Curious about fellow European antiwork stories.
I know we have it slightly better on this side of the ocean but I feel like a lot of US office culture gets imported to Europe (especially by u.s. based multinationals) including the (sometimes very illegal) bullshit rules and mandates they think up over there.
I'll kick off a story from about a year ago.
I work for a software company, usually It's fairly good there. Nice benefits. Good colleagues. No ego-tripping managers (usually). I have a very specialised role in the company and only 1 other colleague of mine did that in a company of about 1900 employees. We were both in a medior position at the time and together we were absolutely unstoppable. When we had some intense inflation in Europe. We were both struggling financially and asked for a riase on par with the inflation number.
Right after this my colleague (lets call him John, not real name ofc.) gets a new manager. John's new manager feels like John isn't doing to much since he's only at the office when he needs to be at the office. The work that's being done in the office is very visable work but requires a lot of afterwork. Work that is perfectly suited for a home office environment due to the lack of interuptions. So usually we work with a '1 day office, 2 days at home' sort of rotation.
Now after a while John's new manager was able to force him out. Still don't know how because John is very quiet about it and i don't really work with, or talk to his new manager. It was very abrupt as well. One momemt we're both confident about getting our raise and the next day i get a call from him that he's leaving and btw it's also his last day (still had a bunch of paid leave days he had to take). So we have a handover of files and current projects.
So now i'm in shit. The only colleague that does what i do as well just left the company and now I'm all by myself. So I go to my manager and tell her that since John left the company we should get someone new ASAP otherwise our running projects and future planning will turn into a complete chaos. So she says okay, we're going to take a look at it. For now you get X amount of extra budget to spend with our external partners to catch the work load. So i tell her that's fine but that is not a long term solution and since i'll have to brief our external partners it will still put extra work on my plate.
A few months go by… project structure and planning slowly start to fall apart. Me overworked and always irritated due to the stress. Can't take a day off, can't even be sick (no seriously i was ill for 3 days and had to work all 3 of them due to constant phone calls and fuckups) STILL no promotion/raise… and at one point (after scrolling some antiwork reddit) I've had it. I start having to say no to projects. Internal deadlines are no longer met. Revenue targets being missed. And then at one point there's a meeting to discuss where things are going wrong. And I lose it. Wasn't my finest moment but some truth bombs had to be dropped.
So i tell them that everything went fine when John was still here and we NEED another person to fill his position. Then it comes out John's new manager was never planning on replacing him. So I tell them that if my raise doesn't come through and John isn't replaced i'll be handing in my resignation.
Apparently that scared some higher ups because they suddenly realised the company can't function without our work being done which would result in a heavy loss for the company. Then things started to moved quickly. I got promoted to senior with the neccesairy cost of living adjustment included (about 13K euro's a year raise). John's manager got fired for making a bad call and refusing to replace John, costing the company more money than they saved. And on top of that I get to hire John's replacement and an extra FTE (so there will be 3 of us) to start building my own team 🙂
Still feel bad for the way John left but I'm happy I get to stay with the company and the bad manager left.
Now. Where my fellow european antiworkers at? Tell me your story