The rotten manager at a poorly run barns and ignoble was absolutely furious that my grieving mother (she’d just lost her husband) had booked a Jamaican vacation for us w/o allowing me to provide three weeks’ notice. I profusely apologized, explained mom had not consulted me, and that she was suicidal. None of that made any difference to her, including the suicidal part. I mean, what choice would any sane person make?
“Sorry, mom, you have to cancel my ticket and go by yourself, b/c I need to be here for my 60-hour/week but still listed as part-time so I get no insurance minimum wage job, where I am daily treated like shit both by management and customers. Sorry!”
Like fuck.
The manager deliberately scheduled me for the last day I was on The Island, and I’d arranged to have all my other shifts covered by fellow employees, but no one else could make it that day.
I simply never went back, which saved the manager from getting all upset again while firing me to my face. A coworker brought me my last two paychecks.
I feel seen by this. A neighbour introduced himself the other day and declared my life “so sad” right to my face because I’m of a certain age, single, and childless all by choice (except the age part, I guess). I love my life and the options it gives me. He genuinely thought he was being sympathetic because I simply must be unhappy with those choices, or they can’t possibly be choices because why would anyone not want kids or a spouse?
If you can’t appreciate the breadth of human possibilities and that we all have different motivations and desires, then you’re not acknowledging that other people have an existence independent of your own.
Let’s all remember we have assholes like this to thank.
With the triumph of scientific management, unions would have nothing left to do, and they would have been cleansed of their most evil feature: the restriction of output. To underscore this idea, Taylor fashioned the myth that ‘there has never been a strike of men working under scientific management’, trying to give it credibility by constant repetition. In similar fashion he incessantly linked his proposals to shorter hours of work, without bothering to produce evidence of “Taylorized” firms that reduced working hours, and he revised his famous tale of Schmidt carrying pig iron at Bethlehem Steel at least three times, obscuring some aspects of his study and stressing others, so that each successive version made Schmidt’s exertions more impressive, more voluntary and more rewarding to him than the last. Unlike [Harrington] Emerson, Taylor was not a charlatan, but his ideological message required the suppression of all evidence of worker’s dissent, of coercion, or of any human motives or aspirations other than those his vision of progress could encompass.
Sounds like nearly all of them to me. I slept in the company breakroom for a few hours a night and gone back to work… Come home at 3am when the traffic lights switched to overnight flash mode… Had pizza delivered at work for dinner. Gawd I’m so glad I retired
Christ, what an asshole!
I’m also child free by choice, but find it so rude when people ask about that, because for all they know, maybe I tried for years to have a kid and it didn’t work. Or maybe I suffered a series of miscarriages and was devastated. It’s just so personal, but random strangers seem to feel entitled to have opinions about it.
I don’t get it too much anymore because I’m not meeting random strangers as often. But some work colleagues were talking about a woman nearing retirement age recently and said in that sad/sympathetic voice, “She never did marry or have children. [sigh].” Like, this woman had traveled the whole world and scuba dived all over the place well into her 60s. She’s still having a great time.
That’s the rub… if you don’t have kids, people are going to criticize you, if you DO have kids, people are going to criticize you. It’s literally a no win situation. Disheartening, especially when it comes from other women. And of course, no one ever criticizes men for having children or not having children.
Whatever choice other women made about that, good for them. You had kids, you didn’t… great. I’m here to support that choice, either way.
Ugh, for sure. And at least not having kids, it’s a kind of “one and done” criticism. I’m sure when you have kids, there’s the initial criticism, then all kinds of on-going about how you’re doing it wrong. Thank you for helping keep the world populated by contributing what I can only assume must be a thoughtful, interesting human.
Fake texts or not, the current environment makes it very clear that a lot of businesses have gotten used to cheap, exploitable labor. A workforce perpetually on the edge of missing rent or losing health insurance is one that will accept steadily worsening conditions in the name of steadily increasing profits for owners/shareholders.
What is very telling is to hear the owners, managers and conservative politicians say that the REAL problem is that workers today aren’t desperate enough. That cutting unemployment, ending rent moratoriums and restarting school loan repayments should fix workers’ “attitude problems” and force them to start accepting the shittiest jobs again.
Families are a luxury to millennials and zoomers. We can’t afford to have children.
It is interesting how this is coming back to kick the bosses up the arse though. Bad wages = no family commitments = workers telling their bosses to fuck off.
It’s probably too late now, but 60 weeks and still listed as part time with no benefits? that’s federal labor law violation territory.
PLEASE tell me you got overtime for the 20 hours past 40, because that’s an even bigger violation. Companies have been sued into non-existence from pulling shit like that.
Some of us in the U.S. got to enjoy the tail end of the post-war economic anomaly, but most of us were also just the right age to realise what a crock the promises of Reagan and Thatcher were. As a Gen-Xer I’ve always made a point of informing the young people in my life about all the myriad traps that late-stage capitalism lays for them and how best to avoid and resist them.
Anecdotally, about half the people I know in their 20s have stated that they have no intention of having kids and about a third saying they won’t get married. To further clarify, these tend to be privileged kids with post-secondary-plus educations and high-paying jobs in growth fields who might afford both but just don’t see the benefits relative to the costs.
I can only assume that they are deep cover communist accelerationists, creating the conditions for the revolution.
That or they are so ignorant that they have failed to notice the growth of socialism in millennials, especially the decentralist varieties that were suppressed by Marxist-Leninists.
I knew folks in high school who worked part time at Wal-Mart. Their managers did not think twice about scheduling them during the school day. They all quit eventually
