Month: March 2022

This is long, but I’m at a kid’s volleyball tournament and I have a lot of time. For the last six years, I’ve worked for a very large, worldwide, multi-divisional chemical company in their sales division. About 95% of my day is spent servicing our dispensing equipment and dishwashers at customer sites (if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant or hotel, you’re probably familiar with the company). From 2016-2020, I was mainly focused on sales (minor service) and mostly paid on commission. In 2018 and 2019, I made about $80k each year – despite losing corporate customers worth 50k in 2019 (decision made at the corporate level – all my customers under those umbrellas loved me). About 15% of my budget. I was able to find those extra sales to break even. Pandemic hits, and they give us pay protection for the first six months or so. Income definitely fell,…

I worked for an American multi-national for almost a decade and decided to leave. As it approached closer to my last day I asked for a reference and was promptly told by HR that it was against company policy to provide references I said “You're fucking joking? How am I meant to get a job?” Best they can do is provide a statement of employment. So now all my references are over 5 years old and I'm trying to contact former clients and former colleagues who have also left to see if they would give me a reference. I asked why this is policy and I was told if they provided a reference it could open the company to litigation if I fuck up with my next employer. Riiiight.

My friend works at a university, staff not a teacher. They got an email saying everyone was getting a $1000 bonus, which you know is taxable. At the end of the email, the chancellor said I'm donating mine to the scholarship program and I encourage anyone else with the means to donate some or all of it. She does not have the means and I'm betting a lot of other people don't either. She thought since they see donations that it would look bad if she didn't. I say screw them, if they wanted donations they should've just taken the money and donated it in the name of the staff, which also is a complete write off.

You are not a capitalist. You are a worker. Without you working, this system will remorselessly starve & kill you. Nobody will even notice, they will step right over you as you plead from your cardboard sign. If you pay bills with money from a paycheck, no matter what you drive or wear or fuck: you are a worker. You might be an extremely well-compensated worker who is able to obtain a premium for selling literal fragments of your finite existence, but you are still a worker. Do you enjoy having no control over your daily life while some bastard far away extracts & hordes nearly all the wealth you produce just to cruise on a yacht? Do something about it. Tell the others. MAKE A PLAN.

I worked at a big box retailer in a college town on their late afternoon/evening crew. Part of our duties was unloading the nightly delivery trucks. We were all scheduled 40 hrs, but sometimes the trucks would take a little longer to unload. So, if we were due out at a certain time, but the trucks weren't fully unloaded, we stayed until they were. If we hit OT, we were paid for it, so it wasn't really an issue… Until it was. We got a new kid on the crew (let's call him Scott). Scott was nice and a decent worker, but he didn't work a full 40 hr schedule because he was a student. When Scott's shift was over, he was gone. Didn't matter if the truck was done or not. It didn't bother us because we had enough guys on the team to cover, Scott was nice, worked…