• Ulvain@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    269
    ·
    21 days ago

    Let me clarify: the business didn’t need the employee to be there, it needed the employee to be pliable.

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    163
    ·
    21 days ago

    In the first world, we have employee protections that mean that a) pulling stuff like this in the first place is illegal and that b) bragging about it on social media means that when you get dragged in front of an employment relations tribunal, your lawyer caves their forehead in with their palm and tells you that you owe back pay and penalties

          • theneverfox@pawb.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            20 days ago

            The state owning and operating key services also doesn’t make it socialism. Except when you’ve had a decades long campaign to redefine socialism

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          21 days ago

          If the US was actually socialist it wouldn’t need employment tribunals because people like this wouldn’t have the power to pull this crap in the first place.

          All employment tribunals do is allow capitalism to exist as it currently does, but with a few breaks applied and with a steering wheel.

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      21 days ago

      In the first world, we might have protections against firing but companies can deny vacation day requests for project reasons and if you don’t go to work you will have consequences, legally.

      • twei@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        21 days ago

        That’s the point where you call in sick and stay home anyways. Can get fired for not coming to work, can’t get fired for being sick

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          21 days ago

          You shouldn’t get fired anyways, but here in Spain if you miss work because you are sick you need to have a note from your doctor justifying that staying at come was the correct choice, so you wouldn’t be able to call in sick.

          You wouldn’t be able to be fired either, the company needs several heavy failures from a worker to be able to legally fire them. Companies usually decide to lay off people instead. Since you didn’t go to work, the company would be entitled to subtract whatever they pay you in the hours you weren’t there (which is way more than what you end up getting post taxes, so be prepared to earn way less than the days you missed), so there would be SOME consequence.

  • Gerudo@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    115
    ·
    21 days ago

    I literally told my employees back in the day that if for any reason a request was denied, just don’t show up anyway. I also never asked for a reason for the request. The building won’t burn down if you aren’t here. Just keep in mind that someone has to pick up the slack and pay it forward.

    My direct boss always wondered why employees would come in on off days to cover shifts when I was there, but not him. Don’t be an ass, treat employees with respect, and surprise, surprise, people actually want to work.

    • CTDummy@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      71
      ·
      21 days ago

      Reminds me of my former employer. Would always give us time off when we requested it. Was always understanding if we needed time away or had issues going on that impacted us work. When I gave my 2 weeks notice I told him to call me if he needed cover as I knew him and his wife were going on holiday soon (the guy almost never takes proper time off). Nearly a month later he calls and mentioned one of his newer employees was out sick. Very enthusiastically agreed to come back for a week to cover them as I had started my own business. Lovely people and would always cover a skip like that in a heart beat. They’re few and far between.

      • Milk_Sheikh@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        21 days ago

        I had a prior employer who got some of those well deserved negative reviews, from employees. Google swears they can’t pay to take them down, but the ToS is so slanted towards their customer (the business paying AdSense fees) it’s exactly that just with more steps.

        Once they nuked the bad reviews, a manager came around for a ‘friendly chat’ with individuals about how great it’d be for them to use their personal login and write leave a review - wink wink.

    • AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      21 days ago

      My God, not a single negative review at the time of writing this. Perhaps we should rethink office politics combatative hierarchical structures.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    96
    ·
    21 days ago

    I dunno who needs to hear this but, they need us more than we need them.

    They keep trying to flex and act like they’re in charge of everything because they sign the paychecks, the fact of the matter is that the money they give you is a paltry amount compared to what they’re making from your labor. If you don’t do the work, they won’t make any money at all. Sure as shit the business owner isn’t going to step up to do your job.

    They need you. They want to convince you that you need them. They want to take your power away from you.

    Employment is a two-way street. Anyone who will treat you like trash isn’t worthy of your sweat.

    • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      21 days ago

      Your uninformed (or hopeful) if you think big businesses make money from labor. A lot of it is from capital, investments or rent.

      E.g. McDonald’s profits are mostly from rent.

      • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        50
        ·
        edit-2
        21 days ago

        And Hollywood profits aren’t from movies, honestly you’ve fallen for basic accounting tricks…

        A franchise that doesn’t make money devalues the retail space. McDonald’s model links rents to sales so they take maximum value at all times.

        Royalty fee: 4% of gross revenues

        Brand marketing and promotion fee: 4% of gross revenues

        Location rent: Unlike most other franchises, McDonald’s owns the land and buildings at its locations and franchisees pay rent that can be based on a percentage of sales or as a fixed amount. Percentage rents are 31.75% of sales. Fixed rents are typically £100,000 to £225,000 per month.

        So Corporately it looks like they make their money from rent. But that rent is directly linked to sales and labour in most cases.

        Without sales they don’t get rent unless they’ve agreed a fixed rent and that’s increasingly rare. Usually only the highest value sites.

        The real estate value of the property is linked to business revenue as well. If a franchise fails and doesn’t get another investor then the empty building is worth a lot less.

        By picking McDonald’s you’re actually about as wrong as possible. Everything of value is linked back to labour, even the value of the land.

        It might work differently in other countries but I doubt it. Economics work the same everywhere and McDonalds didn’t like to standardise when they find a winning model for themselves.

      • MellowYellow13@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        21 days ago

        Capitalism’s value and money is based on your labor, that’s it, that’s the foundation for all of it including rent.

      • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        21 days ago

        McDonald’s franchises can’t pay rent without that business making money. It’s labor at the end of the day. Always is. Always has been. Always will be.

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        20 days ago

        I get what you’re saying here. McDonald’s, the franchiser, makes money on rent. But they’re renting to McDonald’s franchisee’s (at least in part, likely a majority of it). Even if they’re renting out to third parties, those third parties are making money largely from service, which is rendered via labor.

        So the service is performed by labor, and the service makes the revenue to pay the rent and pay the labor, QED, rent is paid by labor.

        McDonald’s franchisee’s are paying their rent with labor. It’s not like the franchise is getting fully assembled big Macs delivered. The labor needs to assemble the parts to make the whole.

        Without labor, they would have no product to sell, since it’s not feasible to cut out the on site assembly of the food while keeping it as fresh as it is.

        Yes, a nontrivial part of revenue is in materials, and there’s a mark up on the sale of those materials when sold, but the majority of cost is for the labor of putting everything together.

        On top of this, there’s plenty of non-McDonald’s examples of the same. I work in IT support, almost all of my work is service, where I go in, either in person or remotely, and perform corrections to get things working normally. There’s plenty of industries that have similar models, where there’s little to no production of things that you’re paying for, and the vast majority of the payment is for labor.

        Finance, tax prep, handymen, carpenters, welders, programmers, factory workers, delivery drivers… The lion share of revenue is directly from labor.

        With food service costs are generally split between labor and materials, since the raw materials can be rather costly, but for many other workforces, labor is the main revenue.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        20 days ago

        McDonald’s profits are mostly from rent.

        rent on what?

        Come on, follow through. Don’t leave the equation partially finished. Rent on what?

        RENT ON FUCKING MC’DICKOLDS FRANCHISES. Not rent on Toy R Us, not rent on Starbucks, it’s rent on MICKY-DEEZNUTS FRANCHISES MATE.

        Cute thou.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      20 days ago

      This is true, but you can only grab hold of that power collectively. There is no way to pull on this lever solo.

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        20 days ago

        Sometimes you can, but it’s rare.

        Collective action and unions are the way for 99.9%

        The 0.1% know who they are, and they’re happy to throw their weight around. When the company pushes back and gets rid of them, they often end up bringing that person back as a consultant because they really cannot survive without their help

  • Old_Yharnam@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    70
    ·
    20 days ago

    Any manager who talks about work like that in public isn’t a manager of any high caliber.

    Probably just a gas station manager or some shit

  • CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    64
    ·
    21 days ago

    I had something similar happen once when I was a teenager, working McDonald’s. Keep in mind, is not PTO it’s just ‘don’t schedule me these days’. Handed my request to a manager like a month in advance. Before I went in the family vacation, double checked everything was fine. When I got back from vacation, went to work to get the next schedule only to get stopped and informed I was fired for ‘no call no show’.

    The one manager that didn’t like me for some reason (honestly don’t know why) had changed the schedule to explicitly get me fired. The manager I handed my request to was there and even said she remembered my request and putting it in the books but claimed there was nothing they could do.

    Technically, I’ve been fired twice from McDonald’s (second time was years later at a different McDonald’s and basically the owner thought my hair was too long and I had ‘girls hair’). So I cut McDonald’s out of my life a long time ago. And it brings me great joy every time I read about McDonald’s having financial problems or people not going there as much as they used to. I hope I live long enough to see McDonald’s file for bankruptcy. And all the managers that wronged me, I’ve never forgotten. I wish them nothing but unhappiness and misfortune for all their days.

    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      edit-2
      20 days ago

      And all the managers that wronged me, I’ve never forgotten. I wish them nothing but unhappiness and misfortune for all their days.

      seems like you already won tho. You left. They stayed.

    • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      20 days ago

      We may have worked at the same shitty McDonald’s as teens lmao. I once requested off one single day several weeks in advance, because I had some school trip that day and wouldn’t be in the state. A week from the trip I looked at the schedule and saw I was scheduled for that day, even though I had it approved weeks earlier. I asked my manager about it and made it very clear that I would not be able to come to work that day. They told me I needed to find a replacement or I’d get a “point” or whatever they did to keep track of people’s “fuck-ups”. I told the manager that I didn’t have a way to contact any of the other people that worked at that McDonald’s because I had just started working there and didn’t have any of their numbers. The manager went and printed out a spreadsheet of every employee that worked at that location and their phone numbers (probably without their consent), and I called every single person on that list. There were probably close to a hundred names (I think it was a list of literally every person who had ever worked at that location, past or present), but no one was available to cover my shift. Trip day comes, I got a point, and then was “quiet fired” a couple months later when they just stopped putting me on the schedule (except for after I submitted a two weeks notice, where they scheduled me for an 8 hour shift on my last day 🙃). I too have avoided McDonald’s ever since then.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      20 days ago

      Oh McDonald’s can go dying a ditch but just so you know they’re a franchise. Kind of surprised you worked two different ones and didn’t realize that

    • Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      21 days ago

      This. The only “need” for the business being satisfied is that one manager’s “need” to hear his own voice and to lord power over someone. And such managers are the ones whom, if I were in charge of the business, I’d make redundant in a heartbeat.

  • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    43
    ·
    20 days ago

    At work right now they’re denying all the new vacation requests because we’ve got to make a bunch of products for customer. But they at least told us when the order was placed, so everybody took a vacation before the rush or planned one afterwards.

  • Roopappy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    ·
    21 days ago

    I’ve managed people for 20 years, and I’ve never denied a PTO request. The business has never collapsed because of that.

    • runner_g
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      21 days ago

      We have Dec 24th and 25th off this year. My entire team requested Monday, Dec 23rd off. I denied all of them (after securing it as a paid holiday).