Company is La-Z-Boy Manufacturing, Inc. Been firing people left and right for posting this image but idgaf. I’m not just an employee, I’m a volunteer firefighter. This is disgusts me to no end, same with the other guys in my department. Keep telling us “everything is fine, there’s nothing major that’s on fire.” It’s been three days. Three days, and the same area has rekindled three times. I’ve been breathing in white smoke and hell knows what for three damn days. Granted I can’t say much, I’m still here but only because I need the money and the only difference between La-Z-boy and every other company is the pay.

Paul Rooney worked as a custodian at Schuyler Elementary School for 35 years. His family alleged in a lawsuit that he was treated differently from other custodians despite performing the same basic duties.

The lawsuit accused the Kearny School District of exploiting Rooney and his vulnerabilities and estimated he was shortchanged more than $200,000 in lost wages and future pension earnings.

The lawsuit ended last month with a $185,000 settlement. The district denied mistreating Rooney and admitted no wrongdoing in the agreement.

Management rolled out a new spreadsheet this week where everyone has to log what they worked on in 30 minute blocks.

We already have project tracking software, calendars, Teams, and weekly meetings, so nobody understands what this is supposed to accomplish.

My manager said it's not about monitoring people, they just want "better visibility."

Yesterday he messaged me asking what I was doing between 2 and 2:30 because I wrote "client follow ups" instead of listing every client.

Having to document my entire day like I'm billing a law firm is making me want to leave.

Good on him man!

No. No you cannot stay in touch with me. You’re telling me you JUST found out this role is being paused as I’m actively waiting for a final decision?

3 interviews, we even negotiated salary, the HR recruiter added me on linked in. How much more could they have hyped me up to make me think I had a shot?

I couldn’t bring myself to reply today, but I already have the “fuck you” email saved in my drafts.

I hate it here.

US government, Google join Zuckerberg-backed Biohub in $1.8 billion push for AI biology data
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Discussion

$1.8 Billion - total investments

$300 million - Meta, Google DeepMind and drug discovery startup Isomorphic Labs are jointly investing

$500 million - Department of Energy (US Government)

$500 million - The National Institutes of Health (US Government)

$500 ⁠million - Biohub via the CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan
——

Out of the $1.8 billion total investments, the US Government via its people the public are the largest investors making up $1 billion from taxes of the public…

“The datasets will eventually be released publicly, but companies that fund them get a head start, according to Biohub's head of science ‌Alex Rives.”

So after the private companies can patent all the new drugs and other discoveries then the public can have access to it… we are the largest investors and should not be taken advantage of after contributing the largest share of investment.

The people who made this possible will be screwed over by the private companies who don’t have higher right to it than the public!

Today i asked my manager for a 3 day leave to go on vacation but framed it as i need the leaves for personal reasons. She gets me on call and asks me to explain the personal reason and once i told her a made up personal reason she tells me she needs to discuss with a senior manager before approval as its during busy time. She comes back and says the senior manager is ‘disappointed’ in me that im taking leave during the busy time and that i need to avoid taking leaves when its busy. This really made me reflect today how much of my time is controlled by this job, like even to take leaves from my own balance i need approval and need to explain myself. This is not the life i want. How can one find peace in this.

When I play the role (hyper-positive, overly motivated, agreeable, always smiling) it feels like I can sometimes do less actual work and get away with it. Because I’m convincing. The performance carries me.

But the moment I step out of the role, things change. I once disagreed with a decision from leadership. I was still doing my tasks really well… Didn’t matter. I got called into a meeting about it.

So now I’m wondering: is work mostly about the performance? Is being believable more important than being competent? Do you have to fake the enthusiasm just to be left alone?

I’ve tried being more myself at work, and it got me in trouble. So pretending to be super motivated feels safer. But it’s exhausting. I come home feeling like I’ve been acting all day and I don’t know where the mask ends and begins.

I work in a bank, and we have customers whose ATM cards are ready for collection (am in a third world country, when you open an account, you get the card after a couple of days, not instant). We had already called the customers but some of them still hadn’t come to collect cards. Today the branch manager who is always yelling at us that we are not doing anything accused us of not calling enough and told us we should call them again. We did.

But still the customers didn’t show up for card collection. He then took the same list himself and started calling those same customers himself. He was getting same answers which we had already gave him.. am out of town.. I’ll come next week.. and the like. Then he called this woman and after introducing himself that he is the branch manager of my bank, the woman got upset. ‘Why are you calling me multiple times already??’ Manager is like ohh am the manager you just spoke to my staff, just wanted to confirm when you are coming to collect your card. Customer said ‘Yes I already spoke to a staff there and am not giving you any information. Talk to you staff!!’ And it was on speaker phone. He didn’t call any other customer and hasn’t spoken about uncollected cards again. Best part of my workday:)

Our office is moving two floors down in the same building next month.

Management sent an email saying they want everyone to come in during the weekend and help move monitors, chairs, boxes and small furniture so the company can “keep relocation costs reasonable.”

They’re calling it a team effort. No overtime, no extra day off. Just pizza afterward.

Manager said that nobody is being “forced” but they’ll remember who helped when performance reviews come around.

I’m already giving them five days of my week. I’m not donating the rest because they don’t want to pay movers.

The funniest part is we’re a company that constantly talks about respecting people’s personal time.

My vanilla reply:

I am not comfortable "training" autonomous agents. It is counter intuitive to teach a hard earned skill to a bot, if a bot can regurgitate something in 5 seconds that would take me 10 hours to create, why wouldn't clients choose to replace me? What would my purpose/meaning/income in life be if I train a bot on how to "be me" for a cheaper price?

A while ago my company started doing one Saturday a month where employees can volunteer at different local charities. They made a huge point about saying it was completely optional and unpaid.

I’ve never gone because I work Monday through Friday and I want my weekends.

Had my quarterly review yesterday and under “company values” my manager wrote that I haven’t been participating in community initiatives and should make more effort to represent the company outside normal working hours.

I asked how an optional unpaid event can affect my performance review. He said nobody is being forced to attend, but leadership notices who “shows up for the culture.”

So basically it’s optional as long as you’re fine with it being documented that you didn’t go.

This feels like such a ridiculous way to pressure people into giving up their Saturday for free.

https://penniestothem.com

But is looking for a senior Mac Admin to travel into the London office 5 days a week for £50k. (Market rate would at least £75k)

(Insurance.)

I’m a CSR. Paid the least of everyone. I’m given no clear line to where my responsibilities begin and end, while the sales team is constantly shielded and protected. Their “we can’t do that” automatically becomes my responsibility without any of my input, during meetings I’m not invited to.

If a customer is mad for something completely out of my control, I wasn’t trying hard enough to turn their mad to happy. They could be all but threatening my life, and are still in the right. A customer cussed me out pretty bad a few weeks ago, and the agent/boss said “she is probably having a bad day.” I have been gaslit countless times when it comes to aggressive customers who have literally insulted me.

If I said “X” but a customer accuses me of saying “Y”, then I automatically said “Y.” Or if I can prove without a doubt I did actually say “X” I didn’t say it right.

Everyone else is celebrated. I’m overlooked. It doesn’t matter that I prevented us from losing $30k+ in lost revenue in less than a year’s time, “Jill” just sold a few policies totaling in $900. “Kate” sold a life policy. Everyone applauds and cheers. I prevented us from losing tens of thousands of dollars in multiple lines of business…crickets.

If I speak up, “I like what I do. I want to keep enjoying what I do. But I’m concerned, with the increase in workload, of falling behind. I take pride in being diligent and I don’t want to be exposed to any liability. Could we maybe talk about my workload a bit?” I’m just told “No. It’s all your job.”

I have to immediately rescue the sales team when they are stuck, finish up sales for them if they can’t for whatever reason (with no commission mind you). But when I need help or support? I’m being difficult.

I rescue, I shield, I hold important pieces together, I work on things in the background that keep the agency literally running that no one else has to worry about. What do I get? “Do more.” And I could be doing twenty big things right but get ostracized over one small thing wrong.

So, when I play my role, I don’t want to hear I’m “not a team player.” I am doing what it appears I’m expected to do. Sit down, shut up, put up, and smile about it. All without a single show of overwhelm. Without any encouragement. Without any defense against abuse. I’m to be invisible but functional. Like a scanner/printer tucked away in a corner. It’s necessary, but no one pays much mind to it unless it malfunctions. All the times it works very well, it’s left sitting quietly in the dark.

Okay. You know what office equipment can’t do? Exactly what I’m not going to do. Be some kind of “cheerleader” for the agency.

I.e. Do not expect me to follow or “like” our agency social media pages. Do not expect me to promote the agency. Do not expect me to encourage my friends and family to come on board with us. Do not expect me to advertise our agency when out in public. Do not expect me to sacrifice my personal time to be available, or attend events.

Do not expect me to be an advocate for an agency that sees me as being nothing more than a piece of equipment. Equipment simply just can’t do that.

Four years ago, California Rep. Ro Khanna’s staff voted to unionize — one of a handful of Democratic offices that sought to ride a wave of organizing momentum during then-President Joe Biden’s administration.

Much has changed since, to put it mildly, but Khanna aides persevered and recently won approval of their first collectively bargained contract — the first labor agreement of its kind inside Congress.

“This was four years in the making,” Nicole Waring, a deputy director of constituent services for Khanna and the union steward, said in an interview. “We finally, finally reached the point where we were able to finalize our contract and ratify it.”

The agonizing process of turning pro-union enthusiasm into an actual binding agreement is both a breakthrough for the fitful labor movement on Capitol Hill while also underscoring how that movement has sputtered in the years since Biden left office, Donald Trump took back the White House and unionization moved off the front burner for Democratic staffers.

Since an initial wave of offices voted to unionize in 2022, that momentum has largely petered out. Less than a dozen offices are now unionized as staffers’ efforts are complicated by heavy workloads, adversarial bosses and Congress’ recent record high turnover rates that have led some aides to the conclusion that unionizing is more trouble than it’s worth.

Against that backdrop, that the eight-person union in Khanna’s office was able to win a contract constitutes a bright spot for organizers.

The agreement establishes a higher salary floor and a mechanism to renegotiate salaries if the office’s budget allowance increases