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On the job: Absenteeism, or old fashioned employer hypocrisy?
July 17th, 2008
You hear a lot about people taking time off, abusing sick leave and holiday leave rules. Mondays and Fridays are the days nobody believes you’re sick, or trying to get the car fixed.
Apparently kids and families generally don’t need anyone around between 9 and 5, like it was 1950 or something.
What’s infuriating is that people are actually paid to stand around and make a big deal out of someone being 20 minutes late. What are you going to get done in 20 minutes that’s so important?
Can’t take work home because they don’t know if they can trust you after working there for 24 years.
Well, the building’s still there, isn’t it?
Everyone comes in, with the flu, sometimes, which goes right through the place like a plague. Take a couple of days off, come back, and get it again, because some fool had to come to work with it. Costs hundreds of hours of work, all because they get nasty about people taking sick leave.
We had someone with depression, and they had to ring up and find out what it was, and whether that person was entitled to sick leave.
Everyone’s fed up with it. We hear all the time about people working from home, making money, and not having to put up with this madness.
Then there’s maternity leave. One of our girls had a baby, and you’d think the world had ended. There were management meetings about how to find someone for 12 months, like they’d never hired a temp before. We had a new HR person at the time, and she actually left, because management were so far behind the times.
Holidays are like some sort of pilgrimage. We have to tell them six months ahead when we want annual leave.
Our managers aren’t old, either. They’re mainly younger people who report to a senior manager, and he doesn’t give them any leeway about how they manage their own jobs. A few of them have gone lately.
He doesn’t believe in flex time, which has now been around for decades. He doesn’t believe in personal leave, either. You have to jump through hoops just to take a day off during the working week, if you don’t have an actual doctor’s certificate. I don’t think he really understands how to do personal leave, so he just doesn’t do it.
It’s tough on the younger people, just out of university. One of them said it was like working in a museum, as one of the exhibits.
We even had a big disciplinary thing, a meeting of all staff, about leave, and taking days off. We were threatened with docking of pay, even dismissal. It was a bit silly, because hardly anyone takes a day off just because they feel like it. You’d have sworn it was just a coincidence that we all happened to be there, the way he went on about it.
Nobody’s too sure what set that off, but apparently the big boss’s secretary was away one day, and he missed an appointment. All the managers had to stay back that night with the big boss while he gave them a lecture about absenteeism.
The joke is that the place now has a terrible reputation as a place to work, and they’re really having trouble finding people to fill places. Nearly all the younger ones leave as fast as they can, and quite a few of the older people have been leaving lately, too, because they’ve found better places to work.
They’ve brought it on themselves. Nobody wants to work in a place run by tantrums and still stuck in old fashioned working conditions. We actually had a circular about people laughing during working hours.
Management can’t win, with a senior manager refusing to pay any attention to their ideas about modernization.
Meanwhile, of course, most of us are starting to resent the fact that other people have such good leave arrangements. Why should we be the only people in the area working in the last century, or maybe the one before it?
They’d have been better off tolerating people being off work when they needed to be off work, because now, the people they gave a hard time have all gone. They drove them away with all this nonsense about absenteeism. They’ve lost business because now they don’t have the people to do the work.
Me, I’ve got a better job, and I’m leaving next week. The supervisor just groaned when I told him, but he knew there was no talking me into staying.
I think you can say absenteeism starts when nobody wants to be there at work, for whatever reason.
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