As i wrote this post i realized i wrote too much and my thoughts wandered a bit so this is a long post. I will add a tl;dr in the end.
I was always amazed by the work stories of US employees on this sub until i experienced one. I work for a company that has offices in most major city/financial hubs in the world. Offices that i have helped set up with my team(not all of them). Since 2018 i have travelled with my team in different large cities to help set up their systems and train new employees. Generally we would set up/train people for 2 months. Leave back to our home offices in Switzerland and return after a month or two to fix the smaller problems that remained for another month or two.
Now in this company i have two roles, i work my main job that i have automated/custom made for myself to such an extent i only need to check on/tinker with things for 2 hours a day from my work laptop whilst remote working, which is why i was able to get a dual role during the company's expansion abroad. Overall i am paid 320k CHF ( 311k euro and since a lot of americans are here that is about 350k USD) for my primary role.
Mind you i was really in a fortunate and privileged position to meet and get to know the son of the man who was about to start this company in 2013 when i entered university and started working there in an “unofficial” capacity to help out. Thankfully this wasn't america because then i would have been kicked out in the street after i finished working for free. But the owner was nice and after college gave me QUITE a large salary ( about 40% of the above which he justified by saying i had years of experience and on the job learning). As the company grew i got the secondary role to help expand the company and got my second salary. I don't just set up different branches but also support them and along with my team of 15 we support the branches until they are not only fully functional but independent.For this i make about 180k CHF ( 175k eur 195k usd). It is less and more work time but really it is a great position to travel, they put us in amazing airbnb's and hotels. My team is fantastic and we love spending time together. I really see myself staying in this company for a long time.
In 2019 a controlling portion of our company was sold as the owner wanted to retire for health reasons and leave the running of the company to someone else. Up until that point we had really nothing to do with the united states, we had an office in Toronto but that was it for the American continents. But this new company wanted to expand to either NY or Miami. After a bit of back and forth between the bosses it was decided on Miami and then switched to NY AFTER we had already started hiring people in Miami and gotten a lease. This was the first sign that something was wrong with the american management of things. See i had met with the corresponding heads of the European and Asian branches, and saw that this new company was really in tune with our company values and understood that we were very efficient in our work model.
Oh side note. We were really Shocked when setting up the Japanese offices in Tokyo how overoworked everyone was. We had heard but it was a bit dystopian in some places. As we were leaving we saw that there was already a growing movement similar to antiwork there that had for a long time sort of stayed silent but now was waking up. But it was truly truly a whole different world. But compared to the USA. DAMN.
Ok so we set up with this new american head and he decides to move from Miami to NY on a whim. I asked him directly and he said some nonsensical things that made no sense about better “synergy” in NY and a “different brain-work-life culture”. I thought he was an idiot. I now know he is an asshole. He is also the nephew of the largest share holder of the company that bought a piece of the company i work for. So that really cleared things up when we moved to NY. Which nobody in my team or back in the home office believed actually happened. We lost A LOT OF MONEY. He was so confident in getting these big offices in Miami and leased it for a few years. Mind you i am nobody's boss in these branches. I am assisting them setting up and supporting them throughout. Now in the past smarter heads have allowed me and my team to lead at first until they caught up with the rhythm and took over. But this dude was like a bull in a glass house, charging in head first.
So we move to NY. Ok. We get our offices and half the people we hired came with us, the other half we hired as we were setting up a whole new office. Again he chooses this GAUDY ugly ass building in midtown ( we were given a few options of buildings and offices and turns out midtown was just not a good idea) because turns out it was closer to his new apartment he purchased. Fine. Again not the boss. We start up the company and this guy is something else, he offers about a third of the salary to everyone we hire, in miami the salary was cut in half. Now in some roles we were supposed to pay 100-120 thousand us dollars per year and about 9 people from miami accepted 60 or less. In NY some people accepted 50-45 . One job that is CRUCIAL and is our head of IT normally pays 180k because it is a very vital role. Dude accepted 60k per year. I was shocked.
Not only that but i told my bosses that it was a HORRIBLE idea , and they agreed, because if you have people in the same exact position with different salaries then that is going to cause friction between them. And i knew that race was a big issue in the united states and whilst that wasn't an issue in countries like Switzerland or Japan or Singapore because there is a homogenous population. We didn't even have trouble in Canada because everyone was paid the same. But when i saw that each salary had a range that was negotiated AFTER the interview or DURING? It seemed to me like the salary was something the employee had to negotiate but with the added stress of this sword of damocles over their heads , because they were made to feel that if they asked too much they wouldn't get the job. Even though too much would have been 10-15 % under what we normally pay.
My bosses back home realized that they weren't opening up a branch for a few weeks, this was permanent so having these issues created now would be a massive issue later. They knew that we are saving a few bucks now to lose a lot more in the long run. But the people who now owned us were just happy to save up some money in the short term. But this new american head didn't like that i “went behind his back” and decided to in front of everyone at the new offices to yell at me. Now mind you there is no back of his i went behind. My job is back in Switzerland ,i work for them, report to them. I work WITH him. Now i tried to coax him back into his office to talk but halfway his incompetent one sided shrill/screaming match he was having with me i realized this wasn't about solving a problem but him acting out/ attacking me.
Now i am originally from Greece and we are known as shouters. Hell we are the rebellious shouting passionate people everyone around the world thinks we are. Our three national holidays are literally
- When we said no to the Italians who told us to surrender and then kicked their ass so hard that germany had to delay their invasion of Russia to come deal with us.
- Our revolution against the turks in 1821 when we finally fought our way to freedom. IN SKIRTS mind you.
- A student strike against a far right Greek Junta.
One of our national holidays is us literally rebelling against other Greeks
So as he is half shouting and his voice is breaking and telling me i work for him and i should never dare to “disobey him” . Like fuck you dude. So i yelled at him to get back in his office. I don't work for him. He isn't my boss and he can't tell me what to do, hell he can't even tell his own dog what to do.
( oh he brought his dog into the office one day and it took a massive shit in his office, on an antique desk his dad brought that was in their family for 100+ years) He later told me to switch offices and i told him no. Last i visited 2 weeks ago his office still kinda smells like shit because he can't change the desk. Although i think that is just his natural aroma.
After a few seconds of shrieking he got tired and i yelled at him to get back into his office and he conceded. Then he whispered if we can go back into my office because his still smells and we did. I hate yelling and it was the first time i have ever yelled at a job or another person outside of Greece.
OH GOD this post is long and i don't edit. Ok ok. So long story short this guy is an asshole. He whined and tried to get me fired. He couldn't . He was told by my bosses that i work with him or he works for me until the branch is set up. He again against my wishes got a MASSIVE lease on this shitty midtown office 4 months before Corona.
Now we have to work remotely and out of all the branches he has been the whiniest and most needy and intrusive and abusive to his employees. He kept trying to get them back to work and raging against vaccines on company fucking emails. Just a nuisance overall. Now whilst in Miami when we were hiring people i met a woman who later moved to NY. Now i don't date coworkers because
A) i move a lot
and
B) it is problematic.
But she somehow managed to get herself as a representative for her team and whatever issues there were she would demand we get one on one meetings because emails are just impersonal and don't solve anything. Her department had about 10 times the “issues” any other department had that we needed to fix. Sometimes it was that they didn't like the mouses they had and wanted a different brand. Which is an issue that obviously needed a face to face meeting after work where she had already ordered chinese food. Anyways after Corona hit we started dating, gave notice to the home office and she was no longer a representative for any issues for her team and since we had no other contact at work besides that it wasn't a problem. Of course her boss send her a 3 am private message on whatsapp ” Oh i didn't know you dated guys at the office, i wish i would have known.” He , of course, is a cliche and thus married. Now for the whole of 2020 i stayed in NY and thankfully to the incompetence of the American head we were never able to properly set up until DECEMBER of 2021. We started mid July of 2019. Normally a branch takes a total of six months to set up and even during that time we have managed in the past to set up 2 branches simultaneously. But this dude took 2 and a half years.
Now in 2021 when restrictions eased she took a lot of PTO and we went to visit Zurich and Thessaloniki and any other places we could manage. On the way back the company got a coronavirus outbreak and we had to close up about a few days after opening up again. I can't say that it was the American who did it and i can't prove it. But i know he did. Deep in my heart. Since she wasn't going back to the office for at least 10 days we travelled a bit more and she even managed to see the Tokyo office. Which after working with USA looked like a paradise of freedoms and equality comparatively. After she saw how every other country operates she send an application to work in Zurich where i was moving in semi permanently with about a 250% raise, which sounds impressive but it is just how low her salary was in USA.
Her boss went insane but really had no recourse. Now as we suspected the differing salaries and overall low salaries got the American branch hit by the “great resignation” and they lost about 20-45% of their work force. Not once. Not twice. BUT THREE TIMES IN ONE YEAR. It was like an amazon fulfilment center. Now there are discussions of closing the branch. It is insane how short sighted and insane and greedy and outright STUPID American capitalists are. We are capitalists here in Europe, we just know that if you want a company to exist for 100 years you get a slow and steady net income that rises over the years. Our company has recently thanks to the pandemic boost reached about a 9 billion CHF evaluation. Which is great but it doesn't happen overnight.
tl:dr : Oh boy. Sorry for the long post. But after setting up branches in Japan-Canada-Singapore etc i was asked to set up an American one. The rampant abuse, temper tantrums of the new head of the branch and the uneven salaries and benefits and just overall exploitative culture has led this branch to be the first EVER coming close to closing. And he tried to blame me for all of it but wasn't smart enough to realize that work emails are saved by YOUR WORK. So far he has had 3 office change ups where 20-45% of the entire office left in one fell swoop. One time 25% of the office left in ONE day. Sick of his shit.