Smalll Businesses

"Why wouldn't you want everyone to get unlimited free cake everyday!? Its delicious cake. And its free. To everyone! How could you not want that?"

"No, I mean, its not possible. How would go about implementing it?"

I just tried to think of something that seems practically impossible but sounds really good to the person offering it. And I'm a little hungry. It was none of that. I didn't mean to say that your offer was anything actually like unlimited free cake, other than its something that probably cannot happen, but you still really like the sound of it.

Not really. You are the who expressed a longing for farm work, which I take to mean just being in business for yourself. Actually, I don't believe I've never found myself in that situation. I seem to recall some 19th century legislation that made stuff like that illegal.I don't know what your situation is. Perhaps you find yourself in bad bargains for wages. And I agree that such a thing is a problem for many people. But you objected to my examples involving something approaching a reasonable wage.

I once worked with a woman who was habitually late for work - but when she got there she did more work than the managers who reprimanded her for being late.

Yeah, I've seen operators that were just awesome, absolutely great at their job, but could not show up on time.Unfortunately, our products are produced on a schedule, and we need the operations to be happening when they are scheduled to or it makes everything after them later and later. So, we cannot tolerate showing up late.There's been multiple people fired for being late that I advocated for keeping because they were so good at their job. But the operations department said they cannot make unfair exceptions for individuals and the rules are the rules.

Oni

How often do you show up for a gig after you were supposed to be on stage?

CS writes: ooo, but it is so nice to get there and find they're all waiting in their seats for you.

When I work the bigger venues I'm never late. But it's all because they go through all the necessary wake up calls, and driving us or picking us up, or knocking on the door at the hotel with plenty of time before the show. They know we are drunks, lazies, and potheads.But in the city (NY) it is different. We all do gigs all night so when you are going to be late, and every night people are late because of trains or you booked a gig too close to each other time wise, we call one another and cover for each other. The workers protect themselves.- OniEdited by onifre, : No reason given.

I think that's how it should be. If I could cover for someone I would do it. At least until I determined that I was being used by the same person continually.At most jobs I've been on, workers try to cover for each other as much as possible. Most of the time, I have been on flex time which means that being late is next to impossible unless you have some kind of life problem.But some people still managed to get fired for being late.

That may be true in your one specific situation but you said in Message 42:

quote:

---

I have no faith in them being able to run the company.

---

You might find that if the workers were the managers they'd have a better understanding of the importance of timeliness.

Maybe if they start their own businesses they will be successful, but who promotes people who don't give a crap about their current job to manager?

Someone who knows what it's like to look to the horizon and see nothing but dead-end jobs with crappy pay and worse benefits, knowing that promotion to manager would mostly mean the loss of overtime pay.Showing up on time is huge. Still, most good managers I've known will try to help find a solution. But most mid-level, actual work-supervising management in the U.S. is untrained, capricious and inflexible.I watched a plant manager fire a man who was doing a wonderful job because he was late for the second time in his first two weeks--the manager had to fill-in for 15 minutes on the assembly line the first time mass transit issues made him late.After the first offense, the worker found an outreach program for vets that helped with transportation; he was due to have a reliable car the day after he was fired. The manager knew this. The worker called before he was late and asked the manager to fill-in briefly because the bus had failed to show again.After firing the guy, the manager told me that he hated to do it, but it was the principle of the thing.Today on NPR I listened to a report on suits against employers due to discrimination against pregnant employees. One woman was fired by WalMart because she needed to keep a water bottle nearby; another was fired by FedEx, because her physician limited her lifting to 20 lbs. We don't change an employee's duties to accommodate outside incidents, she was told; FedEx had previously changed duty assignments to accommodate off-work injuries and drunk driving license suspensions. They claim their policies are pregnancy-blind.My father-in-law told me a story of a young woman doing great web and ad design for a friend who owned a chain of furniture stores in Wyoming. He said she had replaced two people and did better work. One day he saw her browsing the web and told her she couldn't do that on work time; the second time he caught her, he fired her. My f-i-l told this story with an air of stern sorrow: the man had no choice. I said he hired someone who needed the constant cross-fertilization of media culture: he fired her for doing her job. We eventually agreed to disagree in that in-law way.One day many years ago, I worked in a Chevy truck body stamping mill. Our entire section--half a dozen lines--was shut down. Police came; EMTs came; stretcher left. Later we learned a man had been called to the phone because his son was badly injured, and was hospital bound. The foreman told him he had to go back to work on the line until a sub was found. He shot the foreman and left.Quite aside from larger issues of economic justice, the supervision under which most Americans work is frequently arbitrary and bizarre. Unsurprisingly, it's also often demeaning and disheartening. People trapped in these jobs sometimes do dispirited jobs. If we want to change how people work--both workers and managers--we have to make change possible.Making management both more professional and more compassionate would be one step.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

Perhaps the problem is not just pay, but respect as fellow human beings and treatment that doesn't border on slavery where one side makes all the rules.My experience shows that flex time is more productive and the workers are happier.

But all that requires empathy. Empathy is hard and calling people lazy convinces me I have worth and am better than those "other people".