Lately, due to how the economy is going, the place where I work (huge, famous European company) is trying more and more to milk the employees, with the excuse of war, inflation and “nobody wants to work anymore”, although the profits are record high.
I have the lucky situation of having the highest level of education in the entire module at work, at 32 I am among the younger ones and luckily I have my own flat, car and savings. This gives me both a high degree of freedom and options to go to work elsewhere. Most other people I work with are in their 40s and 50s and in the past two years took loans for houses, or have for example expensive hobbies. These people are now under huge stress from management and work more than 10 hours per day, often 12, whereas 8 hours per day are paid for. Me, on the other hand, I do my 8 hours like a champ and go home. I firmly believe that, because they bragged about taking a 300-400k loan for a house, to pay in the next 30 years, the bosses overheard this and now know who they can push to their very limits.
In the last weeks I really start to notice a lot of hate and negative energy coming from the other colleagues in my direction. Also, they try real hard to push me to do unpaid overtime like they do. All of this is happening with the added detail that last year a 50 year old guy I shared an office with went home one day, after working for 7 days in a row and being shouted at daily, and dropped dead from hearth failure. Furthermore, since many accepted to be pushed into overtime mode, the amount of mistakes, failures, customer returns and so on has increased several times. Up to the point where the greed is causing us to be slowly becoming unprofitable.
I tried these days, when confronted for the nth time by older colleagues (for myself I call them “pushers”, although really I see them as simply stupid) to explain to them that their efficiency is tanking because of the overtime, that this is only happening because they are allowing it, that they are only shooting themselves in the foot and that it is their own fault they traded their sovereignty in for a mortgage. You can imagine, this only made things worse. Luckily, some of them now stopped talking to me completely, so I can work as usual without the bad vibes. Of course, on the side I am on the lookout for the next gig. The biggest trigger was that on this Monday one guy was pissed at me because I came to work in a good mood, telling me I should suffer more and be miserable.
Do you have such colleagues at work? How do you go about in your relationship with them? What is causing them to have such a low esteem to allow to be so exploited, to hate themselves so much and then to be so hateful against others who do not buy into the whole grind and fake it until you make it approach?