At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
Jesus, some people just have no awareness whatsoever.
It’s almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it’s kind of always been a thing for them to “encourage” resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It’s what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.
I’ve seen the induced attrition, but with control. So let’s say the company on a ‘healthy’ year gives out a 14% bonus to everyone (and the salary is calibrated with the expectation of that large bonus). So they decide they want attrition, sorry, they can’t afford the bonus that year, everyone just has to learn to do without. Ok, disastrous, except they also identify some key folks and give them like 30% bonus in stock that vests over two years and/or a cash bonus with a clause that they are entitled for that to be paid back if the employee quits. So those people manage to get the same money (or more), though with strings attached, so they aren’t inclined to quite unless they have an amazing competitive offer.
I’ve also seen a new executive come along and admit the strategy was being used, called it BS, and announced bonus was going to be significant but they were laying off folks.
Someone laid off is out and angry. Maybe talking smack about them, sue, might come back and cause a scene. Someone resigning already got what they wanted, to never see the employer again. It’s like when you have a mentally unstable ex and make her feel like she broke up with you so you don’t come out to find your tires slashed.
The added olive on the shit pizza here is that skilled maintenance personnel, at least where I am, are a fairly small trade, and word gets around. I’ve never heard of “official” blackballing, but we ticketed folks gossip pretty readily about industry employers, and are in high demand.
Moves like that will guarantee that they can’t get experienced tradies, and even if they do, the ones that are willing to go to their next shutdown will be keeping an eye out for trouble, and at the slightest sign of bullshit and will probably cackle with glee while screwing with this employer.
Beware the phrase “I can retire anytime.”
Quiet firings.
Quiet hirings are a thing now too…
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don’t have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It’s shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It’s actually really smart, as long as you don’t have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
I interviewed with one company I wanted to work at, but no answer after 2 months, so I interviewed elsewhere. That place had me start within a month. 6 months into working at my job, the first company said “ok, we are ready to schedule your start date”. I took that as a sign that it probably wouldn’t have been a great place to work.
That’s messed up.
That’s capitalism.
It only works when the government backs citizens over companies. Because a public company is required to put profits over everything else.
So there needs to be regulations getting passed to keep blocking whatever new bullshit someone set up.
All it would take would be requiring companies to have a start/end date on applications and only be able to hire from applications received in that window.
It’s already how the federal government does hirings. The government gets a lot of shit, but they’ve got one of the best unions around.
It also doesn’t work in a tight labor market. This happened to me, I just laughed and blocked them, because in the 6 months it took them to get around to me I already had a better paying job with a competitor.
Well, that’s nothing new, it’s at least been a thing for the last 20 years I’ve been working.
Best use of that I’ve seen was a manager that always pushed to get new headcount, and then never wanted to fill it. Because the company counted cancelling unfilled positions toward a departments required layoff requirements, so several layoff rounds spared every actual employee in his department.
That works until the company re-evaluates how many people that team needs…
It probably contributed to them kicking him out of management one day.
That’s utterly diabolical if that was the intention
The devil himself is afraid of the machinations in the mind of the average human resources manager.
Not to mention that the company doesn’t have to pay unemployment for those that resign but do for those that are laid off.
i struggle to understand that even from a sociopathic viewpoint here, productivity drop would far exceed any wage savings
Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we’d been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
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WFH was ending, and we’d all have to go back to an office that didn’t have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
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Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn’t expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
some people could just sit on the floor and work.
i hope you have a workplace safety agency where you are, because damn…
Where I was. I noped tf out of there, and a few weeks after they started enforcing RTO America set it’s records for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. We really did do COVID the way we did Vietnam: it got too expensive so we gave up, declared victory and threw a bunch of people away.
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It’s amazing how often I see executives talking about their cool trip, their new plane, or other rich person bullshit during the same presentation where they are telling their employees to suck up some furlough, reneg on bonus, or similar financial hardship.
Super mega sons of bitches Super mega…sons of bitches
tons of upvotes and comments for this one. definitely a frequent flop by management.
Went to a cousin’s wedding, her parents split when she was little so I’d not seen my Uncle Mal for decades. Tbh everyone was expecting him not to show because he’s a selfish twat and knows nobody likes him.
Surprise, Mal is here. He had an inexplicably-attractive, younger date (Mal was a disgusting, horrid-breathed, lumpy old man and his date was a pretty, well-spoken woman in her 30s so we all assumed she was an escort, as Mal has no redeeming qualities).
The whole time everyone is desperately avoiding being stuck alone with him, and everyone is talking about having the same conversation… Mal has written a book, he’s a writer now, and he’s written a poem he wants to read.
He was given many hints, subtle and not-so-subtle that his poem wasn’t wanted and he agreed not to read it. Unfortunately whether due to ego or wine, he loudly interrupted someone elses toast to announce he had a poem to read. Our collective hearts sank.
It was worse than we expected, at one point including cringe-inducing references to his daughter having large breasts. It went on and on for at least 5 minutes of everyone silently looking at the floor, sneaking the occasional “No way he just said that?!” glances at each other. He eventually finished, and just stood there awkwardly for about 10 secs, I assume waiting for applause, which obviously was not forthcoming.
Read the fucking room Mal, no-one wants to hear your shitty poem and no-one cares that you’re (allegedly) a published writer now. And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
My sides
Honesty compels me to inform you that this ending sentence was shamelessly stolen from It’s Always Sunny. Highly recommend it, first season is a bit ropey as they are literally filming, writing, scripting themselves with no experience and at the start of their acting careers. An incredible show though imo!
I swear this feels like a plot point from a Righteous Gemstones episode. Sounds like you have a real life Uncle Baby Billy
I’ve been meaning to watch this show but I was put off by the evangelical-ness of it… worth watching then? This happened in the UK about 8 yrs ago!
I was the same way. Especially as someone who lives in Texas and is surrounded by those types. Not to give anything away but it is closer to mobster than evangelicals.
Always looking for new funny shows to watch so I’ll give it a go, thanks for the rec.
I could just hear the tone in your voice when reading this. Great storytelling.
My first job out of university.
Company is going through financial hardship. Boss cancels our collective insurance without telling us. Then the president of the company does a meeting in a shady motel reception room to announce to everyone the company isn’t going well and we all need to take a 10% pay cut. Ends the PowerPoint presentation with a photo from our major client’s ads with a lady on a beach with a laptop. President says “oh that’s going to be me in a few weeks. I’ll be going to Greece!”
The whole room just say there silent.
Fuck the rich.
“Don’t you all have phones!?”
I was an interpreter for this event, and I was the one covering this part of the panel. As an ex-Blizz fan, this moment is seared in my memory for many reasons. The shame of having to interpret this not the least.
Yup, I was there as well. The bride moment of dead silence followed by booing after they announced it will forever be etched into my brain. To be fair though, poor Wyatt was set up and was never going to land that pitch in that setting.
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Oh, wow.
Nobody should be downvoting you. Not everyone pays attention to, iunno, that crapfest that is/was E3 or the like
Thing is, the guy wasn’t wrong. Everyone in that room most certainly had a phone capable of playing the game.
But Blizzard was teasing Diablo 4 all but without actually saying it. I feel that a simple black screen, a voice over, and a flaming “IV” would have been all that was needed since they obviously was balls deep in development of it at the time.
And Blizzcon is a PC gaming centric event and we all know how PC gamers feel about mobile games. He didn’t just read the room wrong, he was in the wrong room entirely. The mobile game should have been announced as a Twitter post
In comparison Bethesda was smart about announcing Fallout Shelter by talking about Fallout 4 first, then going “oh btw some of us been doing this phone game on the side…”
Plus it was developed by a shitty mobile game apps company that was known for ripping off assets from other games. Sure, Blizzard licensed the assets to them, but the problem wasn’t really the stealing of the assets itself, it was that only shitty fly by the night companies are ripping off assets to put into a game that hopes to trick people into spending money on microtransactions before they realize how bad the game was.
I was going to mention this one.
Former CEO gathers 20-30 of us in the board room, talks about the difficult economy, proceeds to fire everyone.
The silence was deafening.
The meeting ends, he stands at the door expecting us to shake his hand as we leave.
Not a single person shook his hand.
At least he didn’t publicly share what his bonus was going to be for improving the bottom line.
Never forget that the year Lehman Brothers “collapsed” it paid the CEO 700 million dollars for one years worth of work.
Back in the day I worked in a restaurant that closed down, and the owner tried to steal all of our last two weeks’ pay.
It had been announced ahead of time that the place was going to close at the end of the month, and we were actually a very popular place, so the last two weeks were completely sold out, crazy busy, and there should have been lots of tips. After we closed, they kept dragging out the date we could get out last paychecks, then finally just tried saying, “there won’t be any last paychecks.”
All of us employees got together with a lawyer and they sent a letter saying that they needed to give us our last paychecks or we would file a class action lawsuit for all the tips they’d been stealing out of the tip pool. He then relented and agreed to pay us our last checks, but refused to mail them. When I went to pick up the check, dude really had the balls to try to shake my hand and say, “Hey Turtle Joe, how’s the summer going? Take any vacations or anything?”
I left him hanging and said, “No I’ve been out of work for months now. I’m not here to talk to you, I just need my check.”
P.S. we sued him for wage theft anyway and ended up taking him for almost $200k.
New hire, brought on board comes to a Monday meeting.
The company Quality of Worklife Balance survey has been returned, and it’s awful. It’s just after the 2008 crash, and we’re barely treading water, but the company held on. The CIO brought everyone into the largest conference room, meant for hundreds (there’s a couple dozen of us standing around, the chairs weren’t setup) and we stand around her as she procedes to tell us “Why is your QWL so low, you should be talking to your managers about this! I don’t wanna see another QWL survey this bad ever!” In a very yelly tone.
One of the managers raised their hand, and asked, “Folks feel like they’re not being listened to and that they’re not getting enough leeway to make decisions.”
CIO: “Well they need to get over that.”
And that was the first meeting a bunch of developers and IT folks got to see at that company.
Many other shenanigans occurred there, but my personal favorite was the quarter million dollar genset system all setup and tested multiple times – fueled and ready to go, failed in a major power outage because someone left the key in the “test” position on the generator.
– That CIO thought they led people, they did nothing of the sort.
Celebrities singing Imagine
I completely forgot this happened. 😂 Wow, that was wild.
A bunch of insulated aristocrats starved for attention while the rest of us were getting sick, disabled, and dying.
Our brains suppress extreme cringe memories.
I heard this years later by my former boss. He used to work for a company that just announced some lay-offs because work was slow. Right as the lay-offs were being announced the head of the company pulled into the lot with his new Porsche lease. It was terrible timing, but the corporate lease was up and the car was ordered months prior. Just made the owner look especially tone-deaf since the car came the same say as the lay-off announcement.
Why are most of the stories here about dickhead executives
The janitor doesn’t usually have to address an entire room full of people.
I know hating on CEOs is par for the course for Lemmy, and I tend to agree most of the time, but being fair here, it isn’t that often that lower (or even middle) ranking employees have a chance to speak to 10, 20 or 100+ coworkers at the same time.
Depends. I work for a company that uses the SAFe methodology (whether that’s a good thing is a different discussion) there are tons of opportunities for people on the bottom of the org chart to do this.
Even in those contexts, the time is limited, tends to stay on point of some work, and in practice the audience can and will largely ignore the speakers.
Meanwhile, executives schedule regular mandatory meetings for them to spew words for 2 hours to an audience that is expected to have laptops put away and sit there and listen to the executive ramble on. That’s a whole lot of people stuck in a meeting they didn’t want anyway and a whole lot of time for the executive to go on self-involved tangents that are completely at odds with the bad news he might have to say.
Dickhead executives are exactly the sort of people to get in a large room of people forced to be in it, and explicitly not care about “reading the room”, therefore the most likely to be in the situation, with the largest forced audiences to go talk about it.
We had a big mandatory meeting where an executive came in to tell us all to be happy we weren’t getting our bonuses or pay raises, and used a weird analogy about poor people being perfectly happy, because they have realistic expectations and that’s all you need to be happy.
He then had to leave early, as he quipped he was sharing a ride with a fellow executive on the private jet, and if he didn’t leave right then, he’d have to suffer flying commercial.
Please tell me someone recorded this utter waste of oxygen doing the equivalent of stepping on garden tools in a Looney Tunes short. That’s so monstrously fucking stupid it could be funny (if the old adage of tragedy + time = comedy holds true, anyways).
It’s funny when summarized, but sitting there for over an hour to set up the punchline drained all enjoyment from life.
If someone bothered to record it, I’ve no idea. Nowadays (different company) all such meetings are recorded and made available, but haven’t seen an executive say something quite so boneheaded in general.
I worked a night shift at a lobby of some residential building, with another guy patrolling the building.
Some mentally unstable person wound up sitting at the lobby while the guy was on patrol (long story), so I sent him a message explaining the situation as I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the person.
The patrol guy comes back, looks at the person, looks at me and says “so, who’s the psycho?”
Good lord, what an inconsiderate asshole
“Don’t you guys have phones?”
Biggest physical room I’ve witnessed a misread happen in
“Is this some out of season April fools joke?”
And yet after everything that happened with Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4 was apparently Blizzard’s best selling game ever.
If the customers don’t care why should the company?
I think Blizzard not taking any real damage from their anti-consumer BS is why I don’t respect people who identify as Gamers™. I still play games, mainly from indie devs, but identifying as a gamer just means you’re a mark for scummy companies.
That’s a weird blanket to throw. I can think of a few people I know including myself who don’t fit that description but still would consider ourselves as gamers if someone asked.
I’ve been to enough LAN parties and various conventions. The most obnoxious gamers have always been the ones that make it part of their identity, which in the year 2023, is mainstream and just another form of consumerism. There’s a difference between “I play video games after work” and being a Gamer™.
Some of us have completely dumped ActiBliz permanently. The existence of Overwatch 2 was my final straw as it turned out Bungie was the bad guy behind the Activision mask all along with Destiny 2’s bullshit. Never even looked at Diablo Immortal or 4, and never will. Blizzard joined the shambling horde of zombie companies that effectively died years ago. Damned AAA necromancers just out to pump and dump any remaining customers.
God, I was right to stay clear away from Destiny. When that was announced, I couldn’t even tell what the genre was even suppose to be. It sounded more like they were selling me a life style then a game.
It’s so bizarre. I play a lot of indie fps games from small team or solo devs and they don’t have the fraction of the bugs that AAA studios do. Goes to show the difference between passionless corporations and individuals with a single game design vision can be.
There it is.
I came to this thread to say this one too.
As an autistic person with ADHD I am going to leave this one alone. 😬
Lady at work told our office one day at lunch that her chihuahua died because it poked its head thru the fence and the neighbours rottweiler bit its head clean off. I could not stop laughing for the rest of the day. Even now its hard not to laugh. I know Im disgusting for thinking it funny, I love animals and would never hurt one, but it was the way she said it, “clean off, i went to take him away from the fence and his collar fell off, his head was completely gone. Neighbours dog at it.”
No, that’s funny. You were right
Holy shit haha!
I don’t know the specifics and I love animals as well, but I think as a porcelain rat dog™️ owner with a rottweiler neighbour, you should anticipate some risk and act accordingly. Big dogs killing the shit out of rat sized dogs by little more than a growl is very common after all.
I just read that as a chihuahua walked into the cafe :0
Joke way to tell people, “As an autistic/ADHD person, if you want me to be able to read the room you better write it down. Preferably with bold text an bright colors.”
Lol same. Just me all the time…
Had a teacher tell some students that it’s rude to speak a foreign language in school (an international school)
I had to be this teacher to a bunch of 8 year old Chinese girls who only spoke Mandarin purposefully to ostracize Brazilian girl, the only non Chinese girl in the room.
It was an English speaking international school in mainland China that incouraged speaking primarily in English.
An American comedian, following a long set here in Australia, told the audience to stand up and stretch. He then tried to direct us to “bend over and pat your neighbour on the fanny”. Stone cold silence did not indicate to him his mistake, and he tried several times before eventually realising he had lost his audience goodwill entirely with this starting skit.
Turned out later that he had no clue what “fanny” means here, and had to have it explained to him.
Still a weird thing to say.
Not as weird or rude as telling them to pat their neighbour on the vulva.
Genuinely curious what does fanny mean in Australia
It’s slang for ‘pussy’. It’s the same in the UK.
So question for any language experts: why is it different?
Because Australia is upside down.
And England, where we got it from?
Who knows why those limey bastards do anything.
Americans are obsessed with being different from England. See: Football / Soccer
There’s a Christmas song that became a classic in the US largely because it was hated in England.
So one American circa 1776 decided “know what, mate? I think ‘fanny’ should refer to ass, not pussy”
Why?
“Coz fuck da bri’ish!!”
🍻 🍻 👏🥂
Sounds like the most American thing I’ve ever heard.
Same guy also had a hatred for useless letter "u"s.
…which one?
Well at least saying shove it up your fanny is indicating a similar location in both amarica and Australia
Wait, what does fanny mean in America?
It’s a word for butt. It sort of has a childish connotation, like a pre-school teacher might direct their class to “keep your fannys on the ground.”
Only in the US. In Commonwealth countries it’s a slang for vulva
Fanny was a nickname for Frances or Francesca.
Both the “buttocks” and “vulva” meanings may have originated from the scandalous 1748 novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
Why did you get downvoted?
Yanks get tetchy.
Not just the US. Canada too.
I worked for a UK based fashion retail business and they always found it blushingly charming when I referred to what they called a 'bum bag ’ a ‘Fanny pack’.
Also, ‘Pardon me!’ Doesn’t mean excuse me in UK English. It’s more an excuse for if you do something disgusting that you are ashamed of, like if you fart or burp.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that was my take away the couple years I worked with British people.
Vulva
Okay wait, even if he meant “butt”, I feel like no one is going to follow a random comedian’s request to grope your neighbor on the butt…
No, not grope, as I said, pat.
He felt we had all been sitting down for too long, and should gently pat the stranger on the butt, presumably to help them with the pins and needles. It was weird, but we thought it was weirder still! I believe people did indeed ask a lot of questions of him, but at the time it was a massive moment of lost in translation and divided by a common language, etc.
Unity - “hold my beer”
This was the main example I had in my head when making this post.
