I work at a grocery store as a bagger (HS job, not long term) and if the cashier doesn’t scan something I most of the time won’t say anything
Someone from a different department wanted to transfer an internal user to me for help with something. As soon as the transfer went through, the user said something had come up and she’d call back. I didn’t offer her my number to call me directly, nor did I ask for her number and offer to call her later. I said “ok,” and let her hang up.
I used to go the extra mile for the company. Now I do the minimum necessary for people to be satisfied with my work. Being generally friendly buys goodwill, too.
One time at a TV station I worked for, the manager of our marketing department decided that three $90k pieces of robotic studio camera equipment were actually fun toys with which he could (without training) just mess around. I came into the studio that day to find two of my fellow production department coworkers trying desperately to wrangle the situation. At one point, the manager nearly crashed two of these robots into one another and my co-worker threw himself onto the emergency stop switch halting the imminent collision and, potentially, tens of thousands of dollars of damage.
Knowing we had work to do with these units shortly and having been trained on how to reset everything after an emergency shutdown, I turned to the manager at the control panel. Y’all, as the words “wait let me help you reset it” were coming out of my mouth he shouted directly in my face “I said I fucking got it!” So… I threw up my hands and walked to the break room, which was across the hallway from the chief engineer’s office. About two minutes later the marketing manager walked into the chief engineer’s office saying “hey [chief engineer], we’re having a problem with the studio robotics, can you come take a look?”
My coworkers told me that, the moment the door closed behind me, the manager turned back to the robotic controller and said “I don’t think I’ve got this.” An hour later, the GM sent out an email announcing basically “union shop rules” for the incredibly expensive robotic equipment… essentially: if you’re not trained on them, don’t touch and we weren’t training anyone else. Come to find out that when my coworkers explained what happened to the chief engineer (who had fought corporate bean counters for nearly five years to get us these robotic units), he had apparently chewed the marketing manager out to the point of causing an HR situation and nearly succeeded in getting the idiot fired.
Since then, every time I realize that I am doing something that will make the company more money or even just save them money, I always think back to that moment of “I said I’ve fucking got it” and stop what I’m doing. I’ll do a ton of extra work to make my job and my coworkers’ jobs easier long term, but I am NEVER going to intentionally contribute to making any place at which I work run more profitably. It’s just not worth it.
I hate it when people yell, so unneeded, especially since the robots were stopped. I am glad you now no longer help these companies, but help your fellow workers only. :)
“if you don’t like your job you don’t strike, you just go in every day and do it really half-assed”
-Homer Simpson
Soviet era joke.
We pretend to work and the bosses pretend to pay us.
There’s a Chinese joke from my dad:
“做也三十六，不做也三十六.”
Which translare to: Whether you work or not, you still get paid ¥36 (Yuan/Renminbi) (per month)
“做也三十六，不做也三十六.”
I heard it this way.
“If you work hard, you make $36. If you work really, really hard, you can make $36. If you die, $36.”
Strong disagree with this.
Like most adults, I HATE my job. Every day I go into work I die inside. There is nothing rewarding about my job other than the pay check.
Still I try hard. Every day. It makes the lives of my co-workers easier. It makes my boss’s life easier. They are real people in my community and I care about how my actions affect them. Work ethic means a lot to me.
I get hating your job but half assing your job every day is awful for society.
I work in government.
I do as well. I know (or at least I used to know) that what I do helps the public rather than giving more money to some waste of oxygen on a yacht somewhere.
I generally sympathize with OP, but someone in your position is the exception.
I’m sorry your job sucks (especially now); and thank you for putting in so much effort!
I work in government
Understandable. If you work in like welfare departments, working harder to get people more benefits is a bigger “fuck you” to the government
The company I work for likes to hold a meeting every quarter to tell employees how the company is doing and they love to talk about the stock price as if we’re supposed to care. Executives get rewarded with shares, not us, we’d have to actually use our own money to buy shares and the number of shares we’d be able to buy with our own salaries would be meager by comparison. Still, they proudly boast about share buybacks, while if you look at the publicly-available data, the execs are selling tons of shares (not just for tax purposes). So they’re using company funds to pump up the stock price while offloading their personal shares. Real inspiring leadership, really drives me to put in more effort so they can get a bigger payout while I and everyone else gets diddly squat.
Today I was given a 1.3% raise and my 10% bonus was funded at 6%. Immediately after I was told that someone told me they were about to do something that could end up costing the company around $50k. I didn’t stop them.
Imo there’s no such thing as ‘paid enough to care’. If I’m not paid TO care, specifically, I wont care. I’m not wasting my mental energy to create more profit for the shareholders if I’m not directly incentivised to do so.
I’m not wasting my mental energy to create more profit for the shareholders if I’m not directly incentivised to do so.
Especially when those very same capitalists use their wealth and power to attack democracy and public institutions! Every dollar of profit I make for a modern day (wage) slaver does harm to my soul.
I love seeing those types of titles so often in lemmy :)
I also want to receive stuff for free.
Who doesn’t want to join a co-op and receive shares of the company for free. Almost no one wants to start a co-op, financing it, taking risks and responsibilities only to give shares away for free and gain nothing in exchange.
You don’t finance it, you take a loan from a bank on the company. If the company folds, it goes bankrupt, not you. You don’t take anymore risk than the other workers.
If the company is dead, you’re still a human and now just another worker on the job market. You don’t go to jail for going bankrupt.
You still take all the risk because the bank is going to say they won’t give a loan to a new company without a track record, unless someone is willing to be a guarantor.
Now you share the profits, but all the risk is yours.
Unless you have a bunch of people lined up to start the co-op and they’re all willing to pitch in or become guarantors with you, in which case it might just work - but again, the initial people are going to have more skin in the game than the rest.
Then go ahead and start one :D Good luck finding a bank that gives you an unsecured loan to start a business.
Eh, banks give out loans for people to start restaurants all the time, and restaurants are notoriously risky businesses. There’s hundreds of worker-owned co-ops in the States, so it’s not impossible to find a bank that will fund them.
Eh, banks give out loans for people to start restaurants all the time
** Citation needed.
** Citation needed.
Looks outside
And if you want a reward for founding a business but want it to be a co-op there are methods thst are reasonable and fair like selling it bit by bit to the employee union at a reasonable price or willing your company to your workers.
This unironically
You don’t receive shares for free. You receive shares in return for your labour. You don’t become an equal member of a partnership as soon as you join.
Then it is not equally owned as the title says.
You’re struggling so hard in the comments, just to be wrong.
Why are you so invested in capitalism? Do you own lots of capital or something?
I don’t own much capital, but I live in a post communist country and I sure as hell don’t want to experience the shit our country already went through once.
Let me guess. Post-Russian? Don’t blame communism for Russia’s glaring flaws.
Yeah, blame the Russians. As if the Russian revolutionaries were not fighting for the same ideals you believe in. Just by not realizing that eliminating capitalists concentrated all the power in the government and handed power to Stalin on a silver platter.
Once you come up with an economic model that both works economically and does not hand power to elected officials or some other such group, you have my support. Until then, I will keep the safe assumption that socialists have zero idea what they are talking about and would lead us to doom if we gave them the chance.
As someone also from a post soviet country, don’t make the mistake of thinking all socialism is the same as Leninism.
Once you come up with an economic model that both works economically and does not hand power to elected officials or some other such group,
So you’d rather support a system where the power is handed to the unelected “officials”? You can see that happening in real time with Musk effectively leading the US. Not to mention almost all forms of democracy have people handing the power to the elected government, so I really don’t know what you’re opposing here.
Except shares don’t represent the amount of ownership of a company. Everyone gets one vote regardless of how many shares they have, thus equal ownership.
They do however represent the ability to profit from it. Which is what the whole “paid enough to care” thing is all about.
I don’t much care if I have equal voting rights to everyone else in a co-op of which my share is worth ten bucks a year in dividends if the founder is making a million a year or something (which I’d say is realistic for a medium sized company). At the same time, the founder is not going to just give away his ownership, maybe in small chunks, but not the majority of it.
As the other commenter put it, it depends on how it’s structured. There are so many ways to set up a coop I won’t get into how shares affect dividends. Instead I’ll use your example to show why your voting right is worth more than how the profits gets distributed.
If you’re making ten bucks from your share and the founder is making a million, then the cooperative has to be okay with that arrangement. If you’re collectively not okay with it then you have the power to change that. The founder can have all the shares in the world, they still have one vote. Since you collectively have the majority of votes you can simply vote to change how profits get distributed and the founder has to accept it because they don’t own the cooperative, you all do.
Since you collectively have the majority of votes you can simply vote to change how profits get distributed and the founder has to accept it because they don’t own the cooperative, you all do.
How do you change it? By voting to take away the founders shares? Voting to make shares worth unequal?
I would NOT want to be the founder of that co-op. Imagine investing hundreds of thousands, taking out loans, and putting in 80 hours a week for the first few years to get the business running… and then a bunch of new hires vote that you shouldn’t get shit.
The only way to have any equality is for everyone to be equal from the start. Which means everyone putting skin in the game. Which means it’s inevitably only well-off people who could have a co-op with any sort of equality.
Law firm partners have buy-ins, that’s like the closest thing to a co-op with equality and everything. Except the issue here is that the buy-in grows as the company becomes more valuable, so at one point new partners might not be able to afford the buy-in at all. If the co-op is worth a billion dollars and you’re selling shares at ten thousand dollars and there’s 1000 employees owning equal parts of the company - they’re all forced to sell at significantly below market share. Not a great place to be as one of the employees. So the buy-in at this stage should be a million dollars for things to be equal. But who tf is going to be able to afford that?
It depends on how it’s structured.
Well yeah, but cooperatives generally avoid the possibility of buying voting power because that kinda contradicts the purpose of a coop.
Fair cop.
Y’all are getting shares as part of your compensation?
