Sean-Ward.com

I saw this article on digg and I felt I had to comment on it. The digg article can be found here.

Now, I can appreciate the fact that sometimes jobs can be dreadful, and that once you realize that a job is sucking your will to live, it’s to time to leave, if only for the sake of your mental health. The author, VA, lists the 3 ways, in her opinion, companies treat employees in a negative way, which are:

• They Demand Respect While Simultaneously Treating You Like a Child
• They Make it Taboo to Steal
• They Demand a Two Weeks Notice Before You Quit

The first one can be a fault of anyone, not just a company, and as such, it may be tied more to personality types than company entities. Depending on the size of a company, it’s not the company that needs to treat employees well, but the people who make up the management of the company. If they become corrupt and soulless, there’s not much to be done.

The second one, that companies make stealing taboo, is hard to swallow. Stealing is taboo; the companies do not make it taboo. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary lists stealing as “to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice”. If a company chooses to look the other way when some paper clips, binders, tape, paper, etc. go missing, well, there’s your bonus. The company purchased the goods, not you. Then again, when one gets further up in the corporate hierarchy, they tend to assume they can use company property for their own, but would yell at people who do it beneath them. That’s just the way it goes.

If you want, you can say that overall, American companies steal our time by giving us less vacation then other developed companies, or by having it take a year before you can take a week or two of vacation, or that they expect you to stay late and/or come in early, and work weekends and/or holidays without any bonus because you might be salaried, even though the job is Monday through Friday, 8 to 5.

The third item, the two week notice, is more for people who don’t want to burn bridges behind them and wish to give the company time to work on getting a replacement or that position’s affairs in order. If you are fed up with an employer, or they are fed up with you, the termination is going to be immediate. If an employer knows a position is going to be ending, they will try and give you as much notice as they can, provided you haven’t pissed them off. After all, if an employer felt about an employee, how VA feels about her employer, it would have happened in a “don’t come back after your vacation” type manner.

In regards to “cutting you into the profit”, once companies get big enough, you get corrupt middle management who are the ones that hoard the wealth and give the “ata boy” pins. Smaller companies will take care of their workers as best they can.