues would be the result of senior management making stupid decisions, and was not disappointed. At our local office someone decided to randomly raise salaries. Instead of choosing the most talented people, it was like they did it on purpose to choose the ones that did the least. It broke not only the individual’s willingness to work, as it made a joke of the performance evaluation. It was bad: top performers and team leaders left, morale took a deep dive (because why make an effort if it doesn’t matter) and I am sure management still doesn’t see it was a stupid decision to pay more to keep useless developers and lose top talent. Brilliant.
I’m going through something like that now.
Why do they pay me for my 20+ years of experience, then ignore my recommendations based on that experience? It doesn’t make any sense!
Why do they have me doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with that experience? I spend half my time on a project I hate and have no interest in, and has nothing to do with my real job…which, by the way, wasn’t cut back to make room for this project. (Management calls it critical work, then asks for volunteers. If it’s that critical, why aren’t we assigning people to do it? I didn’t volunteer, I was told to do it. It’s insane.)
It’s really killing my motivation, as I post this during work hours… I’m actively looking and have applied for promotions in other areas just to get out of this.
