Well, this has been an interesting week. Started off with the stomach flu on Monday and Tuesday and ended the week with a nice little head/chest cold. I feel like I work in a petri dish. My entire department is passing stuff back and forth, and a ton of them have children, who just bring more crap into the mix for them to bring to work. Maybe I’ll get something next week, just to complete the cycle of three.
Annoyance of the week: People who cough/sneeze and don’t cover their mouth. It’s just downright rude. I bet they don’t wash their hands after visiting the restroom either. Dirty little shits.
So, this week at work, we had a meeting and during said meeting our manager decided to address something that came up during the week. Let me start by saying that, miscommunciations and misinterpretations abound at my job. Lots of stuff is taken out of context, so there is always drama. I mean, seriously, a ton of drama. There was less drama when I worked in the gay bar; and that had a bunch of gay men on the same PMS cycle FFS.
Anywho, the reason I bring this up is the way it was address to us, a group of adults, most of us in our 30s. It was address in the most childish, kindergarten kind of way. The amount of condescention that was being spewed forth could have drowned half of Los Angeles. It wasn’t even a lecture, or a scolding; it was like she was having to explain it to people who didn’t speak English as a first language. It even included a, “I can’t hear you,” when we all failed to respond loud enough to her, “Do you get it now,” question. I mean, really?
This seems to be a common pattern in talking with friends of mine, in various industries – all across the nation. Will the just let anyone be a people manager now? Is there literally, no training required? Furthermore, do they even check to see if the person possesses a basic level of common sense? This is a growing problem. Companies, because of the economy are seeing their people, as less of assets, and more of as replaceable parts. And certainly, they don’t need to be coddled or taken care of with a level of respect that was present five years ago (when the job tables were reversed).
Companies use logic like, “We don’t have it in the budget for raises,” or, “We can’t guarantee your hours, so when we’re slow, you’ll have to go home.” This is proposterious to me. You know the value of a tank of gas, and you certainly don’t say, “Sorry, we don’t have it in the budget pay $2.90 a gallon, we’ll have to pay $2.10,” and expect to get away with it. Why are people’s salaries so different? You know the value of an hour of work; and you further know that if you add more responsibility to a job, that the value of that hour of work goes up. Why it is socially acceptable to abuse people in a recession?
Human resource departments don’t seem to be saying anything. The people paid to make sure employees are treated fairly are more commonly now seen as only there to protect the company from potential lawsuits. They’re paid to reduce benefits and cost to the company and then smooth over the reduction (or increase in cost) to the employee. They’re no longer around to conduct training courses for managers, to make sure they have the necessary skill set to train, grow, and manage their people. Instead, they’re there to protect those managers and devalue complaints when they cross their desk.
I know, realistically, that human resource departments are paid to do the exact things that I stated above, and have been for years; I just think now, they no longer paint a smile on their face when they tell you to get the fuck out. Perhaps, that’s the problem. We’ve actively removed all sense of humanity from the workplace in the name of business.
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