Employment is a form of exploitation. You are paid less than the value of the work you perform (except for footballers) with the difference going to the employer. Most people understand this basic economic principle and can live with it as long as the degree of exploitation is not egregious.
Enter Corporate America and probably Corporate Britain too.
My employer’s market is “under pressure” and they’re not doing as well as they would like. They say their employee costs are too high and they need to downsize the work force to the tune of many, many thousands spaced out over a year or more. As unfortunate as it is for those impacted, those of us still on the payroll are also affected. Losing colleagues means we have to pick up additional workload, take on increased responsibility and generally work longer and harder to make up for the fact there are fewer people doing work which still needs to be done. Your annual review comes along and guess what? No or very low pay increases because of market conditions, the economy, exchanges rates, volatility, blah blah blah.
Hang on a minute! They said their employee costs were too high and to address that they were letting thousands of employees go. So how come the employees left behind are also being financially discriminated against, despite their workloads increasing? Sounds like a classic case of wanting your cake and eating it.
It gets worse.
Performance related bonus time! Yeah, that’s not happening either. Bonus payouts decimated for the same reason. Hang on a minute. The value of the work you do does not correlate to the performance of the company. If it did then the argument would go something like this for the SAME job performance:
(Company doing well)
Your performance this year has been outstanding and you’ve really helped the company grow, capture new market share and significantly added to the operating efficiency. Big bonus awarded.
(Company not doing so well)
Your performance hasn’t really helped the company this year, we’ve seen little in the way of market gains and overall the economic outlook is poor. No bonus awarded.
These two scenarios are obviously nonsense given the SAME job performance in both cases. So despite your own job performance being recognised as “excellent” and “outstanding”, you don’t get the bonus you worked for and deserve because the company is choosing to base the payout on its own performance. Something which you have no direct control over. So the company has grossly misled you and seems to think there’s nothing wrong with that.
It gets worse.
You’re instructed to look for and execute cost savings and cost avoidances to help reduce the company’s costs and improve the bottom line. Many people pitch in and are so successful, literally millions of dollars are saved or are not needed to be spent. Hurrah! Top tier management then has an “all hands” meeting where they show the savings figures to the whole company on a PowerPoint side. They’re naturally delighted, thank everyone for their hard work and deliver the message to keep going.
Hang on a minute. The same company that terminated several of your friends and colleagues, screwed you out of a decent pay rise, didn’t pay out your absolutely deserved performance related bonus now wants you to help them save even more millions in return for a ‘thanks and keep it up’ message? Fucking seriously?
Three points:
1) A “thank you” from the CEO doesn’t help pay my mortgage.
2) The company reneged on the payment of performance related bonuses. I kept my side of the bargain. They didn’t keep theirs. Trust broken forever.
3) I have zero motivation to help the cunts save more money that they’re choosing not to share with the people who helped them save it.
So in essence, fuck off. Bare minimum effort from now on. Take on extra work? Nope. Assume greater responsibility? Nope. Stay late and work a weekend or two? Eat shit and die. Their exploitation has now reached egregious levels.
Time to find a new job. Cunts.
Nominated by : Imitation Yank