Fixing morale, according to management.
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@remi said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
I don't know what's "good" about Good Friday, since it's supposed to be the day Jesus died... the "good" part is when he comes back on Easter!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday#Etymology
The etymology of the term "good" in the context of Good Friday is contested. Some sources claim "good" to simply mean pious or holy, while others contend that it is a corruption of "God Friday". The Oxford English Dictionary supports the first etymology, giving "of a day or season observed as holy by the church" as an archaic sense of good (good, adj. 8c), and providing examples of good tide meaning "Christmas" or "Shrove Tuesday", and Good Wednesday meaning the Wednesday in Holy Week.
In German-speaking countries, Good Friday is generally referred to as Karfreitag (Kar from Old High German kara‚ "bewail", "grieve"‚ "mourn", Freitag for "Friday"): Mourning Friday. The Kar prefix is an ancestor of the English word "care" in the sense of cares and woes; it meant mourning. The day is also known as Stiller Freitag ("Silent Friday") and Hoher Freitag ("High Friday, Holy Friday").
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@anotherusername Ah, I see. Makes sense. The name in French is "Holy Friday", btw.
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@accalia said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Indeed. Eight weeks is the do-not-want for me; I'm used to short-lived periods of crunch time, e.g. on my last contract there was one four-week period where my timesheets went 80-70-100-50.
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@Yamikuronue said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
an 8-week period in which the least they worked was 71 hours in a week.
I'd do that for the overtime moneys. 8 weeks with at least 33.5 hours of overtime a week paid at at least 1.5x hourly pay is (IMO) worth it.
Not much more than 8 weeks though.
Zero weeks if I didn't get paid overtime.
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@loopback0 said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
I'd do that for the overtime moneys
We don't get paid overtime.
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@Yamikuronue said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
We don't get paid overtime.
Then fuck that.
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@loopback0 said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@Yamikuronue said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
We don't get paid overtime.
Then fuck that.
Being an exempt employee (and not getting paid overtime) doesn't give you any leverage to argue that you should normally only have to work 40 hours, though...
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@anotherusername Eh? Of course it does. They pay you for 40 hours, they get 40 hours.
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@loopback0 you'd think so, but no. They aren't paying you for 40 hours -- that would make you an hourly, non-exempt employee. They're paying for the satisfactory completion of your job duties, as described in your employment agreement / contract / whatever... and if that requires 50+ hours per week, every week... well, you can always quit!
(fact that their payroll will say "40 hours" and give you an hourly rate notwithstanding... oh, and if they ever do try to give you only 38 hours pay because you only worked 38 hours, you can take them to court, claim they were actually paying you as a non-exempt employee, and force them to pay you for every penny's worth of unpaid overtime that you've ever worked. ... that said, there are some conditions where they can pay you less than your regular week's pay, even as an exempt employee.)
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@nullptr said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
"You guys have been doing great, you've increased the number of points closed per iteration from 8 to 14. That's awesome! Starting next week, it needs to be 24"
And else, what?
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@asdf said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
If there was a world championship for going on strike, France would certainly win it every year.
Unless UK train companies and the UK medical profession could enter as well...
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@Rhywden said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Over here, as soon as you can't pay your employees anymore (or when your company's debts are higher than your capital or when you can't make other mandatory payments) the CEO (or equivalent) has to declare insolvency.
We have similar laws here but it still happens.
@Rhywden said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
insolvency manager who tries to save the company
Here their duty is to pay creditors. If that means saving profitable parts of the company they may do that, but usually all they do is liquidate everything. The administrator is first in line for payment so their first job is to work out if they can even be paid from what's left. Next comes secured creditors. Employees are treated as secured creditors. Secured creditors get a fraction of what they're owed. Then unsecured creditors, who are usually fucked over.
@Rhywden said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
The C-level executives will be facing criminal charges, including up to 3 years of jail time.
This seems to be rarely prosecuted.
@Rhywden said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
The C-level executives will be facing civil suits which will make him pay a lot of money.
And this also seems rare. There are not many cirumstances in which executives or company owners are held personally civilly liable for their company's debts.
It's better than it used to be though, a few years ago a couple of fairly large companies went under owning millions in wages and leave and the executives just went with "too bad, so sad, I have a nice house and you do not (anymore)".
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@anotherusername said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@loopback0 said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@Yamikuronue said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
We don't get paid overtime.
Then fuck that.
Being an exempt employee (and not getting paid overtime) doesn't give you any leverage to argue that you should normally only have to work 40 hours, though...
Sure it does. You can walk out the door at 5 or 6 or anytime you feel like it, and they can't do anything except fire you. I did exactly this at my last company.
They started asking for weekend overtime, unpaid of course. They never said exactly how long it would be - in hindsight, the project was so poorly planned, they didn't even know themselves. I played ball for like 2-3 weekends, and then decided I'd had enough and would now be unavailable nights and weekends. I told them that and did it, and they didn't do a thing. I quit about when I had planned to, which turned out to be right after the project actually shipped.
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@UndergroundCode you "can", but it'll most certainly be detrimental to them continuing to pay you at all.
And your leverage is simply that you can threaten to quit or just slack off until they fire you for underperforming. That doesn't really have anything to do with whether you're an exempt employee.
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@another_sam said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
a couple of fairly large companies went under owning millions in wages and leave
How much is that per employee? If you've got thousands of employees paid monthly then suddenly you owe millions of wages if you're unable to pay just once, and going bankrupt owing multiple months of back wages does not seem uncommon.
Note I do not know if in AU employees are typically paid monthly (as is common in Europe) or weekly (as seems to be common in the US).
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@Khudzlin said:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
(4) It's one of the relatively few things I don't like about France.
Don't forget that, unlike in most countries, holidays that fall during a weekend are lost (instead of being postponed to the next working day). And we have a lot of fixed-date holidays (May 1st, May 8th, July 14th, August 15th, November 1st, November 11th, Christmas and New Year's day - which I count in the previous year, to avoid leap days and because it's exactly 1 week after Christmas), half of which (May 1st, May 8th, Christmas and New Year's day) fall on the same day of the week in a given year.
Indeed. In 2011, I got extra time off because so many fixed-date public holidays were on the weekend.
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@Steve_The_Cynic Lucky you.
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@PJH said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@asdf said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
If there was a world championship for going on strike, France would certainly win it every year.
Unless UK train companies and the UK medical profession could enter as well...Nah, train companies wouldn't stand a chance against French railways. Medical professions, though... maybe, they don't seem to go on strike that often in France.
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@anotherusername said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@UndergroundCode you "can", but it'll most certainly be detrimental to them continuing to pay you at all.
And your leverage is simply that you can threaten to quit or just slack off until they fire you for underperforming. That doesn't really have anything to do with whether you're an exempt employee.
what do you mean threaten to quit?
if my current employer turns into a raving asshole who has unrealistic expectations such that the only way i could meet them is to put in significantly more than the standard 40 hours a week with no end in sight, and i cannot reason with them to adjust expectations to be more reasonable then the only course of action left to me is to seek other employment. which i will do, immediately, and if i am offered retention bonuses I will turn them down because management was enough of an asshole to have unreasonable expectations and could not be reasoned with to adjust those expectations to a more reasonable level. I have no reason to believe that they would not revert to such behavior after the threat of my leaving is past.
I'm happy to work with management if they're being reasonable, and i'll even put in some extra hours if it makes sense and everyone is being reasonable about things. (in fact i'm averaging about 45 hours right now, but that's more because i adjusted my commute to avoid rush hour which means i save a significant amount of travel time but am at the office for about an hour extra each day) But if management decides to set unreasonable and unobtainable-without-severe-and-uncompensated-personal-sacrifice expectations then i'm not putting up with that shit.
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@anotherusername said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@UndergroundCode you "can", but it'll most certainly be detrimental to them continuing to pay you at all.
And your leverage is simply that you can threaten to quit or just slack off until they fire you for underperforming. That doesn't really have anything to do with whether you're an exempt employee.
I swear there was a strip about how employees will steal office supplies to make up for low pay but I can't find it now. Maybe it was just something he wrote in The Dilbert Principle though.
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@boomzilla said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
I swear there was a strip about how employees will steal office supplies to make up for low pay but I can't find it now.
Either of these?
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@PJH said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Either of these?
It might be in that book. The strip is close but not the one I was thinking of.
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Take Stuff From Work
Also, work where the stuff you want is at!
King Missile - The Cheesecake Truck – 01:10
— Nicko
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@remi Strikes are limited by law for those in public hostipals (a minimum service must be guaranteed), who are the ones with the most reasons to go on strike. Some other public servants (like cops, soldiers, prison staff, judges) cannot go on strike at all.
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@Khudzlin That minimum service law (well, some variation of it) also exists for transports, and it doesn't do much to prevent railways strikes, though. So the fact that other public corps don't go on strike as much comes from elsewhere (habit, mostly... I mean, the railways are used to go on strike whenever they fancy it, other services are slightly less prone to that).
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@remi I guess (because I don't know the details) it's stricter for medical professions, which makes sense, because lives are stake.
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@Khudzlin Yes, and also probably the mentality of the workers plays a role here. When doctors (or other medical professions) go on strike, they tend to be on some sort of "minimum service" strike where they still work but cancel a few non-essential appointments and hang some banners (no signs, that would be too dangerous!). Of course, this being less annoying than a "real" strike, it also tends to be less effective for them, but at least nobody dies...
(same goes for fire fighters, at least those that are not soldiers (i.e. all but Paris and Marseille, I think?) and thus are allowed to go on strike)
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@accalia said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
if management decides to set unreasonable and unobtainable-without-severe-and-uncompensated-personal-sacrifice expectations then i'm not putting up with that shit.
You might not. Some employees might. And at the end of the day, the question is whether you'll be able to get a job that pays similar or better wages without putting you through that shit. Depending on the job market, and how much you could afford to take a pay cut if it'd improve things, it might be your best bet to just stay and put up with it.
Whether or not 50-60 hours per week is "reasonable" really depends on the person, and on how much they want/need the job. Also on how much the employer wants/needs to you stay and continue performing it.
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@anotherusername Thing is though, maintaining that amount of work could prove detrimental to your health long-term, so you have to balance that in too.
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@RaceProUK a lot of employees (especially younger ones, I'd imagine) don't consider that, or weigh it as heavily as they should when considering the pros and cons of their potential/current employment.
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@Yamikuronue said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@loopback0 said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
I'd do that for the overtime moneys
We don't get paid overtime.
Me either. Absolutely zero compensation for overtime. Although, hey, we do get every other Friday off due to timesheet bullshittery and 9 hour work days.
Just told my boss that I'm not going to be able to do the issues pertaining to the project I was supposed to start on today because 3 critical issues have popped up on the last project that needs to be fixed.
Boss just told me, "Maybe we'll (read, 'you') will need to work this weekend"
Really hard not to tell him to fuck off.
Personally I think he should pull one of the three engineers off his 'pet project' that absolutely no one has expressed an interest in buying and has nothing to do with any product we've sold, ever. Instead assign them to one of the three running projects that have a ton of work and need to be done within the next two to three months.
Really tempted to cash out my 401k and bail, take a month or so vacation, move, and take a job doing something mindless for much less money.
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@anotherusername said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Whether or not 50-60 hours per week is "reasonable" really depends on the person,
from where I stand, the expectation of more than 40 hours per week every week when the standard compensation level is for 40 is by definition unreasonable.
if the level of compensation was negotiated with the expectation of 50 or 60 hours, then that's not unreasonable because the negotiated compensation matches the expectation.
My argument on the unreasonableness comes from when the negotiated compensation does not match the expected output of work. In situations where the employee underprovides work commensurate to the compensation that employee is an asshole and the business is well within their rights, if not expected, to terminate the employment. Why should it be any different if the situation is reversed and the employer is expecting more work then they are paying for?
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@accalia said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@anotherusername said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Whether or not 50-60 hours per week is "reasonable" really depends on the person,
from where I stand, the expectation of more than 40 hours per week every week when the standard compensation level is for 40 is by definition unreasonable.
if the level of compensation was negotiated with the expectation of 50 or 60 hours, then that's not unreasonable because the negotiated compensation matches the expectation.
Yeah, it would depend on whether, during the interview, they told you "yeah, you'll be an exempt salaried employee, but under normal conditions we'll only expect you to work 40 hours" or "you'll be salaried exempt, and we expect you to put in as many hours as necessary to complete the amount of work we need from you -- 50-60 per week will be typical."
And if they don't offer that information during the interview, you should probably ask for it.
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@remi said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
I don't know what's "good" about Good Friday, since it's supposed to be the day Jesus died... the "good" part is when he comes back on Easter!
The good part is that it's a day off !!!
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@Yamikuronue said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
We don't get paid overtime so we don't work overtime.
FTFM !
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@nullptr said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Boss just told me, "Maybe we'll (read, 'you') will need to work this weekend"
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@PleegWat said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
How much is that per employee?
My recollection is quite vague and I can't be bothered researching. :)
@PleegWat said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
If you've got thousands of employees paid monthly then suddenly you owe millions of wages if you're unable to pay just once, and going bankrupt owing multiple months of back wages does not seem uncommon.
I think it was leave entitlements that were the biggest. People usually realise there's a problem when the first paycheck is missed, but if you've banked a month or two of leave you don't get any warning when that evaporates.
@PleegWat said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Note I do not know if in AU employees are typically paid monthly (as is common in Europe) or weekly (as seems to be common in the US).
Neither! In my experience pay has always been fortnightly. I have one friend who is paid monthly. He's working for a US corporation. Sales commisions and such bonuses are sometimes monthly.
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@remi said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
(keep in mind that being the opposition, it's the left-wing parties at this time...).
That'd never happen in the USA. Republicans signed an index card that said they can't raise taxes. For some reason. I hope.
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@Khudzlin said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Ascension
About average for a GW2 wiki image. Might be NSFW depending on your workplace.
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@Khudzlin said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
(4) It's one of the relatively few things I don't like about France.
Don't forget that, unlike in most countries, holidays that fall during a weekend are lost
No, they aren't. If the first of either May or November falls on a Saturday, you're advised (if you live in France) to take the Friday immediately before off work so you can do the shopping you'd normally do on Saturday, because on the Saturday itself, the shops will be closed. Much the same can be said about Christmas Day as well, except that on 1 May in particular, almost everything stops, except emergency services, power stations, wastewater treatment, and other irrelevant things, while there are often restaurants open on Christmas Day (even if, like in 2016, it's on a Sunday).
Other fixed-date holidays are less ... punitive of the common man (well, except for shop staff, I guess), but 1 May, 1 Nov and 25 Dec are a little special. For the terminally curious:
- 1 May is "la Fête du Travail", the French equivalent of Labo(u)r Day.
- 1 Nov is "Toussaints", All Saints, a fairly holy day.
- 25 Dec is, well, um, I think we all know what that is.
It's interesting, to me at least, that although France is an officially secular country, the only religion whose holy days appear as public holidays is Christianity.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
It's interesting, to me at least, that although France is an officially secular country, the only religion whose holy days appear as public holidays is Christianity.
That was part of the discussion around removing one holiday (mentioned above). Especially since nowadays, most people are utterly ignorant of the religious significance of these days. Those that self-identify as Christians almost certainly will know for Christmas, very likely will also know for Easter (although I've heard some confusing the Friday and Sunday...), and may know about All Saints. Apart from that, I'm ready to bet that very, very few will know what Assumption/Ascension/Whit are about.
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@Steve_The_Cynic What I mean by "lost" is that we're not given another day off instead of it, as is common practice (and probably law) in most other countries (for instance, the UK and its former colonies). If you take that Friday off, it'll be counted against your allotment. So, for every holiday that falls during a weekend, you have to work one more day.
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@Khudzlin said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@Steve_The_Cynic What I mean by "lost" is that we're not given another day off instead of it, as is common practice (and probably law) in most other countries (for instance, the UK and its former colonies). If you take that Friday off, it'll be counted against your allotment. So, for every holiday that falls during a weekend, you have to work one more day.
Whence my previous comment about 2011, where so many jours fériés were on the weekend that I got an extraordinary ordinary day off to make up for it. My point is that for those workers who work on Saturdays (but aren't e.g. shop staff, power station operators, firemen, etc.) such as teachers in at least some schools(1), bank employees, etc., a Saturday jour férié is not lost.
(1) I live across the road from a lycée, and there are classes on Saturday mornings. I don't think it's universal for French schools, but it does still exist.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Whence my previous comment about 2011, where so many jours fériés were on the weekend that I got an extraordinary ordinary day off to make up for it.
Lucky you, I got absolutely nothing last year to compensate for all the public holidays falling on Sundays.
My point is that for those workers who work on Saturdays (but aren't e.g. shop staff, power station operators, firemen, etc.) such as teachers in at least some schools(1), bank employees, etc., a Saturday jour férié is not lost.
Presumably, they'd lose the ones that fall on their fixed rest days, unless their collective agreement says otherwise.
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@Khudzlin said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
Whence my previous comment about 2011, where so many jours fériés were on the weekend that I got an extraordinary ordinary day off to make up for it.
Lucky you, I got absolutely nothing last year to compensate for all the public holidays falling on Sundays.
It depends on the employer, yes. Mine does not give us any specific compensation days for years where public holidays fall on non-working days, but we have 3 additional holidays every year, decided in advance by the management (usually, it will be a Friday where the Thursday is a public holiday or some such, but in 2016 it included December 23rd since 25th was a Sunday).
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25 Dec == 31 Oct
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@ben_lubar said in Fixing morale, according to management.:
That'd never happen in the USA. Republicans signed an index card that said they can't raise taxes. For some reason. I hope.
YMBNTAP
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@Helix True.
I don't see what's so funny about base 8 though.