NoNukes writes:
Maybe if they start their own businesses they will be successful, but who promotes people who don't give a crap about their current job to manager?
Someone who knows what it's like to look to the horizon and see nothing but dead-end jobs with crappy pay and worse benefits, knowing that promotion to manager would mostly mean the loss of overtime pay.
Showing up on time is huge. Still, most good managers I've known will try to help find a solution. But most mid-level, actual work-supervising management in the U.S. is untrained, capricious and inflexible.
I watched a plant manager fire a man who was doing a wonderful job because he was late for the second time in his first two weeks--the manager had to fill-in for 15 minutes on the assembly line the first time mass transit issues made him late.
After the first offense, the worker found an outreach program for vets that helped with transportation; he was due to have a reliable car the day after he was fired. The manager knew this. The worker called before he was late and asked the manager to fill-in briefly because the bus had failed to show again.
After firing the guy, the manager told me that he hated to do it, but it was the principle of the thing.
Today on NPR I listened to a report on suits against employers due to discrimination against pregnant employees. One woman was fired by WalMart because she needed to keep a water bottle nearby; another was fired by FedEx, because her physician limited her lifting to 20 lbs. We don't change an employee's duties to accommodate outside incidents, she was told; FedEx had previously changed duty assignments to accommodate off-work injuries and drunk driving license suspensions. They claim their policies are pregnancy-blind.
My father-in-law told me a story of a young woman doing great web and ad design for a friend who owned a chain of furniture stores in Wyoming. He said she had replaced two people and did better work. One day he saw her browsing the web and told her she couldn't do that on work time; the second time he caught her, he fired her. My f-i-l told this story with an air of stern sorrow: the man had no choice. I said he hired someone who needed the constant cross-fertilization of media culture: he fired her for doing her job. We eventually agreed to disagree in that in-law way.
One day many years ago, I worked in a Chevy truck body stamping mill. Our entire section--half a dozen lines--was shut down. Police came; EMTs came; stretcher left. Later we learned a man had been called to the phone because his son was badly injured, and was hospital bound. The foreman told him he had to go back to work on the line until a sub was found. He shot the foreman and left.
Quite aside from larger issues of economic justice, the supervision under which most Americans work is frequently arbitrary and bizarre. Unsurprisingly, it's also often demeaning and disheartening. People trapped in these jobs sometimes do dispirited jobs. If we want to change how people work--both workers and managers--we have to make change possible.
Making management both more professional and more compassionate would be one step.
Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.
"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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