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Welcome to the D&D work and employment thread! Back in 2016, I started the "Retail Thread", which has been going for a while, because there are a lot of political and social issues related to how and where we shop. I think that we should have the same thing, for employment. This is a thread to discuss the way that we work. I do want to steer away from being a chat thread, and hopefully it will not become a "haha dumb customers thread". I specifically want to talk about the political and social customs of the workplace. Where do you work now, and where have you worked previously? Multinational corporation, medium sized business, small business? Are you self-employed? Do you work as a contractor? Do you work for a government body, and at what level? What about non-profits or religious groups? What about worker owned cooperatives, or some other type of non-hierarchical business or organization? Has anyone worked for a family business? Who is working under the table, or perhaps for a not totally legal enterprise? I have worked for many of those categories, and I think most people have worked in varying roles. But people's experiences are going to be different---I was a "government worker" when I worked as an adjacent instructor in a community college district, but that is very different from having a full time federal government job! How do you feel about the possibility of democratic, egalitarian or decentralized work environments? Have you ever had experience working in one, and how much do you think they should and could be applied? What is the relation between the purpose of an organization, and the work structure? For example, has anyone worked at a big multinational corporation that was personally pleasant for the employees, or worked at a non-profit that had major issues of worker mistreatment (I have seen both). Have you had experience with businesses overtly or covertly trying to break employment law, either in terms of wages, hours, or worker safety? How did you respond? Have you experienced bias or discrimination in worker hiring or promotion based on race, gender, family status, etc? How much have businesses you worked for taken sexual harassment seriously? What about workplace bullying? Also, of course: what country/geographic area are you in? Because obviously employment norms and laws vary a lot from country to country. These are just a few of the questions we can ask about the social and political side of being employed. Its a good discussion to have, because (almost) everyone has work experiences, but we will probably be surprised at how different our work experiences are. I am curious what your experiences are.
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Aug 25, 2018 23:57
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Ytlaya posted:I don't think there's really any reason not to have all businesses be required to be run in, at least, a representational democratic manner (i.e. employees can either elect or vote to remove managers). While it's not hard to come up with potential problems with this, I think they're greatly overshadowed by the plethora of problems with the current undemocratic way most workplaces are run. I worked in a non-profit that was a consensus-based cooperative. It worked pretty well when it was under about 12 employees. At a certain point, the consensus model became too unwieldy and the non-profit transferred to being a more conventionally run organization, with an executive director etcetera. I certainly think they should have thought more before ending the experiment. But I also have seen that a democratic structure didn't solve all workplace issues. There was still a lot of gender and racial discrimination even in a democratic workplace.
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Aug 26, 2018 00:43
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roomforthetuna posted:I've been employed at small companies, and a very large company, and also self-employed both as an independent contractor and as a direct "I own the IP, I get the money" producer. I think some of that might just be reversion to the mean. Like, with a small company, its dependent on the personality of one person. If that person is good, then you can have a wonderful experience, and it might even turn into a situation where they will go above and beyond for you, because it transcends being a business relationship. But if its bad...well, it can be really, really bad. In a larger company, it is likely to just be average, because one person's personality doesn't hold as much sway, and also you have a layer of bureaucracy telling managers what they can and can't do.
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Aug 26, 2018 03:04
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Tenure ("titularisation") as a civil servant is most commonly achieved through success at a competitive examination where thousands of candidates apply for dozens of job openings. I remember writing a post about that at some point but I’m unable to find it. Kind of off-topic, and also I might not be fully aware here, but for, me it seems like a lot of countries outside of the United States put a lot of emphasis on examinations. And that sometimes these examinations determine someone's life, and can only be taken once. Like, where I live now, in Chile, the people take their scholastic examinations at 17, and that pretty much determines where they go to university, and then what company will hire them, etcetera. They are surprised when they find out that in the United States, you can not finish high school, spend 10 years working a menial job, then go back, get a high school equivalency, and go to community college and get a bachelor's degree in your 30s. It is one of the better things about the United States system, people do get to do things differently. Or it was---when I was in community college in the 1990s, my tuition was 30 dollars a credit. Its now 100 dollars a credit...and that is at a community college. So its not as easy a path as it used to be. In general, interviewing for work in the United States, and getting hired, is a really subjective experience. I think that outside of very technical jobs, work experience counts a lot more than formal education. And even in jobs where it is about formal education, they still want a lot of soft skills, and the interview is going to focus more on how someone might fit into the workplace culture, than on what they strictly know. Other people might correct me on all of these points...maybe my US work experience is just specific to me!
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Aug 26, 2018 17:37
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Admiral Bosch posted:Colorado, manufacturing, CNC machinist, 22/hr. I kind of want to move to Canada and get a job as a bus driver now. It is a good deal, but I am assuming that is Canadian dollars, which means they are getting paid closer to 27 US dollars. I mean, it still seems like a pretty good deal, but with COLA and the like, maybe not quite as good as it seems at first.
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Aug 27, 2018 15:28
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Star Man posted:I'm going to be starting a job with a FedEx contractor that pays by the day instead of by the hour. It's how the scumbag gets away without paying overtime, but I still need this job because it pays better than anything else I can ever find in this shithole I live in in Wyoming. Pays by the day instead of the hour? I do wonder how they get away with that... If you are wondering whether your employer is doing something that perhaps they legally can't, this is a good resource: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.pdf Although its very long, and covers lots of very specific topics. Lots in there about maple syrup and cardboard box bailers.
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Aug 27, 2018 15:30
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I work as a technology coordinator for a bunch of rural and very rural school districts and towns and stuff. All the school districts underpay and cheat me but I give a lot of leeway because it's meaningful work. Like one school pays me 1000 dollars a year, but like, it's a 28 student one room two teacher schoolhouse so I'm happy to take the job like I'm a kid mowing a lawn. The aggregate of all of the schools pay me an okay amount, not great, but okay. How many hours do you have to work for that 1000 dollars? And is it mostly onsite or remote? This is where work conditions can make up for a lot of inadequacies in pay. Because if that is two hours a week, 52 weeks a year, you are making less than 10 dollars an hour. But if that is done in 30 minute chunks throughout the week, at home, wearing your pajamas and remotely reading log files on a computer or something, that is a pretty good job. If you actually have to get dressed and drive somewhere for those same hours, it becomes a worse deal. Which is why working for democratic, or at least more open work conditions, is just as important as working for better pay. Because I would rather be paid 12 dollars an hour and be happy, than be paid 15 dollars an hour and be constantly stressed.
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Aug 28, 2018 02:33
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:
So that works out to about 20 dollars an hour (4*12=48 hours a year), which I am guessing is below standard for whatever type of IT professional you are, but is not an unfair wage. And it also goes back to just how flexible you are. Can you choose what day that is? If that is a Sunday morning where you are bored, and you can just kind of cruise in and noodle around, seems like an okay job. In general, your work seems to be an example of the "gig economy", more or less. Would you classify it as such, and if so, do you like it?
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Aug 28, 2018 06:34
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My story, or at least the most interesting of my stories (I will write about being dial-up internet tech support later) In my 20s, my "first job" was working for a non-profit. It was an organization that recycled and rebuilt computers for the community, using open source software. It was originally volunteer and community run. I came in one day as a volunteer, and ended up working there for three years. (You might already know about this organization). When I started, there was three staff members, and by the time I left, there was 12. There was also a variety of paid interns there, through other programs. The full time staff was a collective, who made operational decisions by consensus, with the volunteers and community making "big picture" decisions at a monthly meeting. Especially for my first few years, it was full of chaotic energy: it really was egalitarian, people could come in and three weeks later be part of the informal decision making process, and also there was a feeling of being part of the community. But as it got bigger, it started having problems: they wanted to hire people part-time, which made sense, but also turned it into a two-tiered organization. There was a lot of factionalism developing. And while it served and interacted with the larger community, the people who ran the organization were usually demographically pretty similar: what we might call prototechbros, only Wobblies instead of Libertarians. Eventually, some time after it left, it switched to a more conventional non-profit model. It still does a lot of good work, but as an experiment in spontaneous community organizing and collective decision making, it has ran its course. Also, from the outside, lots of people looked at it as just crazy hippie shenanigans, but I found that consensus and non-hierarchical decision making made it more efficient, because there was no management to be insulated from the impact of their decisions. Everyone had a voice in what was practicable. It was agile, because suggestions from everyone could be incorporated quickly. Even though I see the problems with this type of employment model, I think it can work, and has benefits compared to conventional employment models. I think the two main things it needs is a way to be scaled better, and a bedrock of a culture of inclusion/respect, which are hard to get. I've also found it interesting that on at least one occasion, I've had discussions with people who were doctrinairely more leftist than me, who didn't believe that a workplace without "bosses" could be possible. It is still something that I take as a template for how we can work.
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Aug 28, 2018 06:59
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Ocrassus posted:In aviation, progression is mostly handled via seniority, which is just based on join date. You have checkups every 6 months to make sure you can fly safe, but otherwise there isn't really any performance metric for progression, with the exception of a command course that moves you from the right hand side (first officer) to the left (captain), which also usually resets your seniority. Flying, particularly international, is still relatively well compensated but certainly does not have the prestige it once did, the very expensive training is no longer sponsored and has to be paid for by the applicant, and the very generous perks (known in the industry as the Ts&Cs) have been whittled down significantly. What is the management structure like as a pilot? I imagine that it is confined to basically monthly meetings, or something, maybe obligatory trainings about safety/technical issues, etcetera. But, like pilots don't have offices where there bosses stop by and remind them to use the proper fonts on their TPS reports. I imagine it might almost be like being an independent contractor.
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Aug 28, 2018 18:13
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Solkanar512 posted:So anyone else here a "straddler"? That is, someone who grew up blue-collar and ended up in the white collar world with all the WASPy pretension that comes with it? I've been meaning to read Lubrano's "Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" (decent review here) but in the meantime I'd love to hear from others who've been through similar experiences. The concept of being "bicultural" is something I hadn't considered before, but it really hits home. So much, so much, but even beyond that, because I was raised in a below blue collar environment and then later found myself at least partially on the side of the upper class. Its a complicated story, but relevant. My grandparents on both sides were pretty middle-class, and both of my parents were raised in a pretty middle class environment. When they reached their teens/early twenties, they were hippies and "outsiders", although still pretty regularly employed. I was born when my parents were in their early 20s. The best way to describe it is that they were pretty middle-class in their outlook, but that they were "slumming" for a bit. This was in the early 1980s, when two people with high school educations could afford a ranch home. My parents got divorced when I was 5, and for some of my most formative years, I was the child of a single mother on food stamps/public assistance. I don't really know if the bad poverty lasted for long, but when you are 6 or 7, it leaves a big impression. So, like, my first way of looking at "blue collar" jobs were as a step above anything I could imagine. Like, one of the parents on our street worked as a road flagger. Another one worked as a bank teller, and made 900 dollars a month! (This was in the mid 80s, but that was still not a lot of money objectively). Like the idea that people made actual, four figures a month amounts of money seemed hard to believe. Being on food stamps, having our water cut off, waiting in line to get cheese, hoping my mom could find a daycare so she could work a minimum wage job...all of those are reasons that I have shown some disdain for "blue collar workers" and how sad they are, because those were the people looking down on me, or at least who I thought were. Anyway, at the same time as this was happening, my maternal grandmother was writing successful books, and was getting pretty rich and famous. I mean, as a kid, I thought she was rich because she had both a microwave and VCR, but by the time I was ending my elementary school years, she was actually getting rich. It was a weird dichotomy, one that I find hard to explain to a lot of people. Like, when I was 7, we didn't have money for the water bill, but my grandmother bought me the fanciest Transformer for my birthday. There are two big things that I find hard to explain about my life as a straddler. First, is that I didn't really, as a kid, connect academic success to financial success. In fact, the opposite. Reading books and going to the library was something that I did because my family didn't have enough money to do the more common things my classmates talked about doing. "Normal people" got jobs as bank tellers and construction workers and bought RVs or went to Disneyland, and being smart and academic was a sign that you were bad at society, not good at it. Second is something kind of specific to the Pacific Northwest: my town, like most towns in the Pacific Northwest, grew quickly after World War II, and was inhabited by people who had moved in from all over. None of my friends parents knew each other beyond casually. There wasn't a small town infrastructure of shared employment and recreation. It wasn't like a similar small town in Ohio, where everyone would work at "the plant" and then go to the Elks meeting or go bowling together. Even if my parents had stayed married and I had stayed in that small town, there wouldn't have been an opportunity where my father would say "Well, son, you are 16 and my friend Jim from the Elks club needs a new stockboy at his grocery store"... like, I have no idea of how a blue collar milieu of having guidance and easily understandable entry lanes into employment would work. This is one of the few things that I do feel sympathy for the mythic Midwestern Economic Anxiety Trump Voter for--- what would it be like to live in a world where your social life and community life naturally led into your economic life?
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Aug 28, 2018 22:50
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wateroverfire posted:I own my own business in Chile. Previously I've worked in the USA at a small family-owned retail shop, in finance at a couple of multinationals, at a tech startup (that didn't), and doing various other things. ¡Como tay, weon! I also live and work in Chile, and have for two and a half years. (Actualamente, vivo en Bellas Artes). I am assuming you are in Santiago? I work as an English teacher here, which is not a "standard" job at all, so I am outside of the normal employment system. It shifts a lot, and depending on the season, I might work only very odd hours. For example, tomorrow, I only "work" between 8:30 and 10:00 at night. It can be a fun adventure, and it can pay well, comparatively. Chilean workplace culture would probably be a big surprise for people in the United States, because stereotypes of Latin@s being fun, spontaneous and sexy don't really apply to the work culture here, which is very serious, bureaucratic, and long. The labor laws are in general much stricter, but in certain aspects (especially about discrimination) the US has stronger laws. As an English teacher, I've worked at dozens of companies in Chile, and its been a happy surprise. I've worked with lots of senior people, and I've been impressed with how conscientious and aware they are. I've worked with a few that weren't, but given the fact of Chile's classist history, most of the senior executives I have met are not that type of person. I mean, part of it is that the people who are learning English are by definition interested in change, like they know they have to learn more about the world, and they are not "The Old Chile", where you get a job because of who your uncle plays golf with. BHP, which on paper might seem like a bad company ("World's Largest Mining Company" doesn't sound very progressive) is one of the best companies I've ever worked with as far as diversity and awareness and sustainability go.
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Aug 29, 2018 19:50
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wateroverfire posted:Yeah, I'm in Santiago. The multi-nationals that are working in Chile are very different culturally from purely national firms, so you might notice a difference depending on which type you're working for. You also enjoy a very priviledged position, in a lot of ways, as an American man working in Chile that shields you from a lot of bullshit you would experience if you were a local or a woman (lol) or a local woman (roflmao). Chile is a pretty weird place to work. Yes, I am working legally, I am a permanent resident. I don't understand all the stuff with payments, but as far as I know, all the work I have been doing is legal.
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Aug 29, 2018 20:37
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Star Man posted:How to get a job in 2018: Please don't joke about suicide! And even more, please don't think about it seriously. Also, there is one job where it is easy to make a lot of money with a humanity's degree...the job I have currently!
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Aug 30, 2018 04:45
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Star Man posted:Man, I can't even get an interview at a community college in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming (ie: outside of Casper, Laramie, or Cheyenne) with qualifications that meet or exceed the requirements for a job that pays $29k a year. I can't even interview. I was in the same situation, only I was in Montana! ...have you considered ESL teaching overseas? Its basically a job that any American with a college degree can get, and you are automatically considered cool and knowledgeable! It obviously has a lot of costs, but it is fun.
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Aug 30, 2018 05:17
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One of the good things about this thread is that it gives people the ability to talk about their real experiences, and to talk in concrete terms. Instead of repeating the same talking points in circles about the theoretical relationship between labor, capital and consumers, we can talk about our actual experience, and what we actually look for in a business. My worst job ever came when I was volunteering at the library, and met a fellow volunteer who ran the local farmer's market. She said she needed someone to work one day a week, a few hours, to set up and take down the facilities of the farmer's market: basically I set out chairs and picnic tables, put bags in the garbage cans, etcetera. So, this basically sounds like the easiest job ever. Hang out with some hippies, eat free burritos, do some very light manual work. About half way through the summer, my boss started getting really mean, making personal comments, calling my lazy, telling me that I was careless for not checking the tire pressure in the little red wagon that we used to move the water jugs around. I asked around and found out she did this every year. I talked to one of the board members, who told me that my boss "had darkness in her heart". I went through the week feeling depressed and anxious because I was just worried about what random thing was going to be brought out against me next (including, one day, saying "Hello"). So for me, what matters to me first is my experiences, rather than the theoretical question of whether someone somewhere might be getting money that in a just world they shouldn't. I would have preferred being paid 25 cents an hour, having that money go into some "capitalists" bank account, if it meant I wasn't going through a week where my face felt like styrofoam because I was so depressed and felt so trapped. And this might just be an anecdote, but kind of what I am asking about is...how much of workplace culture, especially the lovely parts, are not because of the "economic system", but because people are, in fact, lovely? Because I've also seen bad work environments in government work, and in the non-profit sector.
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Aug 30, 2018 19:22
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PT6A posted:Ultimately there's always going to be poo poo parts of every job, even good jobs, and people you don't get along with. A good job run by competent people will minimize the impact of these things so it's just an annoyance instead of something the causes depression and hopelessness. ---an adult, who has actually had a job, rather than someone who has read wikipedia articles on economic theories.
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Aug 30, 2018 22:11
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ExplodingSims posted:
One thing that is somewhat ironic about university versus blue collar work, is that to me, university takes a lot less "preparation". The tools you need to study in a university are tools that are everywhere, and are often free or cheap. Like if you want to read literature or learn about history, even a small town public library probably has enough to get a curious young teen a big head start. You can be intellectual for cheap. With things like science and math and technology, you do kind of need some type of facilities, but you can still learn a lot of the principles behind things like electronics, even if you can't practice. So with those types of things, you can study and learn on your own. Contrast that with something like learning to drive a forklift...you can't just go to the local library and check out a forklift or a welding kit. Those type of things require connections and structured programs to learn about. As a teenager, I learned the principles of electronics from Isaac Asimov books (which cost me a dollar each at a thrift store), but I never got a chance to look at a circuit or get hands-on experience. I became academic not because I was middle class, but because of the opposite.
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Sep 3, 2018 19:30
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JustJeff88 posted:
This doesn't sound exactly like adjunct faculty (because you were working 60 hours instead of 6), but it sounds like the new academic experience. I was an adjunct instructor for two terms. As I describe it, being an adjunct instructor is a really good job...if you don't need a job. At one point, when I had very few classes, I was working 6 hours a week, and making 500 dollars a month. Making an extra 500 dollars a month for working two evenings a week is a pretty good deal. (And that is actually on the bottom end of the payscale for adjunct teaching.) But on the other hand, no one can live off of 500 dollars a month without another income. And, of course, every ten weeks, you had to find out whether you were unemployed for the next ten weeks. But more than that, its a sign of how the "gig economy" has spread to activities that were at one time considered to be very formal employment. And how much of a gap there is between millenials and boomers about things like this. Some years ago (I think after I had this job), I was talking about how hard it was to find a job in higher education. And someone (who I assumed was a boomer, but I don't know) chimed in to tell me that Portland Community College has classes at night and perhaps I could start there? Like, to a lot of people, there is the idea that a Master's Degree means permanent job, with benefits, but that in a tough time, you can always start "at the bottom rung", and work your way up. But their idea of "bottom rung" would be a job that would be a very big stretch for most people in the field (teaching adjunctly in a large community college system usually requires a Master's in ESL and at least 2 years experience and sometimes 5 years). So there is this disconnect where our ceiling is their floor! I think it is just taking a while for the message to percolate through popular culture, (especially because popular culture is going to glamorize life). Like take a show like Parks and Recreation: a character like Tom Haverford, who seems to be an office employee with no special talents, still has a permanent, middle-class job. So its kind of hard to go against that type of cultural inertia, where having "standard skills" is the bar for being middle class and easily employed.
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Sep 4, 2018 18:33
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Ytlaya posted:
What is interesting is that you manage to use neither empathy, nor logic, when reading my statement. Like, some people have a deficit of one or the other, but you seem to lack both. Let me rephrase what I was saying in small pieces: "If a job situation is psychologically difficult, I find it unpleasant regardless of the structure of the job". Just like "If apples have worms in them, I don't like to eat them" doesn't mean "Apples always have worms in them" or "Apples usually have worms in them", I wasn't saying that corporate jobs are necessarily psychologically better, just that if they are that is worth the fact that I am getting paid less. Or that some of my pay is going to a rent holder. The statement I used was actually in the Third Conditional: talking about two different hypothetical situations in the past. If I could magically choose between a job with a small employer where I was very unhappy, and a job with a corporation where I was less unhappy, I would choose the first. (Obviously there are other considerations, I wouldn't work doing something morally wrong). But since logic can be difficult, lets skip it and I just want to ask you directly: You have a choice of two jobs. In one, you are working for a non-profit. You don't get paid on time, your boss is angry and personally insults you, and sometimes even kicks holes in walls, you have a co-worker who drinks on the job but no one can do anything, you are exposed to safety and health hazards, and that is just the way it goes. In the other job, you are working for a totally boring multinational corporation, working in a cubicle, doing some sort of abstract internal process work (editing TPS reports, maybe), and while you don't get any personal satisfaction or meaning from it, your co-workers are nice, your office is comfortable, your and your boss is passably nice to you. So, between those two choices, which one do you choose? Yes, and I know obviously this is kind of a "trolley problem", because maybe you can find a non-profit that is also nice. Or even if you don't have to choose, would you have no reservations about your choice.
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Sep 4, 2018 19:05
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Darko posted:- I'm a VP for a large financial organization (which really means nothing as a title, it just determines income) that does User Experience and Training Development. I work remotely. That makes me around 150k a year. Well, if you aren't a pathological liar, congratulations!  Okay, kind of a random question, but I am imagining that being an extra is not something you do for the money...if you are making 150K a year, making an extra 100 bucks on the weekend, or whatever, doesn't seem to be very worthwhile...
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Sep 4, 2018 21:44
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Darko posted:
This is really interesting, and fits the discussion about being a "straddler". I want to hear more about what is is like to be a straddler, especially a black straddler. A lot of your story applies to me (including the GED and getting money after being poor), but that is as a white person---and as a white person, I kind of had the luxury of being "an outsider", I could just have a GED and read books and people would assume I was a nerdy outsider, not a criminal. A lot of times, black kids have to walk the line much more exactly.
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Sep 4, 2018 22:59
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BrandorKP posted:poo poo wrong thread. Well, its a good example of a very abusive work environment...
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Sep 6, 2018 18:16
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