I've had it pointed out to me that my blog - Out of the Mouths of Gamers' Babes - has been, well, rather more profane and obscene (and whiny and just plain bitter) since a) my husband's death, b) the 2016 US presidential election, and c) February of 2017, when AT&T stopped feeling like family to me.
I am, therefore, publishing a new blog; this one has more to do with the job hunt and the state of my life in general, and less with the titular Gamers' Babes. Never fear, fans of Gamers' Babes, that one will still be updated as (not very) often as usual; this one is safe as an example of my writing style without being the whine-fest that one has occasionally become.
To that end, let's take the relevant bits of a fairly recent post on the original blog, and edit for whine, shall we? Also cheese, because what's whine without cheese? It can still be funny and engaging without being a constant rant. At least I think so.
Same Sh*t Different Day... I can only rant about the same damn stuff our government (or the upper echelons of my employer) are doing so much (or I get angrier)... there is the never-ending, all-consuming problem of Money, or more specifically, Work. I've said it before; I love my coworkers (including local management), I enjoy my job (though I have to say that this has been a very stressful autumn), and I even like working for AT&T. What I don't care for is the ridiculous way in which the upper management folks in charge of negotiating our new contract think of us. Do they really think we're so stupid we don't see what they're doing? They keep doing these booster kind of things for morale, but I wonder, if they took the money (these are pretty high production values) they put into the cheerleading videos and plowed it into the people who work for them instead, wouldn't that be more of a boost to morale than yet another t-shirt?
And I'm not talking about the off-shore and out-sourced folks either; I'm sure they deserve jobs too. But they're cheaper and less consistently trained (based on the number of mistakes they make that we fix every day), and therefore AT&T thinks... what? that the people who actually work for the company should forgo cost-of-living raises and decent healthcare/PTO (because I used up all my paid time off earlier this year because of severe depression due to my husband's death, that sinus infection - two and a half days of fever - went unpaid), and fix the outsourcers' mistakes for less? We've been working without a contract for ten months. And AT&T has already tried to make an end run around the negotiating team by speaking to the union members directly. While this may not be illegal, it is certainly not adhering to the spirit of the negotiations, and seems to be unethical to me.
I think part of the reason that AT&T has disappointed me as an employer is that they seem to be taking a stand similar to that of the federal government, that the worker should show loyalty to the company, but the company does not have to reciprocate. (In the federal government this is shown by Congress cutting welfare and VA benefits and such, but voting in pay raises and the best medical benefits in the country for themselves, just as an example). From this (former) employee's perspective, they are spending available funds on things that do not fundamentally benefit the average employee, and therefore not the average employee's loyalty to the company.
Employees want sick time, a living wage, security in their jobs, and good medical benefits. The unionized ones want a decent contract now, not when you feel like it. If you put the employees first, they will want to take care of the customers and therefore the shareholders; this stuff trickles up, not down.. Carrots work better than sticks.
JennTheJobHunter
I have been very fortunate, in the last two significant employment periods for me both of my direct managers were awesome bosses who added greatly to my skill set, though the first company were a bit sloppy, failing to value the skill set I had and loosing me to another company as a result, my boss was a great guy we shared much in character, sense of humor and general outlook on life.
ReplyDeletesecond boss could not have been more different, but we shared the same work ethic, and he was very very fair, if you were willing to go an extra mile, he would make sure the company did the same when you needed it. so Jen is spot on, loyalty buys loyalty, trust buys trust, money only buys my time, if you want other things from me you need to pay in a different coin!