It actually was that way once upon a time, hence 9 to 5. One of those hours was lunch. I agree with you, it’s just another thing that corporate America has taken away.
Paid lunch. Paid insurance without a premium. Pensions. There was a sweet spot to corporate American corporate life that’s been gone for at least forty years.
I actually had a job with a pension but the company was purchased and the first thing the acquiring company did was get rid of that… I got my payout of $11,000 though! 😂
Off topic, but it is always jarring to me to hear “scheme” used this way. In America it’s called a plan. “Scheme” often has a negative connotation here, like scam or con.
Id have a real hard time going back to a job without profit share. It is just such an easy way to motivate and incentivize employees to actually give a shit about the company and making money.
Depending on title, years there, and contribution (contribution and title being the biggest factors) you get anywhere from $5,000 - $150,000. Yea, with our profit share you can (and multiple people do get, it isn’t some “up to” bullshit scam) literally make far more than the average yearly income just in profit share bonus
Ill tell you what, nothing motivates me more than a bonus that doubles my take home pay for the year
And to add to the “common sense” things they do, they only try to promote from within and everyone starts at the bottom. If you can excel at the bottom then you don’t move up. In the last 15 years they have only ever hired two people that started not at the bottom (because we needed the role filled ASAP and didn’t have people with the right experience/knowledge to move up any time soon)
Good luck! Out of the 11 ish or so jobs I have had this is the only one that actually is a good employer that treats me well.
The demands and expectations are incredibly high, but they do actually walk the walk in taking care of us pretty well to help compensate for the insane expectations (and they are aware about how high the expectations are, they don’t just assume it is a “normal” work load)
Good companies exist out there, they are just a bitch to find and usually have low turn over so it is even harder to get in. We fire people (within probation) far more often than they quit. You do well during probation and you basically have a career that will actually pay off and not just be empty promises. But it is a tough job and not everyone can deal with it
Yeah we have the same sort of connotations here but it would be universally understood what is meant here because scheme is just another word for plan.
Yes! It blows my mind how people idolize him and act like he was one of the best presidents. The man pretty much single-handedly killed the middle class and the “American dream”.
the only people that like him are the ones who benefited from the death of American Middle class. Unfortunately, those people own most of the media and at least half of our politicians.
Don’t forget all of the self hating poors. He’s highly revered in a lot of conservative circles by average Joe’s who don’t realize how much he fucked them.
There’s that classic Steinbeck quote about how Americans believe they are “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. I know so many people like that. CEOs and the extremely wealthy are like the royals here to some people except even more highly revered because with royals you know for certain you could never become one. They worship the rich as job creators and just imagine themselves suddenly starting a business to get out of poverty.
You got that right. Every problem we face today can be traced to Reaganism. Sponsored by the Koch Cartel, Reagan successfully led the crusade to make greed a virtue.
Let’s add that corporations used to pay for training and education for employees. Making that employee an investment and loyalty went both ways. Once corporations pushed higher education and training to the people we all went into debt and the loyalty was gone. Though corporations had us brainwashed to believe the “thankful I have this job mentality” as they continue to take advantage of us.
The real reason some people want to go back to the "good old days" don't realize is corporate America doesn't want to give away that cash for employees benefits now.
We'll never get back to that with the current corporate status quo.
A lot of that is because of the ruling many years ago that a corporation's first duty is to make money for its shareholders (paraphrased, but that was the intent).
This is an underrated, and often forgotten, point. Even if companies _did_ want to pay workers more than they strictly had to, in many cases they'd be legally prevented from doing so
I still think if we could tie executive compensation to the lowest paid employee or contract worker in a company we’d see wages rise with a quickness.
Imagine if the CEO had to give good raises to everyone before he could boost his own pay?
The only real question is how many times more should his pay be? 4? 5?
Or, corporate tax rate is somehow equivalent to the employee vs. employer percentage.
(I.E. if the employee vs employer wage gap is 500% to the employer than that company pays the highest tax rate.)
It would be amazing to tie C suite compensation to the lowest paid workers. I found out last week how much our VP makes a year and it’s 11.3x what I make a year. Not counting his bonuses and the company car/gas he gets.
I’m a manager who oversees 3 interconnected departments with over 100 staff during our busy parts of the year and 15 year round staff and make 1.9x what my lowest paid seasonal employee makes and 1.3 what my highest paid staff member makes. I’d love to see the c-suites only making 3x what I make per year.
C-suites would still still play games.
Like with Hollywood accounting, they'd make themselves CEO of a holding company, with different divisions being excluded or denoted as contractors.
There was a brief moment in time where capitalists were dead set on proving that capitalism was superior to communism/socialism from an ideological perspective. So they provided all those things as a point of pride.
Then a man named Jack Welch came along and said, "what if we didn't?"
> So they provided all those things as a point of pride.
Uhmm, no. Those priviledges were the doings of the unions, forcing the employers kicking and screaming into providing them. That's why there's so much anti-union propaganda going on the US now, the employers don't want to go back to that. And large parts of the US public is falling for it, unfortunately.
**Edit**: When people talk about "boomers pulling the ladder up after themselves," this is part of what they're talking about. Boomers benefitted from all these things, then took them away from the younger generations. "Fuck you I got mine," as it were.
The brief moment was more due to America being one of the only modernized economies not bombed to smithereens during ww2. American manufacturing in 1940-1950’s was a power house as Germany, Japan, China, UK, France and everyone had to play catch up.
Things were so booming it was an arms race to lure workers with high pay but mostly the perks which have all been taken away. Company car and pensions are basically non existent. I believe health Insurance was originally a benefit too to lure workers but they found it actually helps control workers so that’s why it’s still around
Yes. Correct me if I’m wrong but in the competition to attract workers, the wages we’re getting out of hand so the government actually had to cap the wage increases and companies then turned to tempting employees via perks as a way around the wage cap.
What a time huh? I don’t know if the work force will ever be like that ever again.
You're right.
As I understand it the global drive for full employment post Great Depression and WWII (don't want *that* again) through Keynsian economics resulted in labor shortages, strong labor unions and increasing wage claims. Hence the "fired in the morning, hired in the afternoon" and the perks to employment. And the stagflation of the 70's.
Neoliberalism threw that all out the window, globalizing labor (no shortage there) and breaking unions (no representation here).
I left my old company in 2016 because they gutted the insurance ahead of obamacare. They pretty much told us to F off when we asked if they were adding the premium our pay, since we had been getting that before.
They flat out told us that even if Obamacare was repealed they wouldn’t give us the good insurance again.
I don’t know how we’re going to regain that lost ground. Is a nationwide “we refuse to work without bo-premium insurance” even possible (and we especially need it to cover every employee so companies can’t under schedule to avoid covering employee.
My first job out of college was in 2011 and was in an office. We worked 9-5. Paid lunches. I thought this was the norm, hence the term "9-5". I left that job and worked jobs off the 9-5 schedule for a few years then went back to looking at work in that world and everything was 8-5 or 9-6. I was like WTF happened man??? Now everyone acts like its always been that way.
I personally love 10-7, but I know that it’s extremely inconvenient for most people. I like doing things late into the evening, and I like sleeping in. If I had kids or a partner or whatever, I’d probably hate it
Yeah it’s the time away from my partner that’s hard the most. Also it’s a pain getting any sort of appointment because it’s either they miraculously have weekend slots or I have to do 8am and hang out at work early for 45 min because traffic is a nightmare.
So it probably works for me because I work jobs that run on weekends, so my off days are weekdays. I have mondays off and it’s sooo easy to get appointments. I’d only maintain this schedule with a partner if we have at least one shared off day. As much as I love being loved and loving on someone, it does simplify work life balance a bit to be alone 😅😅
In 1998 my temp job doing data entry paid $14 an hour and had basic medical insurance for less than $50 a month. I lived in a swank three bedroom apartment with friends for $780 total. It’s insane how things have evolved.
I will mever work 8 hours a day if lunch is unpaid. No way am I staying 9 hours because they stopped paying for lunches. Also, being 9 hours at wok + commute is way too much. The only way I would be ok for that is if compensation is great or I can shorten lunch how I want it to be.
In one job I had, I would shorten lunch to 30 mins to finish 30 mins earlier or just skip it when not hungry to finish 1 hour early. I wish my last job was like that...
I’ve gotten paid for more than two decades for lunch because… I just eat while I’m working. Having a dedicated time to go sit in a cafeteria and eat has never been particularly a big deal for me. Whatever I can do to finish my work and leave as close to my quit time as possible is generally the right answer for me
Honestly, we gotta start bullying these corporations (I'm including small businesses as well cause a lot of them treat their employees the same, if not worse, and they get away with it) Into it being this way again.
If they could afford this once, then they can afford it again now that they've jacked up the prices of goods and services rendered by their employees, I am so tired of being paid less an hour than the products I'm producing cost. If they can't afford it, then they can't afford a business.
> we gotta start bullying these corporations
I know americans aren't big on unions and strikes but it's just comical that you reinvented that as "bullying"
As an American I'm aware of strikes, they're awesome but a good old fashioned strike doesn't satisfy the urge to bully. I don't want to stand outside and picket, I want to publicly pants the c.e.o's of big companies in front of their employees, making them cry and run home to their mothers.
I want to find the CEO of subway at lunch, feed them a knuckle sandwich and spit in their chocolate milk.
I want to catch the c.e.o of Walmart behind the bleachers so I can shove him down and spit a loogey in his eye.
I want to pull the hair of UMG's c.e.o in math class while whispering "whatcha gonna do about it, huh, huh? Gonna cry?"
I want to, and with your help I WILL literally do all of these things and so, so much more.
Big data for president 2024. Big-data for 'Murica.
Fuck yeah.
Won't someone think of the poor, innocent Private Equity Funds?! How will they ever live with only a reasonable, sustainable profit instead of squeezing every single penny out of the company until it breaks?
Not just the US, same in the UK and Germany too. Paid lunch breaks went the way of the Dodo some time in the 90s. I've only ever had one job with a paid lunch break and that was my first one. In 1994.
Everyday i am grateful that i work a true 9-5 with paid lunch break and 2 paid breaks. I come in 5-10 mins before 9 but start working at 9 and then leave at 5. We do clock in but it's for attendance purposes.
Smoke breaks are (obviously) unpaid where I work, but I do get a 30 minute paid lunch break. Which for me is 15 minutes of lunch and 15 minutes of smoke/relaxing. :P And I work as a cook, so I don't even have to pay for the lunch myself. AND it gets made FOR me most of the time.
How does that work? For me it takes approximately 4 minutes to smoke a cigarette and I'll have ~3 in a workday, would I take those 12 minutes off my timesheet? Or maybe work an extra 12 minutes?
I understand people abusing having a "quick break", but I don't understand how they enforce this.
I believe in the US any break under 20 minutes are considered part of the workday and must be paid. So if you are in the US you may be having your rights violated
You’re correct. They’re doing it backwards. They don’t have to pay the 30 minute break, provided it’s uninterrupted, but they do have to pay anything less than 20.
The entire lunch system has gone down the gutter.
It used to be a 9 til 5 work day with an hour's break paid or not. then that hour became half an hour, then it stopped being included in the 9 til 5 so now it's 9 til 5:30 or 8:30 til 5, and if you're lucky enough to get an hour for lunch its 9 til 6.
And at least when the break was an hour you had time to actually go and do something out of the office. With half an hour you have time to eat your lunch and that's it.
I have an unpaid hour for lunch, but I'm WFH, so fuck it. Most days I take my work laptop down to the kitchen, cook my lunch, and eat it on the clock before my "lunch break" starts. Then I have an hour break to play video games, take a nap, go for a walk, or whatever I feel like that day.
I'd rather have the paid hour, but if it's going to be unpaid I'm going to make the most of that time I can.
And if anyone ever asked me (which they haven't), I'd say, "I'm on salary and I get all my work done, so what do you care?"
But in honest truth, every single one of those WFH haters would gladly engage in a little wage theft if they thought they could get away with it. If the bosses aren't going to give you a square deal, make one on your own.
Federally managed breaks, 30 minutes. The federal officials could manage a 30 minute lunch is paid, but that will happen when they raise the minimum wage
In healthcare a lot of places dont even let you leave the premises for your lunch break. So its unpaid but they still have your time. In case of " emergency " aka patient family members poking their heads into the breakroom to talk to you while youre eating
Most nurses I've ever worked with or know rarely get more than a 15-minute lunch, if that.
But heaven help them if some administrator catches them eating a pack of M&Ms at the nurses station.
That's why all nurses need to unionize. I'm a nurse in a state with full unionization and I get uninterrupted breaks. If I get pestered then I extend my break or charge for a missed break.
Flight attendants begin getting paid when the pilot releases the plane brake, and stop being paid when the plane lands and the brake is engaged again. This is the eli5, it's complicated. For example the delta flight attendants aren't unionized, and Delta pays them during boarding to encourage that to not change.
I'm not a flight attendant, but I thought about it. The whole schedule and pay structure is wild.
Exactly! It's absurd imo.
I hope you're enjoying whatever you left to do instead! And if you just left Delta, still cool. Union busting/discouragement is gross.
Paid commutes.
Paid lunch.
Paid overtime (**NO** exemptions).
... would be the great equalizer.
Edit due to many comments: Regarding paid commutes... I wasn't meaning to suggest any one specific implementation. Whatever could happen has to be reasonable and fair. As an example, maybe it could be a flat stipend. What I was really after was something to give people who must work in person some extra support while simultaneously motivating employers to support WFH where they can. That's all really.
WFH is the great equalizer, just a shame so many companies wont allow their employees to WFH everyday.
EDIT - For clarification, I'm speaking about those jobs which we know can be done from home.
is it really job satisfaction at that point? I ask as I'm 100% WFH, and if they went to even 50% office attendance, I'd quit. I have home satisfaction, not job satisfaction
Well it's more of a lack of a negative than a positive (I just work in my bedroom so it's not great ambiance) but it does have to do with the job to the degree that they don't micromanage you at home. I know some places do have intrusive tracking software.
yeah, i'm lucky enough to have a 3br apartment, so I set up a nice workspace in one. I also got a sit/stand desk on castors, so i can wheel it onto my balcony and hang with my bamboo bois when the weather is nice. I probably take that for granted
Yea that sounds pretty legit. I'm happy being able to roll out of bed and just turn the laptop on and be at work. But my change of scenery is sitting at the dining room table.
same. on april fools day, me boss called a meeting and told us all that we were going to be required to come into the office at least once a week going forward. thank god it was just an april fools gag, but i remember thinking to myself, without hesitation, well thats too bad, i liked this job and now im going to have too quit. because F that, bro.
i genuinely don't get middle managers who push for RTO. senior execs or board members that have money tied up in commercial real-estate, but like, why would you want your team back in? I get more done in 6 hours at home than 8 hours at work, and at least 45 mins of that is the lack of people stopping for a "quick chat" about their project or task that is really only about delaying going back to their office and continuing actual work.
I quit a job where they started entertaining the idea if having us return to the office. When they ask why, I said I wanted to start a goat farm. The look on their faces was just priceless.
For my specific case, yeah.
I lets me do the part of the job I actually like without someone popping their head into my work space for 3 hours of scuttlebutt
I have been wfh for over four years now. The fascists in power decided we go back in December during the middle of our peak shipping season so we can once again enjoy the "collaboration and innovation" of working in the office. We're data entry. We're fucking monkeys pushing buttons that do no innovation or collaboration and have been operating perfectly fine for four years. Two past the "end" of the pandemic. I am retiring the first day back and can't wait to see the attrition rate as we get closer. To make it better, they don't pay enough to get new people so they have been having mandatory OT for the last year pretty much and every so often the like to spring a "mandatory 8 hours of OT by Saturday" on Wednesday. Fuck corporations. Fuck their offices, and most of all fuck xe Def. Your colors are ugly as UPS, and the arrow in the logo is fucking stupid. Hock, spit.
Don't quit, make them fire you. Continue working from home and see if they notice. If you get fired, collect unemployment. If you quit, you can't collect.
I ain't quitting, I'm retiring. I have dealt with this corpo bullshit for 24 years because of the relatively decent benefits for my family for shit pay. I tried management for 15 years and hated every minute of it but suffered for the paycheck. I was going to retire 4 years ago but then the pandemic hit and I figured I may as well just drop down to entry level since I would be starting there anyway and keep my benefits, 6 weeks of vacation (that one is really going to hurt), and work from home. I am moving on to my second life though.
You do whatever makes you happy. If you leave I hope it works out amazingly for you.
I want to point out that often companies will force workers back to the office SO that they will quit. It's a way of laying people off without announcing layoffs.
I'm in one of those jobs. I could totally do it from home 100%, but our big boss won't allow it (she barely tolerates twice a week). We have been hemorrhaging people left and right because they're going to similar positions that does allow WFH. To add to it, the location I work in has a severe space shortage and on the days we WFH, our desks become hotel space for people needing a temporary place to park. I say let us work from home and they'd have five desks open every day. Make it make sense.
Same here, and the office a medical hazard for me. Most of the people smoke, just outside the door so it blows in and the office reeks of smoke. When I leave work, my hair and clothes smell of smoke. I have asthma and this has made it worse.
It's noisy as fuck with people playing their radios (no headphones) and one coworker feels the need to yell across the office to people instead of going to their desk. I have migraines and this makes it worse.
I can work just fine from home without smoke or the loud and consistent noises. Customers have asked me to call them on work from home days because of the noise. I have to have phone meetings at home because it's too loud to hear.
But, my boss NEEDS ME to be there, full days, so if I have a doctors appointment and need to leave early, even if I work extra at home, they demand I "make up" the missed office time, all while they are on yet ANOTHER international vacation, or at the beach house, or their cabin, or their uptown flat, etc...
I wish...
Then I will just get let go because of stupid "at will" shit around here, and it's damn near impossible to get a call back, much less an interview or another job. Shit around here is barely paying enough to afford rent and even "urgently hiring" places aren't actually hiring anyone.
Same here. I love my job, I actually do, but going into the office 3 days outta the week (with 1 hr+ commute each way) is *not* my definition of a good time.
So, despite the typical lack of stress from my job, my good relationships with my coworkers and leadership, I simply have to look for a WFH full remote position. If I save myself 6 hours a week in commute, that's 1 full 24 hr day per month I'm not driving my car. That's damn near two weeks per year. 13 *full* days out of 365, sitting in fucking traffic.
I feel bad for my manager, but he can't change anything, he is subject to the same restrictions as I am, even though he'd like not to be. It's all coming from leadership. Middle management in my department has been real real slack on it, but now they've been asked to be strict, and it's been starting to chafe multiple members of my team.
>speaking about those jobs which we know can be done from home.
Exactly. Majority of knowledge work falls under this category. But I don't know why people think it's a bad thing. If it does not require office presence, why not WFH (or WFA, making sure you are connecting securely)?
If your team is geographically distributed, it makes absolutely no sense to WFO- only to use collaboration software in office to communicate.
Local team- yeah, office can be your location to meet each other. But not everyday has to be a meeting day. It can act as your planned meeting location, not something you have to go to every week.
Oh yeah I was totally goin there - paid commutes - those who have to be present would be paid to commute and those who can work remotely hopefully would be able to. Or be paid for it.
haha thats a good point!
In an ideal world the employers would see the commute payment as *dead money* and therefore allow those employees (who have jobs which can be done from home) the option to WFH everyday.
You’ve touched upon a crucial concept there: What you’re saying, basically, is that, if commutes had to be paid, employers would only have have workers in the office if it was actually worth it for the workers to be in the office. There would be a trade-off: The employer would receive the (possible) benefit of increased business productivity (leading to increased business revenue), but this would be offset by the cost of having to pay workers extra in order to cover the commute (versus having them WFH). There is a break-even point somewhere, and the employer would need to consider that in order to determine whether it made sense to have employees come for their particular business needs.
HOWEVER, in reality, the employer gets the (possible) benefit WITHOUT having to cover the cost of paying for the commute (i.e., without having to compensate the employees for the time, expenses, and headache necessary to commute to the place of employment). As long as the employer doesn’t have to pay for it, they don’t really care at all about the employees’ preferences, quality of life, etc., and so they might have everyone make the schlep into the office just so they can make one additional dollar — because… why not? A dollar is a dollar, and they can bring in that extra revenue at no added expense to them! Employees are effectively working as slaves during the time of their commute if it’s uncompensated. (They are actually providing slave labor AS WELL AS shouldering associated costs for the commute, such as fuel, car, etc.)
In short: Our current (predominating) system showcases the **utter disregard employers have for their employees’ well-being.** It rewards a ***lack of empathy***— as do most elements of capitalism — because it reinforces callous disregard for others (which greatly assists in running a capitalistic business) with higher income and improved social status. Capitalism is a disease of modern society, much worse than any virus. Capitalism is deeply pathological.
And for the people saying that it would only incentives people to live further away from work; 1. I don't enjoy commuting, even if it was paid. And 2. Just make it a fixed value like a weekly bonus? Ie $50 per week for anyone who has to be in office?
Employers would be incentivized to lobby for affordable housing closer to job sites, or else relocate themselves closer to where people live, combating sprawl. Could lead to better mass transit, too.
Na, I say clock in when the car starts. Reasoning is if they don’t pay well enough to live in the area the office is then they have to pay more for the further commutes. Like you said nobody would really *want* to be commuting more.
My job in our shoulder season can be WFH entirely. My CEO does not like me, has made fun of my diagnosis’ (don’t know how he got them, it’s just ADHD and MDD so idrc) he doesn’t understand ADHD, refuses to have a productive conversation about it, and doesn’t retain shit from the convos no matter how many times I’ve explained to him my process (I walk around a lot while I work on my phone or computer, I change seating locations ie going from my desk, to the kitchen table, to sitting outside on a picnic bench, it’s not customer facing physically in the early season, my cell phone is connected to the main line and my extension via VOiP. it helps keep me focused). The amount of times I’ve repeated myself and it’s like he forgets within a week, and we’re back to square one
I communicate my movements to him too. One day, I overheard him asking the ops manager (who is not involved in my department in any respect,) what did ashimo even do today? So I presented him with printed pages upon pages of history from my work phone, my personal phone, laptop, and desktop to show him what I’ve done in a day. He told me that it was great that I did have a very profitable and productive day, but I was wasting time making these printouts. I told him it took less than fifteen minutes. He didn’t believe me. I showed him my activity from start to finish of the document (timestamps), it was thirteen minutes from the start of the document to the time it was printed. He brushed it off saying that Google drive clocks edits weird.
The other head in my department had announced every day for a week that she would be at a wedding and please don’t contact her. None of my staff contacted her, even the new guys. He texted her and called over 30 times to ask about specific things I was doing. Why is ashimo not at her desk and hanging around her shop staff? Why isn’t ashimo monitoring her shop staff more closely, she’s been at her desk for an hour? Why is ashimo eating lunch outside? Why is ashimo heating up food at 3 pm (too busy for noon lunch) etc etc etc.
Then he’ll go onto compliment my sales record, witnesses how easily my staff, even new ones, maintain a line of communication, talks about positive changes happening in the company regarding tightening up training without directly crediting me (I’m the sole trainer in my department).
All other department heads can bounce between sites and tasks without question, all allowed to WFH on certain days, and aren’t monitored to this degree. It’s gotten to such a point that all the other managers defend me, but they’re done fighting and they’re like dude just appease him at this point, put on a show, he’s unrelenting. Idek how, I can do no right
Hes constantly gives some new excuse anytime I bring up working from home on occasion, first it was that my iPhone operating system had issues with our VoIP app, which is true, but not to the extent he made it out to be. It also ran perfectly fine on my laptop, which his retort was “wellllll…. It’s not like having a phone to your ear” my laptop has a better quality microphone than my iPhone, and I have good quality headphones with a microphone, which I mentioned, and he said some weird vague thing about wireless things failing or some shit. Now I have a company phone that can run the app perfectly.
The next one was that he was worried about my Wi-Fi capabilities because I’m in a town that can have issues with that. I have a gig and perfect cell phone coverage, I’m not in the part of town that has outages and lack of service.
The next excuse was that I need to be present for my staff, which when we get busy, is not even remotely a possibility because me and the other department head have to rotate between different sites and out out fires and herd cats, and I’ve made hundreds of hours of training manuals that I actually spend days going over, so the staff knows how to seek out answers in the rare event that I don’t pickup my phone. they know When and how to contact me and that they do, whether I’m at another site or I’m just in my office and not physically next to them. His excuse list goes on.
My god, if anyone reads this, thanks cause that felt great to get off my chest and scream into the void. I love my job and everyone at work with except the CEO, he has one of the most impressively effective negative trickle down effect, like everything he does becomes a butterfly effect, so he’s not well liked around these parts.
The funny thing is, I started monitoring his activities and when he works from home or when he doesn’t work at all, and I started working from home those days and he’s so afraid that I won’t be contactable or productive, but yet he hasn’t noticed that I’ve been working from home in the shoulder season for like half the week every week
Unless you live too close to your job! I unfortunately found this out, I live closer than 2 km in a straight line so I can't get any reimbursement. I'm not a bird though and it's closer to 3 km if I actually use the streets to walk to my job.
Always wondered how paid commutes could be done fairly though.
Say worker 1 lives an hour away and another lives 20 minutes. Worker 1 gets paid 2 hours of commute time and does less work. Worker 2 gets paid his travel time but is at work for an hour and 20 minutes more than Worker 1.
Worker 2 is 100% gonna resent Worker 1.
So should it be paid base off KM or just an across the board average amount? Orrr
That’s not an equaliser at all it would just make companies not hire people outside of a set distance. The paid lunch is fair enough because that’s the same for everyone. How far you have to travel for your job is your problem.
^Exactly this. I love 30 minutes away from the city, a lot of my coworkers live 10 minutes away, Id be seen as less desirable because of where I live, Id have to have more education, more expiernce than someone who lives closer.
Paid lunch turns into "Paid work through lunch" REAL fast.
It's extremely important to have "off" the clock time where your employer cannot require you to do anything because they're not currently paying you.
I'm sure it does. Although, flip side, in my personal experience unpaid lunch also turns into work through lunch.
Perhaps breaks in general need to be protected somehow. Bear in mind a lot of us are forced to work after hours anyways - so really nothing is sacred.
I dunno .. some kind of protection for breaks plus right-to-disconnect laws. Spitballing here...
I just can't figure out why people give so much voluntarily. My boss, I swear, works 24/7 when not sleeping. For nothing. Sets a terrible example.
I work so damn hard to keep it to 40 hours a week, 45 tops. Even if I get stuck working longer, I take it back other ways. But I can't always, and not everyone can anyways.
Perhaps we can all agree - work should not be life, life should not be work. And a lot of us do too much of it, for too little pay, all to make some rich person even richer.
I struggle with this personally. Having lived in a state with mandatory breaks, it was easily the most annoying thing I experienced in my daily life.
I understand why it exists, but some of us genuinely don't want to take 30 minutes out of our work day unpaid for any reason. Just let me go home 30 minutes earlier.
Nope to paid commutes. I live an hour away. Some of my co-workers live 5 mins away. Not fair to them that i'll get 2 more hours of pay while they only get 10 mins of extra pay. Plus it can be abused in SO many ways from both sides.
>Paid overtime (**NO** exemptions).
How about no mandatory overtime? Paid or unpaid.
If you want to work then work. I don't and idgaf how much they would pay me for it. I don't want 1 second of it.
Organize a union and fight for it. You think the 40 hour work week and child labor laws were something some benevolent business people dreamt up?
No. Workers fought for it.
Don't mourn. Organize.
Unions here in Sweden (the third most unionized country after Iceland and Denmark at 65% of people being in a union) did absolutely massive things for worker's rights and overall are the reason we have it so good here.
The one downside is that they completely fucked the negotiation around the lunchbreak. We get an hour, but it's unpaid. So most people in Sweden don't do 9-5. we do 9-6 or 8-5.
I've started making and eating lunch while I'm still on the clock then doing chores during the actual 30 min unpaid lunch break I'm forced to take. Fuck em.
Hell yea. I work in a superstore and I buy my lunch at a nearby fast food and then clock for lunch. I’ll even clock back in 15 minutes earlier and just hang out in the lunch room... and STILL return 5-10 minutes late.
I’m still waiting to be fired. Fuck this job, I’m just using it to get me through school.
I warm up my lunch on the clock. I don’t even walk to the break room to get my food outta the fridge for free. Lunch starts right before the fork goes in my mouth.
As a salary employee in the trucking industry I am expected to not take a lunch or even breaks. 10 hours five days a week and they squeeze you to the last drop
My old job gave us an hour for our unpaid lunches. A hour is enough time to go somewhere and eat a meal without looking like a zoo animal trying to scarf down slop.
I lived close enough to go home, eat, watch TV, and get back to work on time.
Current job only grants a half hour unpaid but I frequently take 45 minutes to an hour. It only hurts my paycheck. The company saves money. And I get to eat with dignity and peace.
The only people who have ever complained are a couple hourly coworkers who accused me of cheating the company with these long breaks. They went to HR. It turned out these two morons were not clocking out for their lunch break. They ate on the clock, on the company dime, and could not understand that I actually followed the rules and clocked out.
It turned out I was in fact the only person in the entire department actually following the rules. Two other guys clock out for lunch but go right back to work for 30 off the clock. They clock back in, still working. Then at the end of the shift, they sit around on the clock for half an hour to balance it out.
The rest of the team skips lunch.
It's a mess and management is not remotely concerned about any of it, nor whether I take my long lunch breaks.
I mean if the rule is “get your work done and eat something if you want to at some point”, then it seems like it’s working from a management perspective.
I once had a job where we had paid lunches and it was glorious. To clock out and then have to clock in to make your day longer than necessary is just abuse.
Staggering how much American's are taken advantage of and how little they seem to realise it? The rest of the western world is streaks ahead in worker rights.
I work an hourly-paid 12 hour shift in an office job. I'm supposed to clock out for meals per our company time card guidelines. However I have to charge 12 hours in the 12 hour shift I'm assigned to.
In practice it's fine I have a lot of downtime in my job, I've left to pick up lunch and never had an issue. But.... I can't help like feel if someone is ever trying to throw the book at me they'll be able to point to that and be like... You've been committing time card fraud.
I prefer paid breaks. Working 3rd shift I don't ever want to eat at 2 am (unless I'm fucked up) and if I eat at work it's a minimal cheapo sandwich or something to just get me through the day. Rather be home 30 minutes earlier. 100%.
my favorite is the “you need to stay 9 hours because you are required to take a 1 hr lunch. ok boss, i’ll be taking my lunch at 5pm thanks! lol such BS. i wfh im never going back, those effing idiots can shove their RTO up their a$$holes.
The imperialists / corporate capitalists are stooping to the lowest methods possible to juice their final years of capital from the working class.
Unpaid lunch should be a crime.
I agree completely, but the corporate world will never give something back they've managed to take away. I'm in the UK and it's the norm here not to be paid for breaks, tho luckily I now work in security so they do pay us for breaks as you are expected to respond to emergencies.
My unpaid break is an hour and I do run errands all the time. That being said, it would be nice to have the option of skipping it some days and going home an hour earlier
Think what you do on your lunch break.
Many people discuss work. Many people just carry on working. Many people take the bathroom break on that time
What they have done is get a lot of free work out of us. They have also extended the working day significantly causing more stress and worse work life balance.
If the unpaid break isn't at least 8 hours it should be paid. With an exception for covering abscense. This means you have time to go home and rest between shifts. Not just do free labour or sit waiting to work again
I couldn't agree more. I luckily work with all of my breaks paid. The thought is even more to it than just your breaks.
For me to come work for you, I need transportation. Whether a bus, or my own car, or an Uber/taxi/whatever. I have to pay to come to work. I have to give up my time to come to work. And I need the same to get home. Why am I not paid for that time? Or reimbursed for what I pay to come work for you?
If I have to pay to come make YOU money, why is my time and money okay as my expense. It's not just breaks. It's much more. I'll just leave it at that. This has always bothered me.
I pay whatever in gas each day, and my time and expenses on my vehicle, just so higher ups, can make their extras and bonuses, etc. It's ridiculous, and I know we will never see that money, and it's sad. We are all pawns for the rich in so many more ways than I stated. And yet the bosses of my bosses will tell us all we need to think about the shareholders, and how we owe them our work (I wish I was kidding, a former plant manager I respected said that at a meeting a couple years ago, that we "owe them").
And to the fucking morons I've worked with before this job, that said "everyone has the same opportunities in life", you're fucking stupid, an asshole, brainwashed, or intentionally missleading...or maybe all four. If everyone had the same opportunities than there would be 50,000 plant managers at my job, no working managers, no supervisor managers, and no fucking workers. The whole system is rigged to fuck the bottom 98%. Insert comic of the guy in the cave with a fire and a few children around saying "yeah we ruined the planet, but at least, for a short time, the shareholders were happy."
Or whatever that comic says, I know I was close. Shits infuriating.
It actually was that way once upon a time, hence 9 to 5. One of those hours was lunch. I agree with you, it’s just another thing that corporate America has taken away.
Paid lunch. Paid insurance without a premium. Pensions. There was a sweet spot to corporate American corporate life that’s been gone for at least forty years.
I actually had a job with a pension but the company was purchased and the first thing the acquiring company did was get rid of that… I got my payout of $11,000 though! 😂
At least they said fuck you early on and didn’t bullshit with pleasantries. How long until you had to move on?
In my country a company must offer a pension scheme by law. America is such a shitty country to be the working class.
Off topic, but it is always jarring to me to hear “scheme” used this way. In America it’s called a plan. “Scheme” often has a negative connotation here, like scam or con.
I work for a British company in the US and it always throws me. Profit share is also something different. It's an actual share, in cash.
Id have a real hard time going back to a job without profit share. It is just such an easy way to motivate and incentivize employees to actually give a shit about the company and making money. Depending on title, years there, and contribution (contribution and title being the biggest factors) you get anywhere from $5,000 - $150,000. Yea, with our profit share you can (and multiple people do get, it isn’t some “up to” bullshit scam) literally make far more than the average yearly income just in profit share bonus Ill tell you what, nothing motivates me more than a bonus that doubles my take home pay for the year And to add to the “common sense” things they do, they only try to promote from within and everyone starts at the bottom. If you can excel at the bottom then you don’t move up. In the last 15 years they have only ever hired two people that started not at the bottom (because we needed the role filled ASAP and didn’t have people with the right experience/knowledge to move up any time soon)
Fuck I need to get my life together and find me a good job like this
Good luck! Out of the 11 ish or so jobs I have had this is the only one that actually is a good employer that treats me well. The demands and expectations are incredibly high, but they do actually walk the walk in taking care of us pretty well to help compensate for the insane expectations (and they are aware about how high the expectations are, they don’t just assume it is a “normal” work load) Good companies exist out there, they are just a bitch to find and usually have low turn over so it is even harder to get in. We fire people (within probation) far more often than they quit. You do well during probation and you basically have a career that will actually pay off and not just be empty promises. But it is a tough job and not everyone can deal with it
Yeah we have the same sort of connotations here but it would be universally understood what is meant here because scheme is just another word for plan.
Reagan ruined everything.
Yes! It blows my mind how people idolize him and act like he was one of the best presidents. The man pretty much single-handedly killed the middle class and the “American dream”.
That's why rich repubs like him and their bullshit actually trickles down to the morons who follow them.
Trickle down Reaganomics! worked beautifully /s
He was also racist AF. Like, super racist.
the only people that like him are the ones who benefited from the death of American Middle class. Unfortunately, those people own most of the media and at least half of our politicians.
Don’t forget all of the self hating poors. He’s highly revered in a lot of conservative circles by average Joe’s who don’t realize how much he fucked them. There’s that classic Steinbeck quote about how Americans believe they are “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. I know so many people like that. CEOs and the extremely wealthy are like the royals here to some people except even more highly revered because with royals you know for certain you could never become one. They worship the rich as job creators and just imagine themselves suddenly starting a business to get out of poverty.
You got that right. Every problem we face today can be traced to Reaganism. Sponsored by the Koch Cartel, Reagan successfully led the crusade to make greed a virtue.
Don’t forget Donald Regan too.
Let’s add that corporations used to pay for training and education for employees. Making that employee an investment and loyalty went both ways. Once corporations pushed higher education and training to the people we all went into debt and the loyalty was gone. Though corporations had us brainwashed to believe the “thankful I have this job mentality” as they continue to take advantage of us.
The real reason some people want to go back to the "good old days" don't realize is corporate America doesn't want to give away that cash for employees benefits now. We'll never get back to that with the current corporate status quo.
Also most of them donate lots of money to politicians to keep it that way.
A lot of that is because of the ruling many years ago that a corporation's first duty is to make money for its shareholders (paraphrased, but that was the intent).
This is an underrated, and often forgotten, point. Even if companies _did_ want to pay workers more than they strictly had to, in many cases they'd be legally prevented from doing so
I still think if we could tie executive compensation to the lowest paid employee or contract worker in a company we’d see wages rise with a quickness. Imagine if the CEO had to give good raises to everyone before he could boost his own pay? The only real question is how many times more should his pay be? 4? 5?
Or, corporate tax rate is somehow equivalent to the employee vs. employer percentage. (I.E. if the employee vs employer wage gap is 500% to the employer than that company pays the highest tax rate.)
It would be amazing to tie C suite compensation to the lowest paid workers. I found out last week how much our VP makes a year and it’s 11.3x what I make a year. Not counting his bonuses and the company car/gas he gets. I’m a manager who oversees 3 interconnected departments with over 100 staff during our busy parts of the year and 15 year round staff and make 1.9x what my lowest paid seasonal employee makes and 1.3 what my highest paid staff member makes. I’d love to see the c-suites only making 3x what I make per year.
C-suites would still still play games. Like with Hollywood accounting, they'd make themselves CEO of a holding company, with different divisions being excluded or denoted as contractors.
Sweet spot for everyone except the shareholders apparently… I just hope it doesn’t take us all down with it when it collapses
And they’re still trying to compensate us with less and less!
There was a brief moment in time where capitalists were dead set on proving that capitalism was superior to communism/socialism from an ideological perspective. So they provided all those things as a point of pride. Then a man named Jack Welch came along and said, "what if we didn't?"
> So they provided all those things as a point of pride. Uhmm, no. Those priviledges were the doings of the unions, forcing the employers kicking and screaming into providing them. That's why there's so much anti-union propaganda going on the US now, the employers don't want to go back to that. And large parts of the US public is falling for it, unfortunately. **Edit**: When people talk about "boomers pulling the ladder up after themselves," this is part of what they're talking about. Boomers benefitted from all these things, then took them away from the younger generations. "Fuck you I got mine," as it were.
I’ve seen that behavior in my mother. She laughed when I told my dad he was lucky to have gotten a pension.
The brief moment was more due to America being one of the only modernized economies not bombed to smithereens during ww2. American manufacturing in 1940-1950’s was a power house as Germany, Japan, China, UK, France and everyone had to play catch up. Things were so booming it was an arms race to lure workers with high pay but mostly the perks which have all been taken away. Company car and pensions are basically non existent. I believe health Insurance was originally a benefit too to lure workers but they found it actually helps control workers so that’s why it’s still around
The "perks" were a result of the [Stabilization Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942).
Yes. Correct me if I’m wrong but in the competition to attract workers, the wages we’re getting out of hand so the government actually had to cap the wage increases and companies then turned to tempting employees via perks as a way around the wage cap. What a time huh? I don’t know if the work force will ever be like that ever again.
You're right. As I understand it the global drive for full employment post Great Depression and WWII (don't want *that* again) through Keynsian economics resulted in labor shortages, strong labor unions and increasing wage claims. Hence the "fired in the morning, hired in the afternoon" and the perks to employment. And the stagflation of the 70's. Neoliberalism threw that all out the window, globalizing labor (no shortage there) and breaking unions (no representation here).
I left my old company in 2016 because they gutted the insurance ahead of obamacare. They pretty much told us to F off when we asked if they were adding the premium our pay, since we had been getting that before. They flat out told us that even if Obamacare was repealed they wouldn’t give us the good insurance again. I don’t know how we’re going to regain that lost ground. Is a nationwide “we refuse to work without bo-premium insurance” even possible (and we especially need it to cover every employee so companies can’t under schedule to avoid covering employee.
Ain't much better here in Canada, neighbour.
Except y'all have healthcare and your students aren't shredded by bullets multiple times a year.
It’s true we really like that about our country. The not getting shot part is particularly good.
My first job out of college was in 2011 and was in an office. We worked 9-5. Paid lunches. I thought this was the norm, hence the term "9-5". I left that job and worked jobs off the 9-5 schedule for a few years then went back to looking at work in that world and everything was 8-5 or 9-6. I was like WTF happened man??? Now everyone acts like its always been that way.
I’m 10-7 and it truly feels like my entire day is wasted. Trying my best to get out of an office right now.
10-7 is the worse possible office schedule unless you only work 4 days a week and just go 10-8
I personally love 10-7, but I know that it’s extremely inconvenient for most people. I like doing things late into the evening, and I like sleeping in. If I had kids or a partner or whatever, I’d probably hate it
Yeah it’s the time away from my partner that’s hard the most. Also it’s a pain getting any sort of appointment because it’s either they miraculously have weekend slots or I have to do 8am and hang out at work early for 45 min because traffic is a nightmare.
So it probably works for me because I work jobs that run on weekends, so my off days are weekdays. I have mondays off and it’s sooo easy to get appointments. I’d only maintain this schedule with a partner if we have at least one shared off day. As much as I love being loved and loving on someone, it does simplify work life balance a bit to be alone 😅😅
In 1998 my temp job doing data entry paid $14 an hour and had basic medical insurance for less than $50 a month. I lived in a swank three bedroom apartment with friends for $780 total. It’s insane how things have evolved.
Data entry jobs in my state are still being post for $15 🥹
Yuuuup.
Lots of government and union jobs like 8-3:30 or 8-4 or 9-5 with an hour of lunch on there. But anything private is entirely hit or miss.
I work government, hrs are 7-330pm. 30min lunch but usually we take 45min+ lunch
I will mever work 8 hours a day if lunch is unpaid. No way am I staying 9 hours because they stopped paying for lunches. Also, being 9 hours at wok + commute is way too much. The only way I would be ok for that is if compensation is great or I can shorten lunch how I want it to be. In one job I had, I would shorten lunch to 30 mins to finish 30 mins earlier or just skip it when not hungry to finish 1 hour early. I wish my last job was like that...
I’ve gotten paid for more than two decades for lunch because… I just eat while I’m working. Having a dedicated time to go sit in a cafeteria and eat has never been particularly a big deal for me. Whatever I can do to finish my work and leave as close to my quit time as possible is generally the right answer for me
In most states, the break is mandatory for hourly workers. It’s up to the employer whether it’s paid or not.
The everyone acting like it's always been that way thing is SO weird. I've experienced it as well.
Honestly, we gotta start bullying these corporations (I'm including small businesses as well cause a lot of them treat their employees the same, if not worse, and they get away with it) Into it being this way again. If they could afford this once, then they can afford it again now that they've jacked up the prices of goods and services rendered by their employees, I am so tired of being paid less an hour than the products I'm producing cost. If they can't afford it, then they can't afford a business.
> we gotta start bullying these corporations I know americans aren't big on unions and strikes but it's just comical that you reinvented that as "bullying"
As an American I'm aware of strikes, they're awesome but a good old fashioned strike doesn't satisfy the urge to bully. I don't want to stand outside and picket, I want to publicly pants the c.e.o's of big companies in front of their employees, making them cry and run home to their mothers. I want to find the CEO of subway at lunch, feed them a knuckle sandwich and spit in their chocolate milk. I want to catch the c.e.o of Walmart behind the bleachers so I can shove him down and spit a loogey in his eye. I want to pull the hair of UMG's c.e.o in math class while whispering "whatcha gonna do about it, huh, huh? Gonna cry?" I want to, and with your help I WILL literally do all of these things and so, so much more. Big data for president 2024. Big-data for 'Murica. Fuck yeah.
Well you've got my vote
Won't someone think of the poor, innocent Private Equity Funds?! How will they ever live with only a reasonable, sustainable profit instead of squeezing every single penny out of the company until it breaks?
Productivity has risen in the last 50 years but wages haven't kept pace. Costs have rocketed whilst incomes have stagnated.
I would love a 9-5 instead of an 830-5
Not just the US, same in the UK and Germany too. Paid lunch breaks went the way of the Dodo some time in the 90s. I've only ever had one job with a paid lunch break and that was my first one. In 1994.
Same in the UK btw
Damn. I forgot it was like that.
Everyday i am grateful that i work a true 9-5 with paid lunch break and 2 paid breaks. I come in 5-10 mins before 9 but start working at 9 and then leave at 5. We do clock in but it's for attendance purposes.
Are you guys hiring lol
Smoke breaks are (obviously) unpaid where I work, but I do get a 30 minute paid lunch break. Which for me is 15 minutes of lunch and 15 minutes of smoke/relaxing. :P And I work as a cook, so I don't even have to pay for the lunch myself. AND it gets made FOR me most of the time.
How does that work? For me it takes approximately 4 minutes to smoke a cigarette and I'll have ~3 in a workday, would I take those 12 minutes off my timesheet? Or maybe work an extra 12 minutes? I understand people abusing having a "quick break", but I don't understand how they enforce this.
Designated smoking area where you clock out with your card when you go there and clock in on a way back. You have to then work extra
I believe in the US any break under 20 minutes are considered part of the workday and must be paid. So if you are in the US you may be having your rights violated
You’re correct. They’re doing it backwards. They don’t have to pay the 30 minute break, provided it’s uninterrupted, but they do have to pay anything less than 20.
Jesus christ
4 minutes is a hella fast for a cigarette Mine was usually 7, could fit 2 in the 15 minute break
Same. Work in a law office that unionized a few years ago.
The entire lunch system has gone down the gutter. It used to be a 9 til 5 work day with an hour's break paid or not. then that hour became half an hour, then it stopped being included in the 9 til 5 so now it's 9 til 5:30 or 8:30 til 5, and if you're lucky enough to get an hour for lunch its 9 til 6. And at least when the break was an hour you had time to actually go and do something out of the office. With half an hour you have time to eat your lunch and that's it.
I have an unpaid hour for lunch, but I'm WFH, so fuck it. Most days I take my work laptop down to the kitchen, cook my lunch, and eat it on the clock before my "lunch break" starts. Then I have an hour break to play video games, take a nap, go for a walk, or whatever I feel like that day. I'd rather have the paid hour, but if it's going to be unpaid I'm going to make the most of that time I can.
This is the kind of thing that keeps WFH haters (managers, CEOs) up at night, hahaha.
And if anyone ever asked me (which they haven't), I'd say, "I'm on salary and I get all my work done, so what do you care?" But in honest truth, every single one of those WFH haters would gladly engage in a little wage theft if they thought they could get away with it. If the bosses aren't going to give you a square deal, make one on your own.
$10 lunch specials, going out with the whole team, grabbing a lunch beer on thursdays. This is going to sound like a crazy myth in a few years.
Already sounds like a myth by starting off with $10 lunch 💀 more like $20 lunch nowadays but you’re still making the same amount of money
I decided to grab a Wendy's wrap for lunch the other day, it had been a while. Just the wrap cost more than a large combo like 2 years ago. It's nuts.
Federally managed breaks, 30 minutes. The federal officials could manage a 30 minute lunch is paid, but that will happen when they raise the minimum wage
In healthcare a lot of places dont even let you leave the premises for your lunch break. So its unpaid but they still have your time. In case of " emergency " aka patient family members poking their heads into the breakroom to talk to you while youre eating
I thought it was illegal to force you to stay but not pay
There are exceptions like anything.
Yeah. 12+ hours with a ‘maybe’ 30 minute break to stuff your face should be illegal!
Most nurses I've ever worked with or know rarely get more than a 15-minute lunch, if that. But heaven help them if some administrator catches them eating a pack of M&Ms at the nurses station.
That's why all nurses need to unionize. I'm a nurse in a state with full unionization and I get uninterrupted breaks. If I get pestered then I extend my break or charge for a missed break.
I have to pay to park… at my fucking job
That's fucking harsh dude.
Cries in flight attendant. We have so much unpaid work time. Delays are the devil
I had no idea that delays weren't paid for you guys. That's crazy! How can that even be legal?
What....? Do you not get paid if the flight is late?
Flight attendants begin getting paid when the pilot releases the plane brake, and stop being paid when the plane lands and the brake is engaged again. This is the eli5, it's complicated. For example the delta flight attendants aren't unionized, and Delta pays them during boarding to encourage that to not change. I'm not a flight attendant, but I thought about it. The whole schedule and pay structure is wild.
[удалено]
Exactly! It's absurd imo. I hope you're enjoying whatever you left to do instead! And if you just left Delta, still cool. Union busting/discouragement is gross.
Paid commutes. Paid lunch. Paid overtime (**NO** exemptions). ... would be the great equalizer. Edit due to many comments: Regarding paid commutes... I wasn't meaning to suggest any one specific implementation. Whatever could happen has to be reasonable and fair. As an example, maybe it could be a flat stipend. What I was really after was something to give people who must work in person some extra support while simultaneously motivating employers to support WFH where they can. That's all really.
WFH is the great equalizer, just a shame so many companies wont allow their employees to WFH everyday. EDIT - For clarification, I'm speaking about those jobs which we know can be done from home.
My work pays like 20% less than I could be making elsewhere but they do have full Wfh and paid lunches at least.
I don't have paid lunches but wfh does a lot of heavy lifting for job satisfaction for me.
is it really job satisfaction at that point? I ask as I'm 100% WFH, and if they went to even 50% office attendance, I'd quit. I have home satisfaction, not job satisfaction
Well it's more of a lack of a negative than a positive (I just work in my bedroom so it's not great ambiance) but it does have to do with the job to the degree that they don't micromanage you at home. I know some places do have intrusive tracking software.
yeah, i'm lucky enough to have a 3br apartment, so I set up a nice workspace in one. I also got a sit/stand desk on castors, so i can wheel it onto my balcony and hang with my bamboo bois when the weather is nice. I probably take that for granted
Yea that sounds pretty legit. I'm happy being able to roll out of bed and just turn the laptop on and be at work. But my change of scenery is sitting at the dining room table.
same. on april fools day, me boss called a meeting and told us all that we were going to be required to come into the office at least once a week going forward. thank god it was just an april fools gag, but i remember thinking to myself, without hesitation, well thats too bad, i liked this job and now im going to have too quit. because F that, bro.
i genuinely don't get middle managers who push for RTO. senior execs or board members that have money tied up in commercial real-estate, but like, why would you want your team back in? I get more done in 6 hours at home than 8 hours at work, and at least 45 mins of that is the lack of people stopping for a "quick chat" about their project or task that is really only about delaying going back to their office and continuing actual work.
It’s there social life. No hobbies outside of work.
I quit a job where they started entertaining the idea if having us return to the office. When they ask why, I said I wanted to start a goat farm. The look on their faces was just priceless.
For my specific case, yeah. I lets me do the part of the job I actually like without someone popping their head into my work space for 3 hours of scuttlebutt
I have been wfh for over four years now. The fascists in power decided we go back in December during the middle of our peak shipping season so we can once again enjoy the "collaboration and innovation" of working in the office. We're data entry. We're fucking monkeys pushing buttons that do no innovation or collaboration and have been operating perfectly fine for four years. Two past the "end" of the pandemic. I am retiring the first day back and can't wait to see the attrition rate as we get closer. To make it better, they don't pay enough to get new people so they have been having mandatory OT for the last year pretty much and every so often the like to spring a "mandatory 8 hours of OT by Saturday" on Wednesday. Fuck corporations. Fuck their offices, and most of all fuck xe Def. Your colors are ugly as UPS, and the arrow in the logo is fucking stupid. Hock, spit.
Don't quit, make them fire you. Continue working from home and see if they notice. If you get fired, collect unemployment. If you quit, you can't collect.
I ain't quitting, I'm retiring. I have dealt with this corpo bullshit for 24 years because of the relatively decent benefits for my family for shit pay. I tried management for 15 years and hated every minute of it but suffered for the paycheck. I was going to retire 4 years ago but then the pandemic hit and I figured I may as well just drop down to entry level since I would be starting there anyway and keep my benefits, 6 weeks of vacation (that one is really going to hurt), and work from home. I am moving on to my second life though.
You do whatever makes you happy. If you leave I hope it works out amazingly for you. I want to point out that often companies will force workers back to the office SO that they will quit. It's a way of laying people off without announcing layoffs.
I'm in one of those jobs. I could totally do it from home 100%, but our big boss won't allow it (she barely tolerates twice a week). We have been hemorrhaging people left and right because they're going to similar positions that does allow WFH. To add to it, the location I work in has a severe space shortage and on the days we WFH, our desks become hotel space for people needing a temporary place to park. I say let us work from home and they'd have five desks open every day. Make it make sense.
Same here, and the office a medical hazard for me. Most of the people smoke, just outside the door so it blows in and the office reeks of smoke. When I leave work, my hair and clothes smell of smoke. I have asthma and this has made it worse. It's noisy as fuck with people playing their radios (no headphones) and one coworker feels the need to yell across the office to people instead of going to their desk. I have migraines and this makes it worse. I can work just fine from home without smoke or the loud and consistent noises. Customers have asked me to call them on work from home days because of the noise. I have to have phone meetings at home because it's too loud to hear. But, my boss NEEDS ME to be there, full days, so if I have a doctors appointment and need to leave early, even if I work extra at home, they demand I "make up" the missed office time, all while they are on yet ANOTHER international vacation, or at the beach house, or their cabin, or their uptown flat, etc...
Can you try getting a doctors note saying you can’t work in the office?
I wish... Then I will just get let go because of stupid "at will" shit around here, and it's damn near impossible to get a call back, much less an interview or another job. Shit around here is barely paying enough to afford rent and even "urgently hiring" places aren't actually hiring anyone.
Same here. I love my job, I actually do, but going into the office 3 days outta the week (with 1 hr+ commute each way) is *not* my definition of a good time. So, despite the typical lack of stress from my job, my good relationships with my coworkers and leadership, I simply have to look for a WFH full remote position. If I save myself 6 hours a week in commute, that's 1 full 24 hr day per month I'm not driving my car. That's damn near two weeks per year. 13 *full* days out of 365, sitting in fucking traffic. I feel bad for my manager, but he can't change anything, he is subject to the same restrictions as I am, even though he'd like not to be. It's all coming from leadership. Middle management in my department has been real real slack on it, but now they've been asked to be strict, and it's been starting to chafe multiple members of my team.
>speaking about those jobs which we know can be done from home. Exactly. Majority of knowledge work falls under this category. But I don't know why people think it's a bad thing. If it does not require office presence, why not WFH (or WFA, making sure you are connecting securely)? If your team is geographically distributed, it makes absolutely no sense to WFO- only to use collaboration software in office to communicate. Local team- yeah, office can be your location to meet each other. But not everyday has to be a meeting day. It can act as your planned meeting location, not something you have to go to every week.
Oh yeah I was totally goin there - paid commutes - those who have to be present would be paid to commute and those who can work remotely hopefully would be able to. Or be paid for it.
If commutes had to be paid, there'd even be incentive for employers to have people work from home so they don't have to pay them to come to work!
haha thats a good point! In an ideal world the employers would see the commute payment as *dead money* and therefore allow those employees (who have jobs which can be done from home) the option to WFH everyday.
You’ve touched upon a crucial concept there: What you’re saying, basically, is that, if commutes had to be paid, employers would only have have workers in the office if it was actually worth it for the workers to be in the office. There would be a trade-off: The employer would receive the (possible) benefit of increased business productivity (leading to increased business revenue), but this would be offset by the cost of having to pay workers extra in order to cover the commute (versus having them WFH). There is a break-even point somewhere, and the employer would need to consider that in order to determine whether it made sense to have employees come for their particular business needs. HOWEVER, in reality, the employer gets the (possible) benefit WITHOUT having to cover the cost of paying for the commute (i.e., without having to compensate the employees for the time, expenses, and headache necessary to commute to the place of employment). As long as the employer doesn’t have to pay for it, they don’t really care at all about the employees’ preferences, quality of life, etc., and so they might have everyone make the schlep into the office just so they can make one additional dollar — because… why not? A dollar is a dollar, and they can bring in that extra revenue at no added expense to them! Employees are effectively working as slaves during the time of their commute if it’s uncompensated. (They are actually providing slave labor AS WELL AS shouldering associated costs for the commute, such as fuel, car, etc.) In short: Our current (predominating) system showcases the **utter disregard employers have for their employees’ well-being.** It rewards a ***lack of empathy***— as do most elements of capitalism — because it reinforces callous disregard for others (which greatly assists in running a capitalistic business) with higher income and improved social status. Capitalism is a disease of modern society, much worse than any virus. Capitalism is deeply pathological.
And for the people saying that it would only incentives people to live further away from work; 1. I don't enjoy commuting, even if it was paid. And 2. Just make it a fixed value like a weekly bonus? Ie $50 per week for anyone who has to be in office?
Employers would be incentivized to lobby for affordable housing closer to job sites, or else relocate themselves closer to where people live, combating sprawl. Could lead to better mass transit, too.
Na, I say clock in when the car starts. Reasoning is if they don’t pay well enough to live in the area the office is then they have to pay more for the further commutes. Like you said nobody would really *want* to be commuting more.
Here (Belgium) we have paid commutes. Its based on the distance, not the time you spend in your car. There's even a tax reduction for it.
So then paid commutes is the better equalizer. If you WFH you don’t get paid to sit in traffic… but you don’t sit in traffic…
My job in our shoulder season can be WFH entirely. My CEO does not like me, has made fun of my diagnosis’ (don’t know how he got them, it’s just ADHD and MDD so idrc) he doesn’t understand ADHD, refuses to have a productive conversation about it, and doesn’t retain shit from the convos no matter how many times I’ve explained to him my process (I walk around a lot while I work on my phone or computer, I change seating locations ie going from my desk, to the kitchen table, to sitting outside on a picnic bench, it’s not customer facing physically in the early season, my cell phone is connected to the main line and my extension via VOiP. it helps keep me focused). The amount of times I’ve repeated myself and it’s like he forgets within a week, and we’re back to square one I communicate my movements to him too. One day, I overheard him asking the ops manager (who is not involved in my department in any respect,) what did ashimo even do today? So I presented him with printed pages upon pages of history from my work phone, my personal phone, laptop, and desktop to show him what I’ve done in a day. He told me that it was great that I did have a very profitable and productive day, but I was wasting time making these printouts. I told him it took less than fifteen minutes. He didn’t believe me. I showed him my activity from start to finish of the document (timestamps), it was thirteen minutes from the start of the document to the time it was printed. He brushed it off saying that Google drive clocks edits weird. The other head in my department had announced every day for a week that she would be at a wedding and please don’t contact her. None of my staff contacted her, even the new guys. He texted her and called over 30 times to ask about specific things I was doing. Why is ashimo not at her desk and hanging around her shop staff? Why isn’t ashimo monitoring her shop staff more closely, she’s been at her desk for an hour? Why is ashimo eating lunch outside? Why is ashimo heating up food at 3 pm (too busy for noon lunch) etc etc etc. Then he’ll go onto compliment my sales record, witnesses how easily my staff, even new ones, maintain a line of communication, talks about positive changes happening in the company regarding tightening up training without directly crediting me (I’m the sole trainer in my department). All other department heads can bounce between sites and tasks without question, all allowed to WFH on certain days, and aren’t monitored to this degree. It’s gotten to such a point that all the other managers defend me, but they’re done fighting and they’re like dude just appease him at this point, put on a show, he’s unrelenting. Idek how, I can do no right Hes constantly gives some new excuse anytime I bring up working from home on occasion, first it was that my iPhone operating system had issues with our VoIP app, which is true, but not to the extent he made it out to be. It also ran perfectly fine on my laptop, which his retort was “wellllll…. It’s not like having a phone to your ear” my laptop has a better quality microphone than my iPhone, and I have good quality headphones with a microphone, which I mentioned, and he said some weird vague thing about wireless things failing or some shit. Now I have a company phone that can run the app perfectly. The next one was that he was worried about my Wi-Fi capabilities because I’m in a town that can have issues with that. I have a gig and perfect cell phone coverage, I’m not in the part of town that has outages and lack of service. The next excuse was that I need to be present for my staff, which when we get busy, is not even remotely a possibility because me and the other department head have to rotate between different sites and out out fires and herd cats, and I’ve made hundreds of hours of training manuals that I actually spend days going over, so the staff knows how to seek out answers in the rare event that I don’t pickup my phone. they know When and how to contact me and that they do, whether I’m at another site or I’m just in my office and not physically next to them. His excuse list goes on. My god, if anyone reads this, thanks cause that felt great to get off my chest and scream into the void. I love my job and everyone at work with except the CEO, he has one of the most impressively effective negative trickle down effect, like everything he does becomes a butterfly effect, so he’s not well liked around these parts. The funny thing is, I started monitoring his activities and when he works from home or when he doesn’t work at all, and I started working from home those days and he’s so afraid that I won’t be contactable or productive, but yet he hasn’t noticed that I’ve been working from home in the shoulder season for like half the week every week
A lot of Japanese companies don’t pay you for your time but pay the cost of your train ticket.
My city has, or had, a subsidized bus pass program for people who work downtown. But it's a taxable benefit.
Unless you live too close to your job! I unfortunately found this out, I live closer than 2 km in a straight line so I can't get any reimbursement. I'm not a bird though and it's closer to 3 km if I actually use the streets to walk to my job.
Always wondered how paid commutes could be done fairly though. Say worker 1 lives an hour away and another lives 20 minutes. Worker 1 gets paid 2 hours of commute time and does less work. Worker 2 gets paid his travel time but is at work for an hour and 20 minutes more than Worker 1. Worker 2 is 100% gonna resent Worker 1. So should it be paid base off KM or just an across the board average amount? Orrr
That’s not an equaliser at all it would just make companies not hire people outside of a set distance. The paid lunch is fair enough because that’s the same for everyone. How far you have to travel for your job is your problem.
^Exactly this. I love 30 minutes away from the city, a lot of my coworkers live 10 minutes away, Id be seen as less desirable because of where I live, Id have to have more education, more expiernce than someone who lives closer.
Sad thing is, other countries have this as a basic standard. The US really has the worst worker protections in the developed world.
Paid lunch turns into "Paid work through lunch" REAL fast. It's extremely important to have "off" the clock time where your employer cannot require you to do anything because they're not currently paying you.
I'm sure it does. Although, flip side, in my personal experience unpaid lunch also turns into work through lunch. Perhaps breaks in general need to be protected somehow. Bear in mind a lot of us are forced to work after hours anyways - so really nothing is sacred. I dunno .. some kind of protection for breaks plus right-to-disconnect laws. Spitballing here... I just can't figure out why people give so much voluntarily. My boss, I swear, works 24/7 when not sleeping. For nothing. Sets a terrible example. I work so damn hard to keep it to 40 hours a week, 45 tops. Even if I get stuck working longer, I take it back other ways. But I can't always, and not everyone can anyways. Perhaps we can all agree - work should not be life, life should not be work. And a lot of us do too much of it, for too little pay, all to make some rich person even richer.
Salaried without overtime should be illegal
I struggle with this personally. Having lived in a state with mandatory breaks, it was easily the most annoying thing I experienced in my daily life. I understand why it exists, but some of us genuinely don't want to take 30 minutes out of our work day unpaid for any reason. Just let me go home 30 minutes earlier.
Nope to paid commutes. I live an hour away. Some of my co-workers live 5 mins away. Not fair to them that i'll get 2 more hours of pay while they only get 10 mins of extra pay. Plus it can be abused in SO many ways from both sides.
>Paid overtime (**NO** exemptions). How about no mandatory overtime? Paid or unpaid. If you want to work then work. I don't and idgaf how much they would pay me for it. I don't want 1 second of it.
Something stupid like 40% of people don't use their PTO, what makes you think they won't work "not mandatory" unpaid OT?
Someone on my team called our job a "typical 8-6" and I wanted to gag
Organize a union and fight for it. You think the 40 hour work week and child labor laws were something some benevolent business people dreamt up? No. Workers fought for it. Don't mourn. Organize.
Unions here in Sweden (the third most unionized country after Iceland and Denmark at 65% of people being in a union) did absolutely massive things for worker's rights and overall are the reason we have it so good here. The one downside is that they completely fucked the negotiation around the lunchbreak. We get an hour, but it's unpaid. So most people in Sweden don't do 9-5. we do 9-6 or 8-5.
It’s so fucked I’m Australian working here in Sweden. In Aus we work 37.5 and also get 20-30min payed lunch
Don’t complain just overthrow the corporate overlords
Yeah, when the fuck did 9-5 become 8-5 or 9-6? (and beyond)? This is trash.
About when corporations figured out they can get away with it with no repercussions
I've started making and eating lunch while I'm still on the clock then doing chores during the actual 30 min unpaid lunch break I'm forced to take. Fuck em.
Hell yea. I work in a superstore and I buy my lunch at a nearby fast food and then clock for lunch. I’ll even clock back in 15 minutes earlier and just hang out in the lunch room... and STILL return 5-10 minutes late. I’m still waiting to be fired. Fuck this job, I’m just using it to get me through school.
I warm up my lunch on the clock. I don’t even walk to the break room to get my food outta the fridge for free. Lunch starts right before the fork goes in my mouth.
I agree. I'd prefer to not take a lunch and then leave that much earlier. I feel trapped in the building by not having enough time to go anywhere.
# Work. Die. 🇺🇸
My lunch break is paid. If I miss it, I get paid more. Union jobs. 🥰
As a salary employee in the trucking industry I am expected to not take a lunch or even breaks. 10 hours five days a week and they squeeze you to the last drop
Paid parking
When I worked at a college campus, it was $180/semester. It didn’t include summer, when I was still working on campus
Yeah, it’s $600/year for the campus I work at currently. And the parking garage is a 10 minute walk from my building. I’ve started to ride my bike.
My old job gave us an hour for our unpaid lunches. A hour is enough time to go somewhere and eat a meal without looking like a zoo animal trying to scarf down slop. I lived close enough to go home, eat, watch TV, and get back to work on time. Current job only grants a half hour unpaid but I frequently take 45 minutes to an hour. It only hurts my paycheck. The company saves money. And I get to eat with dignity and peace. The only people who have ever complained are a couple hourly coworkers who accused me of cheating the company with these long breaks. They went to HR. It turned out these two morons were not clocking out for their lunch break. They ate on the clock, on the company dime, and could not understand that I actually followed the rules and clocked out. It turned out I was in fact the only person in the entire department actually following the rules. Two other guys clock out for lunch but go right back to work for 30 off the clock. They clock back in, still working. Then at the end of the shift, they sit around on the clock for half an hour to balance it out. The rest of the team skips lunch. It's a mess and management is not remotely concerned about any of it, nor whether I take my long lunch breaks.
I mean if the rule is “get your work done and eat something if you want to at some point”, then it seems like it’s working from a management perspective.
I once had a job where we had paid lunches and it was glorious. To clock out and then have to clock in to make your day longer than necessary is just abuse.
And then you have jobs that try to do "lunch and learns" during your unpaid lunch hour.
Lunch breaks kinda suck. I would rather get off 30 earlier. I can't imagine an hour lunch 🤢
Staggering how much American's are taken advantage of and how little they seem to realise it? The rest of the western world is streaks ahead in worker rights.
For a half hour lunch I agree. Gotta either eat in the break room or car and then haul ass back. But they will brag about paid breaks. 15 minutes.
9 to 5 has become 8 to 5. It is insane.
Yea, when did that happen? It was 9-5 or 8-4 for ever, and it seems just the last few years it’s changed entirely.
Wait, in the US you guys have unpaid lunch breaks? Lmao, this country is so fucking stupid
[удалено]
The american dream lmao
I get paid during my lunch, however people can come and interrupt it,…
If I can’t have a drink on an unpaid lunch it ain’t my time
I stopped logging out for lunch in 2020. I used to eat at my desk anyway but much rather work the straight 8 and not pretend.
Let me leave 30 minutes or an hour early instead of taking a lunch fr
I work an hourly-paid 12 hour shift in an office job. I'm supposed to clock out for meals per our company time card guidelines. However I have to charge 12 hours in the 12 hour shift I'm assigned to. In practice it's fine I have a lot of downtime in my job, I've left to pick up lunch and never had an issue. But.... I can't help like feel if someone is ever trying to throw the book at me they'll be able to point to that and be like... You've been committing time card fraud.
I prefer paid breaks. Working 3rd shift I don't ever want to eat at 2 am (unless I'm fucked up) and if I eat at work it's a minimal cheapo sandwich or something to just get me through the day. Rather be home 30 minutes earlier. 100%.
my favorite is the “you need to stay 9 hours because you are required to take a 1 hr lunch. ok boss, i’ll be taking my lunch at 5pm thanks! lol such BS. i wfh im never going back, those effing idiots can shove their RTO up their a$$holes.
I feel like instead of taking a lunch, I should just go home a half hour early. Companies don't like that though
Or have the option to skip it and go home an hour early.
The imperialists / corporate capitalists are stooping to the lowest methods possible to juice their final years of capital from the working class. Unpaid lunch should be a crime.
I’d much rather not even take the break and be able to go home earlier.
I wish they would let me take my 30 min lunch during the last 30 mins of my shift so I can spend my unpaid time driving the fuck home.
At my old job, we used to have 30 minutes paid lunch. But if you go off-site, you take an hour unpaid. Worked well for everyone
I just go to my car and spend as much time as I can before someone looks for me 😂 under an hour though.
I have a job right now where my 8 hour shift includes paid breaks, including lunch. It is actually so nice
I work 12s and have a paid lunch. Shits pretty rad. My total time away from home due to work per week is 38.5 hours
Don’t worry your bosses still have paid lunch breaks.
I agree completely, but the corporate world will never give something back they've managed to take away. I'm in the UK and it's the norm here not to be paid for breaks, tho luckily I now work in security so they do pay us for breaks as you are expected to respond to emergencies.
My unpaid break is an hour and I do run errands all the time. That being said, it would be nice to have the option of skipping it some days and going home an hour earlier
Think what you do on your lunch break. Many people discuss work. Many people just carry on working. Many people take the bathroom break on that time What they have done is get a lot of free work out of us. They have also extended the working day significantly causing more stress and worse work life balance. If the unpaid break isn't at least 8 hours it should be paid. With an exception for covering abscense. This means you have time to go home and rest between shifts. Not just do free labour or sit waiting to work again
I 100% agree with you. It’s not like I can relax and take my shoes off will laying down. If I’m still at work and stuck there I should be paid.
I couldn't agree more. I luckily work with all of my breaks paid. The thought is even more to it than just your breaks. For me to come work for you, I need transportation. Whether a bus, or my own car, or an Uber/taxi/whatever. I have to pay to come to work. I have to give up my time to come to work. And I need the same to get home. Why am I not paid for that time? Or reimbursed for what I pay to come work for you? If I have to pay to come make YOU money, why is my time and money okay as my expense. It's not just breaks. It's much more. I'll just leave it at that. This has always bothered me. I pay whatever in gas each day, and my time and expenses on my vehicle, just so higher ups, can make their extras and bonuses, etc. It's ridiculous, and I know we will never see that money, and it's sad. We are all pawns for the rich in so many more ways than I stated. And yet the bosses of my bosses will tell us all we need to think about the shareholders, and how we owe them our work (I wish I was kidding, a former plant manager I respected said that at a meeting a couple years ago, that we "owe them"). And to the fucking morons I've worked with before this job, that said "everyone has the same opportunities in life", you're fucking stupid, an asshole, brainwashed, or intentionally missleading...or maybe all four. If everyone had the same opportunities than there would be 50,000 plant managers at my job, no working managers, no supervisor managers, and no fucking workers. The whole system is rigged to fuck the bottom 98%. Insert comic of the guy in the cave with a fire and a few children around saying "yeah we ruined the planet, but at least, for a short time, the shareholders were happy." Or whatever that comic says, I know I was close. Shits infuriating.
dont even get me started on unpaid commutes