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Want the legal right to ignore your boss outside working hours? Learn from the French | Alexander Hurst
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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- Better and fewer working hours.
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In my case it kind of comes with the job. Anyone who works "in the cloud" and/or with web apps / servers and/or database servers knows what I mean. We do our best to minimize issues and keep things running smoothly during off hours. But of course, complex systems can and do break for myriad reasons. Sometimes we overlooked something. Or sometimes there's an event beyond our control (ClownStrike, anyone? AWS outages, anyone?).
So, for emergencies / unforeseen problems I expect it to happen and don't mind pitching in to help.
But my boss is also a workaholic who works almost every single weekend. He's bad about texting or emailing us at weird hours and it's annoying. Even if he doesn't expect us to do anything right then, it still causes a mild panic when the phone lights up. And then you're thinking about work shit when you shouldn't have to.
One of the other managers where I work does a cool thing where he'll put a "delay send" on his off-hours emails so you don't get them until the next business day. A real act of kindness and consideration on his part. Unusual for an American manager.
We are a specialized firm so literally nobody else can do what we do and we have to get called in when there is a problem. That said, in other orgs I ran or was in prior to this current one we had "on-call" and "escalation" schedules that guaranteed time off to anyone not on the schedule. If you needed to be brought in off schedule you would be compensated a bonus at 3x hourly (calculated as yearly salary ÷ 640) and be removed from your next schedule rotation. If this was a recurring issue with a particular employee's skill set, redundancy was added to that position. It wasn't a perfect system but at least there was an effort made.
What a great idea. We're spread too thin and have very little overlap in our knowledge / coverage, unfortunately. Typical 'skeleton crew' shop, unfortunately.
Yes. This is how most shops are now, but it didn't use to be that way. The tech industry has gone from trying to hire and hoard all qualified personnel in order to beat out the competition to trying to see how thin they can run and what is the bottom set of qualifications they can get away with before things start breaking down.
Sounds like good management. I've never worked in an IT shop that was run like that. Best I've ever seen was 'free comp time' if you had to pull an all-nighter or work on a weekend.
I have always worked with critical production environments where things have to stay up. It is not sustainable with a skeleton crew. Eventually it leads to service degradation or instability which is far more expensive than adding redundancy. Something bites management in the ass once or twice and they get the message.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that what management ultimately did was outsource the liability to cloud services like Azure and AWS.
Me too, they just expected us to work 100 hours a week when something broke.
I'm 25 years into my career now and know enough these days to say "no" when they ask for unreasonable things like that. It can sit broken for all I care.
I am sorry my man. I am pushing 30 years on my career so I feel your pain. That's bad management and basically our bread and butter these days. They paint themselves into a corner and then pray they can summon an elder god to save their hide.
It's all good. It was only really that bad at one job, a long time ago. Now I am the one counseling my teammates for work life balance and not to let themselves be taken advantage of by the company!