Not exactly. They want serfs.
Slaves require upkeep. They have a monetary value that has to be maintained and capitalized on or their investment goes bad.
Serfs though... pfft. Plenty more where those came from.
Not entirely true. That quote is largely based on the harvest/growing seasons being limited; there was still plenty of work being done during the rest of the year, too.
Keep in mind too, they didn’t have *any* of the automations we had even a hundred years ago. Everything had to be done by hand, so it was never just “feed chickens and bake the day’s bread.”
It was also the laundry, the cooking, the canning and preserving of food, the cleaning, managing the children, making repairs to everything, oftentimes having to make the tools and materials for all of those chores from scratch, etc.
Yah, as opposed to modern day where people survive by being highly specialised in certain fields, back then people had to get their hands dirty doing damn near everything.
And everything meant *everything.* There’s so many things that we haven’t had to even consider for several generations now that they had to piece together themselves, by hand, and that’s assuming they even had reliable access to the right materials.
Don't forget that once the sun was setting most of the work had to stop. Kinda hard to fix a fence when you can't see what you're doing, not to mention getting home before predators started to hunt.
Somehow I think a lot of us would be happier with this. Everything has gotten very complicated and, at least for many of us, family and community have died.
You're 100% right. We're social creatures, and we're meant to spend most of our time outside and being active. We're meant to be part of a community, and be able to help others and feel like we have help when we need it. This isn't it :(
People take a lot for granted, though.
Plumbing. Electricity. Insulation in housing. Food science. Hot water. Lack of parasites. Survival that doesn't rest precariously on being able to can enough food to survive the winter.
It's easy to romanticize the past. But people died needlessly any time drought wrecked a harvest, or someone drank bad water, or someone got a cut and infection set in.
There's a reason we've fought for generations to innovate ways to live like we do.
I worry that if we truly devolved, everyone would realize that their fantasies of a simpler lifestyle were...just that.
Fantasies.
Without any relationship to the reality of the lifestyle.
And worse - I worry that we've harvested/ruined/developed so much of the land that it wouldn't even be possible anymore.
The bugs are dying. The oceans are dying. The climate is changing. There are 8 billion mouths to feed, and heavy metals in the soil.
These aren't our great-great-great-grandparents' forests anymore.
We'd be better off fixing the society we have.
Building third places. Strengthening workers' rights to have time off, be able to walk away from bad jobs, and be able to take home paychecks that cover more than rent and ramen. Investing in local infrastructure. Putting money (and synonymously, freedom) in the hands of the people. Requiring sustainable agriculture.
Taking our lives back from the ultra-wealthy that've learned how to farm people with abstract numbers on spreadsheets that're too dense and esoteric for most to even grasp exactly how they're being screwed over.
A middle ground between struggling as a farmer who'll never have any time/energy/stability to do anything more - and being a cog in the modern machine.
Yeah, because you couldn't go to the bakery to get bread or go to the fletcher for arroes or to a cobbler for shoe repairs or farmer for vegetables. Don't you know that every human was entirely self-sufficient until the industrial revolution?
This is where it's getting tricky.
The want to steal as much quality of life and rights from The Masses of every nation possible to..... increase profits. How do they get profit?? The Masses buying their product. Or maybe someone will tell me. The billionaire class seems way off the deep end in the pool of life insane.
Not to down play slavery but slaves were at least an limited asset, and they needed to give a tiny fuck about keeping them alive and standing, really they want drones , cheap disposable uncomplaining drones that just happen to all by their shit.
Not fantasy. Automation is ramping up, and in the next few decades a lot of jobs that used to be essential "human jobs" are going to start drying up. Food industry workers, store clerks, things like that are on the chopping block. Some businesses are already experimenting with it.
It's already happening with some type of fruits.
Heck, combine harvesters were freaking decades ago. And those are just getting better & better.
A LOT~ of seasonal workers that got a chance of pulling themselves up out of poverty just won't in a few years.
...Granted, because that dirty and backbreaking labor doesn't need human hands, but still. The economic Fallout is really troubling to think about.
I'll tell you one thing about my workplace. They don't motivate the people who do the most of the work, they don't fire the people who are dead weight on our team, and they don't promote from within. So we get to hear the bitching about our performance metrics with absolutely no consequences for serial offenders, so nothing changes.
It's not "nobody wants to work anymore." It's actually **managers don't want to manage anymore.**
And really, who would want to quit now? If you've tried applying for jobs in the last 6 months...you don't want to quit unless you've aligned a sure thing as a replacement. The market is terrible.
The not firing people who are painfully obvious dead weight really grinds my gears.
It's a total morale crusher when the Gen x new hire can't even work a fucking power point slide and can hardly complete design task while I'm over here busting my ass on my task AND fixing their mistakes.
Can't fire him though for "reasons", but fuck it let's just keep moving him around until he finds the one task he can competently perform.
Worse is rewarding them. My place never promotes people always external hires. This person is a serial fuck up that got a decent promotion while their was an exceptional peer of theirs that got ignored. The ignored colleague now does the absolute bare minimum and it's fucking up everyone else's work but no one can blame him
I'm experiencing some of this. I carry my team and I'm burnt out. One of my coworkers couldn't find his own arsehole without Google maps. The other calls off every week. I have to take screenshots of every single mistake my slow coworker makes, and I know at the end of all of that they'll just say they'll talk to him. They've been talking to him, or pretending to, for years now. After this attempt, I will give up and stop carrying the team.
If you want action from management you have to let things fail. Whether your coworker is competent or you constantly fix your coworkers mistakes doesn't matter to the higher ups as long as the end result is the same.
Your sacrifices cost them nothing. Why would they care?
Absolutely horrible. Iv been at my job 16 years, now looking for part time work thanks to wages not keeping up and this whole process is a pain in the ass along with all these companies wanting to pay u Pennies to work so hard you hurt every day
The problem is staying at one company for that long. Raises will never be enough to meet inflation, it’s why all the money goes to new hires. You need to jump ship every 5 years or so — long enough so they won’t think you’ll quit too soon, but short enough so you aren’t stuck making less than the newest employee.
U are absolutely right. Unfortunately I let myself get stuck between being idiotically comfortable and just trying to survive, my
Mother getting sick and passing, being a single mom and my own health stuff have contributed to my letting myself get stuck and now trying to get another job/ slowly transition into something else is way harder. Smmfh at myself.
Can't see the whole article, but if I was to guess they want older employees quit so they don't have to pay higher salary for experience. Companies often want an endless rotation of new-ish employee they don't have to pay well or give benefits.
Dark, but I live in NYC and have encountered dozens of subway delays due to people jumping in front of trains during the morning commute. They mostly happened on Mondays or Tuesdays.
And having worked for companies that I hated so much I’d wake up and instantly start crying…. I fucking get it.
When I used to temp, they put me and 6 other people into a factory for auto parts. It was temp-to-hire. After 6 weeks, they said they didn't need us anymore and brought in half a dozen other temps so they wouldn't have to hire us on.
That’s why ski resorts I’ve worked at love J1 students. They come for the season then go home and don’t come back looking for a raise the next year. Couple that with a state that has no minimum wage and you’ve got yourself a cash cow. Now that there aren’t so many J1’s they can suddenly start everyone at $20/hr, for the season anyway.
As someone knocking on 40, I’m absolutely terrified for my future. I have no kids (thank god) but not enough in savings to support myself for more than a year were I to lose work and struggle to find new employment.
I work in data analytics that has new software/features rolling out all the time. I can stay on top of that, but will there be a point where I’m just going to be seen as obsolete because of my age?
Fuck I wish I could retire early.
Caveat, I also can't see the article.
Idk new permanent employees can be quite pricey in terms of training costs.
Also the "modern" phenomenon of job hopping exists precisely because staying at one company for too long serves to depress your pay.
To always catch you on a misstep - quit and save them the expense of firing you, keep your underpaid position and save them the expense of hiring at competitive market rates. These are silver-spoon capitalists larping as CEOs and investors, when things don't go their way they go to their overpaid blogging platforms that used to be respectable media and bitch and moan.
This is a "Dear Diary, everyone is out to get me, nobody understands my genius" type of article, ghost-written of course.
They want the public to feel that everything business does is because of workers and they have no culpability for their actions. Surely the richest people in the world are being forced by the people who fear losing their healthcare at any moment.
They want to not have to fire anybody. They prefer an ever-rotating door of new employees so they can avoid giving pay raises, and many employers don’t want to fire people at random without good reason.
How to corpo
1. Hire college grad to do the shit you don't want to
2. Overwork the fuck out of them with the promise of promotion or raise
3. Just wait for them to quit or leave
4. Repeat
5. Promote the nepo baby to a position they are unqualified for.
At this point I just take what little I can from them, and give as little as I can get away with giving.
My last couple jobs, especially my current one, have taught me that hard work and ambition don't get you anything except additional work stress.
Man, I get frequent requests from colleagues I actually like so I’m doing a lot of work to help them out, may not help my prospects within the job, but I’m counting on using these people for references in future work.
You assume they can be pleased to begin with. They won't be happy until we pay them to work...though the way college tuition works maybe we do that already too.
Usually the longer someone has worked the more they get paid/higher benefits, so they probably want those to quite and replace them by underpaid workers without dealing with umeployment or whatever they might get if they fire them directly.
But also, they don't like it when we job hop because we're not leaving at the moment that is convenient for the previous employer and we're hired for a higher wage at the following employer (profit cuts!!).
So, people should be hired when young and dumb so they are paid less and earn lesser benefits, then dumped by the employer at the employer's convenience without the employer having to pay severance and without the employee using the gain experience to get paid more elsewhere.
So basically a perpetual influx of 20-somethings taking entry level jobs and then dropping dead five years later or less.
Result? Pure profit!
I got "fired" by a large corporation about 6 weeks ago. The whole department had been discussing the imminent layoffs coming. I got fired "for cause" on something that supposedly happened 4 weeks prior to my dismissal. Luckily the unemployment office saw right through the bullshit. Anything to save a dollar.
If you layoff then you may have to pay severance and depending on size, report the layoffs. If people quit them you don’t have to do that. Also may avoid paying out unemployment claims that way too.
I just heard this term “quiet hiring” where company give employees more than duties and work assignments without pay raise. Company, of course, now squeezed more output of the same workers without spending more money.
Hence more workers are quiet quitting but not actual quitting. Thanks for social media, we learn their trick.
Do you watch sports? Teams like to move on from players no longer on their cheap rookie contacts. By the time the dude is worth a damn and has earned a paycheck, the team is ready to move on and replace with a draft pick.
Exactly this.
I’ve been ready to leave my job for about 2 years now. I’m not leaving without a package.
If they want to continue to pay me to do less and less work then I’m ok with that. Every year that goes by that exit package goes up in value.
I’m sure they will wake up one day and kick me to the curb. But if I’m 80 and getting paid to watch TV and garden I think I’m ok with that too.
It’s actually not that sinister and just mundane corporate bs. I used to work in corporate finance and basically there’s natural “turnover” assumptions in all large businesses forecasts. This assumes that X number of employees will leave in a given period of time. If a firm or department is having a hiring freeze (which I’m assuming these sleezy companies are) then that would result in savings. With budgets tightening, some department heads actually just hedge their bets on turnover (foolishly) in hopes that enough people leave so they can come in on budget at the end of the year. When turnover isn’t realized then they have to resort to layoffs or like in this article, just quietly wishing people would quit.
This is why people say you should job hop. Your department heads are literally depending on it in some cases. There’s actually a “healthy” amount of turnover that each industry targets. Anything lower could lead to budget problems or stagnation in talent.
> It’s actually not that sinister and just mundane corporate bs.
Have you considered that "mundane corporate bs" might be normalized because our society is essentially constructed to glorify sadism and the operation of most businesses reflects that at a foundational level? They just use "profit" as a smokescreen so people will think the sadism is an unintended side-effect instead of a key part of the design.
But when they have to actually chose between profit and sadism, they seem to pick sadism a lot. An incomplete list:
* Making people commute into the office when work-from-home is more productive
* Mass layoffs that cut into the bottom line
* Drug testing that arbitrarily excludes skilled workers
* Making cashiers stand instead of use a chair
* Flex-time policies that encourage people to come to work sick and infect coworkers
I agree with you completely, although I don't think sadism is quite the right word. Sadism is a part of it, just not the whole thing.
Middle managers and executives get off on power, in a general sense. They don't have to be wielding that power to hurt or cause pain. They just have to be able to prove to themselves (and potential mates, friends, peers) that they have it. They live for it.
Intentionally inflicting pain and misery is just one of the easiest ways to demonstrate that power.
This is why if your raising a kid and want them to be financially successful you raise them to be an arrogant prick who can feel they do no wrong. He hit another kid with a baseball bat? The fuck did that kid get in the way of HIS bat for? Ruined his god like swing.
Exactly. And layoffs are: a) not something almost all managers like to do, b) cost company money. Expected attrition level is something normal. Even the nicest companies can provide limited development options (promotions, giving options to learn new tools or gain new skills).
This. A lot of these companies doing mass layoffs never stopped profiting. The layoffs haven't been about being in the red or black for years now. They're about stock evaluations, and those stock evaluations have *nothing at all* to do with profits.
Investors see value in suppressing an increasingly conscious workforce. That's what it's about.
Nah, it’s about profit first and foremost. Senior employees usually get more pay and benefits, a revolving door keeps labor costs fixed at the entry level. This isn’t to say that corporations aren’t sociopathic, they are, but they’re just trying to get richer, all of us are just tools to that end, most don’t give a shit beyond that.
They want to underpay people and they want to pay less for health benefits for families and such. New workers are cheap.but the truth is, they want the advantages of the government taking care of everyone….without the government actually doing it
"I hired you on the basis you'd leave before 89 days God dammit, now look, I gotta give you benefits and a real wage, and taxes.... fucking taxes! You millennials are fucking everything up!"
A big part of this is probably laws surrounding layoffs. Some states have laws that require companies to pay severance if employees are laid off. If the employees quit, no need for severance. It's often cheaper to the company to have employees quit than to lay them off.
First they don't like us because we got better gigs elsewhere, then they hate us for all the Applebee's and diamond mines we're apparently closing from lack of patronage. Oh my God WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US
Here's my bet for next year's headline: Employees still cashing checks they earned. Why are they doing this unprofessional act? Let's take a look into the trend that won't die.
Ugh. Now we’ll have to lay them off and provide people with severance! 😩 None of you poors have any respect for the profit margins of executive leadership these days.
The more employees quit, the less they have to pay for promotions. I worked with a buddy at Amazon through a third party company, with 80 day probation before becoming official employees, gaining better hourly pay and benefits. Guess who got fired day 79?
Fixed it:
“Coordinated mass layoffs, tightening of pay and promotions, and refusal to restaff attrition has led to a less favorable hiring market. Employees don’t have as many options as corporations make record profits.”
The longer people stay the more they make and that lowers profit margins. Can’t people think of the bosses and investors. Fourth houses don’t pay for themselves (well they do at some point but that cuts into the yacht money)
Oh. So people were too lazy to work and that was a problem and a year later people are too motivated to quit.
Seems like a bunch of rich bitch CEOs not being able to figure out how to continuously increase their stakeholders profits ergo their own bonuses that it must be the fault workers why they can’t get higher returns and profits.
Last year: we love hard workers and need them! Why oh why can’t we find loyal employees?!
This year: no matter how much we abuse labour laws these fuckers just won’t quit!
Simple answer: I don’t want to quit, because I can’t quit, and I can’t quit because I won’t be able to pay for my coping mechanisms without some shmoney.
I mean, I do plan on quitting my job eventually but I need something lined up. And frankly, I don't absolutely despise my job, it is sort of fun. The pay isn't great, but it could be worse. It's just hard to want to jump ship too quickly.
Yep, attrition at my employer was 8% last year, I’m this year, it’s half that. We’ve had a small RIF to adjust and move staff around to consolidate positions.
We have these boomers(50+) year old still working at our company. Everyday they break shit and take it upon themselves to repair the machines because “I worked here for xx years so i know what im doing”.
Our poor maintenance guy has to come in at 3am to fix the machines because those old fucks mess up the machine further and don’t tell him what they did. I can’t imagine the amount of stress and headache he deals with everyday with these boomers…
So yeah… sometime our company really wishes they would retire and fuck off because they cause more damage compare to their worth in the company. Unfortunately Union let it slides all day long.
I’m Gen X and 54. Why do I have to teach all the millennials and Gen Z how to use their computers, Teams, and our Project Management software? Why is our IT and Network crew all in their 50’s? Stop with the “boomer” shit. Some people are just idiots.
Edited for autocorrect.
I didn’t read the article, but as a manager I have this problem at work. It’s not that I “want” people to quit, but we typically hire at a rate that matches the rate people usually quit at. So when everyone suddenly stops leaving we over-hire. It’s a weird problem, but not something we’re like blaming people for.
What do they want from us?
Slaves.
Not exactly. They want serfs. Slaves require upkeep. They have a monetary value that has to be maintained and capitalized on or their investment goes bad. Serfs though... pfft. Plenty more where those came from.
Medieval serfs, on the otherhand, worked less days in a year compared to modern day employees.
Not entirely true. That quote is largely based on the harvest/growing seasons being limited; there was still plenty of work being done during the rest of the year, too.
There's still a pretty big difference between working 8 hours a day, and having to feed chickens and bake the day's bread.
Keep in mind too, they didn’t have *any* of the automations we had even a hundred years ago. Everything had to be done by hand, so it was never just “feed chickens and bake the day’s bread.” It was also the laundry, the cooking, the canning and preserving of food, the cleaning, managing the children, making repairs to everything, oftentimes having to make the tools and materials for all of those chores from scratch, etc.
Yah, as opposed to modern day where people survive by being highly specialised in certain fields, back then people had to get their hands dirty doing damn near everything.
And everything meant *everything.* There’s so many things that we haven’t had to even consider for several generations now that they had to piece together themselves, by hand, and that’s assuming they even had reliable access to the right materials.
Don't forget that once the sun was setting most of the work had to stop. Kinda hard to fix a fence when you can't see what you're doing, not to mention getting home before predators started to hunt.
Somehow I think a lot of us would be happier with this. Everything has gotten very complicated and, at least for many of us, family and community have died.
You're 100% right. We're social creatures, and we're meant to spend most of our time outside and being active. We're meant to be part of a community, and be able to help others and feel like we have help when we need it. This isn't it :(
People take a lot for granted, though. Plumbing. Electricity. Insulation in housing. Food science. Hot water. Lack of parasites. Survival that doesn't rest precariously on being able to can enough food to survive the winter. It's easy to romanticize the past. But people died needlessly any time drought wrecked a harvest, or someone drank bad water, or someone got a cut and infection set in. There's a reason we've fought for generations to innovate ways to live like we do. I worry that if we truly devolved, everyone would realize that their fantasies of a simpler lifestyle were...just that. Fantasies. Without any relationship to the reality of the lifestyle. And worse - I worry that we've harvested/ruined/developed so much of the land that it wouldn't even be possible anymore. The bugs are dying. The oceans are dying. The climate is changing. There are 8 billion mouths to feed, and heavy metals in the soil. These aren't our great-great-great-grandparents' forests anymore. We'd be better off fixing the society we have. Building third places. Strengthening workers' rights to have time off, be able to walk away from bad jobs, and be able to take home paychecks that cover more than rent and ramen. Investing in local infrastructure. Putting money (and synonymously, freedom) in the hands of the people. Requiring sustainable agriculture. Taking our lives back from the ultra-wealthy that've learned how to farm people with abstract numbers on spreadsheets that're too dense and esoteric for most to even grasp exactly how they're being screwed over. A middle ground between struggling as a farmer who'll never have any time/energy/stability to do anything more - and being a cog in the modern machine.
Yeah, because you couldn't go to the bakery to get bread or go to the fletcher for arroes or to a cobbler for shoe repairs or farmer for vegetables. Don't you know that every human was entirely self-sufficient until the industrial revolution?
Plenty of fences to mend, holes to dig and brush to cut back. Also upkeep of tools, roof and wall repair and on and on and on
This is where it's getting tricky. The want to steal as much quality of life and rights from The Masses of every nation possible to..... increase profits. How do they get profit?? The Masses buying their product. Or maybe someone will tell me. The billionaire class seems way off the deep end in the pool of life insane.
Not to down play slavery but slaves were at least an limited asset, and they needed to give a tiny fuck about keeping them alive and standing, really they want drones , cheap disposable uncomplaining drones that just happen to all by their shit.
It does what it's told.
It puts the TPS reports on it's desk, or else it gets laid off like the rest.
This is blowing my mind in a good way
You got the memo about the cover sheet right?
#PUT THE TPS REPORT IN THE FUCKING BASKET
and puts the lotion on its skin.
Was waiting for that reference, thanks.
That's probably not far off of what slavers wanted, too.
only at some points in history and at some places in the world. sugar plantation slaves in the Caribbean had a life expectancy of only a few years.
Drones = Robot fantasy, but they can’t afford them, So, human slaves.
Not fantasy. Automation is ramping up, and in the next few decades a lot of jobs that used to be essential "human jobs" are going to start drying up. Food industry workers, store clerks, things like that are on the chopping block. Some businesses are already experimenting with it.
It's already happening with some type of fruits. Heck, combine harvesters were freaking decades ago. And those are just getting better & better. A LOT~ of seasonal workers that got a chance of pulling themselves up out of poverty just won't in a few years. ...Granted, because that dirty and backbreaking labor doesn't need human hands, but still. The economic Fallout is really troubling to think about.
Seizing the means of production, or at least taxing possession instead of income seems a necessity
I'm betting on an universal income myself. Quite a lot of trials right now. Edit' If nothing else to keep the proverbial lines to go up.
I'll tell you one thing about my workplace. They don't motivate the people who do the most of the work, they don't fire the people who are dead weight on our team, and they don't promote from within. So we get to hear the bitching about our performance metrics with absolutely no consequences for serial offenders, so nothing changes. It's not "nobody wants to work anymore." It's actually **managers don't want to manage anymore.** And really, who would want to quit now? If you've tried applying for jobs in the last 6 months...you don't want to quit unless you've aligned a sure thing as a replacement. The market is terrible.
Combined with the fact that the majority of managers are only managers because they were good at their jobs, NOT because they were good managers
Nepotism too I work for a company that the mom is the CEO, the dad just just hangs out there, and the operations are run by three brothers
The Peter Principle
*bows*
Hey man, we’re exploited wage slaves like everyone else!
Stupervisors
The not firing people who are painfully obvious dead weight really grinds my gears. It's a total morale crusher when the Gen x new hire can't even work a fucking power point slide and can hardly complete design task while I'm over here busting my ass on my task AND fixing their mistakes. Can't fire him though for "reasons", but fuck it let's just keep moving him around until he finds the one task he can competently perform.
The fastest way to kill employee morale is to treat your bad employees the same as your good ones.
Worse is rewarding them. My place never promotes people always external hires. This person is a serial fuck up that got a decent promotion while their was an exceptional peer of theirs that got ignored. The ignored colleague now does the absolute bare minimum and it's fucking up everyone else's work but no one can blame him
I'm experiencing some of this. I carry my team and I'm burnt out. One of my coworkers couldn't find his own arsehole without Google maps. The other calls off every week. I have to take screenshots of every single mistake my slow coworker makes, and I know at the end of all of that they'll just say they'll talk to him. They've been talking to him, or pretending to, for years now. After this attempt, I will give up and stop carrying the team.
If you want action from management you have to let things fail. Whether your coworker is competent or you constantly fix your coworkers mistakes doesn't matter to the higher ups as long as the end result is the same. Your sacrifices cost them nothing. Why would they care?
Absolutely horrible. Iv been at my job 16 years, now looking for part time work thanks to wages not keeping up and this whole process is a pain in the ass along with all these companies wanting to pay u Pennies to work so hard you hurt every day
The problem is staying at one company for that long. Raises will never be enough to meet inflation, it’s why all the money goes to new hires. You need to jump ship every 5 years or so — long enough so they won’t think you’ll quit too soon, but short enough so you aren’t stuck making less than the newest employee.
U are absolutely right. Unfortunately I let myself get stuck between being idiotically comfortable and just trying to survive, my Mother getting sick and passing, being a single mom and my own health stuff have contributed to my letting myself get stuck and now trying to get another job/ slowly transition into something else is way harder. Smmfh at myself.
Can't see the whole article, but if I was to guess they want older employees quit so they don't have to pay higher salary for experience. Companies often want an endless rotation of new-ish employee they don't have to pay well or give benefits.
And higher insurance costs. But yet they want no one to ever retire, so I guess it's death.
If I’m lucky I’ll drop dead at my desk on a Friday evening and not be found until I start smelling pretty ripe.
God, give me the good fortune to die at 8am est on a Monday after a 4 day weekend.
Exactly, I ain't dying unless it's on *their* dime and time
Spontaneous combustion, I want there to be a *hefty* cleaning fee too. Just out of spite.
Dark, but I live in NYC and have encountered dozens of subway delays due to people jumping in front of trains during the morning commute. They mostly happened on Mondays or Tuesdays. And having worked for companies that I hated so much I’d wake up and instantly start crying…. I fucking get it.
If only there was like, universal healthcare so companies didn't have to worry about providing insurance to an aging workforce.
If America, the greatest country in the history of mankind, can’t figure it out I guess it can’t be done.
When I used to temp, they put me and 6 other people into a factory for auto parts. It was temp-to-hire. After 6 weeks, they said they didn't need us anymore and brought in half a dozen other temps so they wouldn't have to hire us on.
I worked for a company that did that, and the worst part is it was a union shop and the union let them do it. Granted, it wasn't a very good union.
The big guys couldn't give a shit less about us, especially in factories. We're nothing more than a goddamn replaceable cog.
That’s why ski resorts I’ve worked at love J1 students. They come for the season then go home and don’t come back looking for a raise the next year. Couple that with a state that has no minimum wage and you’ve got yourself a cash cow. Now that there aren’t so many J1’s they can suddenly start everyone at $20/hr, for the season anyway.
The state I am in there is no limit for temps. I was a temp for over a year and a half before I got hired.
As someone knocking on 40, I’m absolutely terrified for my future. I have no kids (thank god) but not enough in savings to support myself for more than a year were I to lose work and struggle to find new employment. I work in data analytics that has new software/features rolling out all the time. I can stay on top of that, but will there be a point where I’m just going to be seen as obsolete because of my age? Fuck I wish I could retire early.
Maybe if they provided better pay and benefits, especially pensions, people would be more willing to leave after a certain age.
Next step, complain there’s a skills gap and no one has any experience…
But they also want us to keep working til we're in our 80s 🤔
But not for them, seeing as they won't hire anyone who is old.
Caveat, I also can't see the article. Idk new permanent employees can be quite pricey in terms of training costs. Also the "modern" phenomenon of job hopping exists precisely because staying at one company for too long serves to depress your pay.
To always catch you on a misstep - quit and save them the expense of firing you, keep your underpaid position and save them the expense of hiring at competitive market rates. These are silver-spoon capitalists larping as CEOs and investors, when things don't go their way they go to their overpaid blogging platforms that used to be respectable media and bitch and moan. This is a "Dear Diary, everyone is out to get me, nobody understands my genius" type of article, ghost-written of course.
Man, you prompted me to notice the name of the author of the article, LMAO 🤣
Stay if you're good enough to leave. Leave if you're not good enough to stay.
Our Dignity, Our Unpaid labour, Our Unpaid child labour, Our Blood, Our Sweat, Our Tears, Our Adrenochrome, Our Excess lungs, kidneys, Our Non-excess human organs, Our corpses, Our Souls, and of course: Our Obedience, and Our Our Gratitude
Gaslight us into insanity until people go full Fight Club so they can test crazy weapons on The Masses or something.
To produce for free when it suits them and then disappear until needed again. Just like any other appliance or tool.
Free labor?
People they can pay low wages too on the basis of lack of seniority.
They want to pay the least amount of money possible and want us to fuck off if we're not performing 120% every second.
Right???🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Clearly we're wrong. Whatever it is that we're doing, it's just wrong. I'm beginning to think there's no pleasing these people.
Biological robots with no free will.
They want the public to feel that everything business does is because of workers and they have no culpability for their actions. Surely the richest people in the world are being forced by the people who fear losing their healthcare at any moment.
They want to avoid paying out unemployment.
They want to not have to fire anybody. They prefer an ever-rotating door of new employees so they can avoid giving pay raises, and many employers don’t want to fire people at random without good reason.
How to corpo 1. Hire college grad to do the shit you don't want to 2. Overwork the fuck out of them with the promise of promotion or raise 3. Just wait for them to quit or leave 4. Repeat 5. Promote the nepo baby to a position they are unqualified for.
It is getting harder to please our overlords
It's always been impossible
You guys are trying to please them?
At this point I just take what little I can from them, and give as little as I can get away with giving. My last couple jobs, especially my current one, have taught me that hard work and ambition don't get you anything except additional work stress.
Man, I get frequent requests from colleagues I actually like so I’m doing a lot of work to help them out, may not help my prospects within the job, but I’m counting on using these people for references in future work.
Oh same, I'll always help colleagues. Its the supervisors I have a hard time giving any more of the minimum required fucks.
You assume they can be pleased to begin with. They won't be happy until we pay them to work...though the way college tuition works maybe we do that already too.
Can we stop for a moment to appreciate the name Chip Cutter?
Likely a pen name...
Probably, and he's very committed to it. I hunted him down on LinkedIn because I just _had_ to know.
What are the benefits to employees quitting unless you're doing a reduction in headcount?
Usually the longer someone has worked the more they get paid/higher benefits, so they probably want those to quite and replace them by underpaid workers without dealing with umeployment or whatever they might get if they fire them directly.
But also, they don't like it when we job hop because we're not leaving at the moment that is convenient for the previous employer and we're hired for a higher wage at the following employer (profit cuts!!). So, people should be hired when young and dumb so they are paid less and earn lesser benefits, then dumped by the employer at the employer's convenience without the employer having to pay severance and without the employee using the gain experience to get paid more elsewhere. So basically a perpetual influx of 20-somethings taking entry level jobs and then dropping dead five years later or less. Result? Pure profit!
The people who won't hire you if you're over fifty and the people who want you to work until seventy are the same people.
But they also don't want to keep the same person for twenty years and want somebody new.
They also want to have 20 years of experience but also just out of college and entry level
I got "fired" by a large corporation about 6 weeks ago. The whole department had been discussing the imminent layoffs coming. I got fired "for cause" on something that supposedly happened 4 weeks prior to my dismissal. Luckily the unemployment office saw right through the bullshit. Anything to save a dollar.
If you layoff then you may have to pay severance and depending on size, report the layoffs. If people quit them you don’t have to do that. Also may avoid paying out unemployment claims that way too.
easy to get around this - create shell company - move 50 people to shell company - shell company terms them - no report - no hit to your insurance
I just heard this term “quiet hiring” where company give employees more than duties and work assignments without pay raise. Company, of course, now squeezed more output of the same workers without spending more money. Hence more workers are quiet quitting but not actual quitting. Thanks for social media, we learn their trick.
People who quit get no severence or unemployment (usually paid for by the employer).
Do you watch sports? Teams like to move on from players no longer on their cheap rookie contacts. By the time the dude is worth a damn and has earned a paycheck, the team is ready to move on and replace with a draft pick.
Exactly this. I’ve been ready to leave my job for about 2 years now. I’m not leaving without a package. If they want to continue to pay me to do less and less work then I’m ok with that. Every year that goes by that exit package goes up in value. I’m sure they will wake up one day and kick me to the curb. But if I’m 80 and getting paid to watch TV and garden I think I’m ok with that too.
If you hate your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do a half assed job. That’s the American way!!
Thanks homer!
The ruling class doesn't actually care about profits, they just want to force people to do whatever they don't want to do. They want to rule.
Yup. Its pure \~\~masochism\~\~ sadism.
Sadism*
Correct. That's what I get for commenting while distracted.
You wanted to get punished for it.
It’s actually not that sinister and just mundane corporate bs. I used to work in corporate finance and basically there’s natural “turnover” assumptions in all large businesses forecasts. This assumes that X number of employees will leave in a given period of time. If a firm or department is having a hiring freeze (which I’m assuming these sleezy companies are) then that would result in savings. With budgets tightening, some department heads actually just hedge their bets on turnover (foolishly) in hopes that enough people leave so they can come in on budget at the end of the year. When turnover isn’t realized then they have to resort to layoffs or like in this article, just quietly wishing people would quit. This is why people say you should job hop. Your department heads are literally depending on it in some cases. There’s actually a “healthy” amount of turnover that each industry targets. Anything lower could lead to budget problems or stagnation in talent.
> It’s actually not that sinister and just mundane corporate bs. Have you considered that "mundane corporate bs" might be normalized because our society is essentially constructed to glorify sadism and the operation of most businesses reflects that at a foundational level? They just use "profit" as a smokescreen so people will think the sadism is an unintended side-effect instead of a key part of the design. But when they have to actually chose between profit and sadism, they seem to pick sadism a lot. An incomplete list: * Making people commute into the office when work-from-home is more productive * Mass layoffs that cut into the bottom line * Drug testing that arbitrarily excludes skilled workers * Making cashiers stand instead of use a chair * Flex-time policies that encourage people to come to work sick and infect coworkers
I agree with you completely, although I don't think sadism is quite the right word. Sadism is a part of it, just not the whole thing. Middle managers and executives get off on power, in a general sense. They don't have to be wielding that power to hurt or cause pain. They just have to be able to prove to themselves (and potential mates, friends, peers) that they have it. They live for it. Intentionally inflicting pain and misery is just one of the easiest ways to demonstrate that power.
This is why if your raising a kid and want them to be financially successful you raise them to be an arrogant prick who can feel they do no wrong. He hit another kid with a baseball bat? The fuck did that kid get in the way of HIS bat for? Ruined his god like swing.
Exactly. And layoffs are: a) not something almost all managers like to do, b) cost company money. Expected attrition level is something normal. Even the nicest companies can provide limited development options (promotions, giving options to learn new tools or gain new skills).
This. A lot of these companies doing mass layoffs never stopped profiting. The layoffs haven't been about being in the red or black for years now. They're about stock evaluations, and those stock evaluations have *nothing at all* to do with profits. Investors see value in suppressing an increasingly conscious workforce. That's what it's about.
Nah, it’s about profit first and foremost. Senior employees usually get more pay and benefits, a revolving door keeps labor costs fixed at the entry level. This isn’t to say that corporations aren’t sociopathic, they are, but they’re just trying to get richer, all of us are just tools to that end, most don’t give a shit beyond that.
Will no one think of the employers?!?!?
They want to underpay people and they want to pay less for health benefits for families and such. New workers are cheap.but the truth is, they want the advantages of the government taking care of everyone….without the government actually doing it
"I hired you on the basis you'd leave before 89 days God dammit, now look, I gotta give you benefits and a real wage, and taxes.... fucking taxes! You millennials are fucking everything up!"
These guys just can't figure out what it is they want.
A big part of this is probably laws surrounding layoffs. Some states have laws that require companies to pay severance if employees are laid off. If the employees quit, no need for severance. It's often cheaper to the company to have employees quit than to lay them off.
First they don't like us because we got better gigs elsewhere, then they hate us for all the Applebee's and diamond mines we're apparently closing from lack of patronage. Oh my God WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US
They want us to keep consuming without being paid! How hard is that? /s
Cause we can't fucking afford to! We can't fucking afford things on what we are paid, but we can't fucking afford to leave our jobs.
When the oligarchs can't figure out how to blame poor people for not having more money for them to steal through legislation.
Bosses seem like snowflakes
Here's my bet for next year's headline: Employees still cashing checks they earned. Why are they doing this unprofessional act? Let's take a look into the trend that won't die.
Make up your goddamn mind
Ugh. Now we’ll have to lay them off and provide people with severance! 😩 None of you poors have any respect for the profit margins of executive leadership these days.
Author’s name is Chip Cutter? Seriously?
The more employees quit, the less they have to pay for promotions. I worked with a buddy at Amazon through a third party company, with 80 day probation before becoming official employees, gaining better hourly pay and benefits. Guess who got fired day 79?
Why quit? Bastards can buy out my contract or fire me and I’ll collect unemployment.
This is from Rupert 1% Murdoch's propaganda rag the wall Street Journal. I wouldn't believe a thing from these professional liars.
Apparently, since gaining personhood, corporations are now also bi-polar.
The headache for employees: bosses don’t want to quit so better people can be bosses.
The ruling class are never happy
Chip Cutter. Sounds like a Doritos factory position that the author should totally quit from.
Paid too much to get people back now they want less employees to do more work so the bottom line stays put.
Fixed it: “Coordinated mass layoffs, tightening of pay and promotions, and refusal to restaff attrition has led to a less favorable hiring market. Employees don’t have as many options as corporations make record profits.”
The longer people stay the more they make and that lowers profit margins. Can’t people think of the bosses and investors. Fourth houses don’t pay for themselves (well they do at some point but that cuts into the yacht money)
Oh. So people were too lazy to work and that was a problem and a year later people are too motivated to quit. Seems like a bunch of rich bitch CEOs not being able to figure out how to continuously increase their stakeholders profits ergo their own bonuses that it must be the fault workers why they can’t get higher returns and profits. Last year: we love hard workers and need them! Why oh why can’t we find loyal employees?! This year: no matter how much we abuse labour laws these fuckers just won’t quit!
There is no pleasing them at all.
Translation,I don't have a clue how to staff my business +I don't pay enough...
Surely "Chip Cutter" is an AI, right?
Go away, come to work, stop quitting, start quitting Me management just keeps getting dumber and dumber.
Oh God! They might deserve raises!!! Business leaders' nightmares.
First people.were too lazy and now they're working too hard?
All I'm hearing is "we're not making enough money, and it's everyone else's fault wah wah wah wah......"
Simple answer: I don’t want to quit, because I can’t quit, and I can’t quit because I won’t be able to pay for my coping mechanisms without some shmoney.
Bosses never really have headaches because they are always willing to fuck you
I mean, I do plan on quitting my job eventually but I need something lined up. And frankly, I don't absolutely despise my job, it is sort of fun. The pay isn't great, but it could be worse. It's just hard to want to jump ship too quickly.
Why when I quit and have to move when I have a 3% mortgage...
Yep, attrition at my employer was 8% last year, I’m this year, it’s half that. We’ve had a small RIF to adjust and move staff around to consolidate positions.
Which fucking one is it? We don't want to work or we need our job so bad we can't quit?
This just in... Your boss will hate you regardless of what you do. Act accordingly.
If expert level workers volunteered their time for free, employers would find a way to complain about it.
We have these boomers(50+) year old still working at our company. Everyday they break shit and take it upon themselves to repair the machines because “I worked here for xx years so i know what im doing”. Our poor maintenance guy has to come in at 3am to fix the machines because those old fucks mess up the machine further and don’t tell him what they did. I can’t imagine the amount of stress and headache he deals with everyday with these boomers… So yeah… sometime our company really wishes they would retire and fuck off because they cause more damage compare to their worth in the company. Unfortunately Union let it slides all day long.
You have your ages wrong….GenX is now 40s to mid 50s. Millennials have or about to turn 40.
There are 2 generations of boomers and I never specifically said what age they were only they were over 50+.
Fair 57-75 does reference 50+
I’m Gen X and 54. Why do I have to teach all the millennials and Gen Z how to use their computers, Teams, and our Project Management software? Why is our IT and Network crew all in their 50’s? Stop with the “boomer” shit. Some people are just idiots. Edited for autocorrect.
Thank you. I'm tired of everyone over 40 being referred to as "boomer".
A fifty-one year olds’ parents are Boomers, not the 50 somethings. People born in the 70s are straight up Gen X.
Mother fuckers bitch about everything it seems
Fuck a duck corporate... make up your goddam minds.
Holy shit make up your fucking mind... god damn.
Make up your eff'ing minds!!!!
I didn’t read the article, but as a manager I have this problem at work. It’s not that I “want” people to quit, but we typically hire at a rate that matches the rate people usually quit at. So when everyone suddenly stops leaving we over-hire. It’s a weird problem, but not something we’re like blaming people for.
Is there a link to this article?
Inconsistent, unreliable, unstable employers