JPMorgan Chase Disables Employee Comments After Return-to-Office Backlash (msn.com) 125
"JPMorgan Chase shut down comments on an internal webpage announcing the bank's return-to-office policy," reports the Wall Street Journal, "after dozens of them criticized the move and at least one suggested that affected employees should unionize, according to people familiar with the matter."
The bank's senior executives announced in an internal memo Friday that JPMorgan Chase would require all of its roughly 300,000 employees to work full time from the office starting in March, with only a limited number of exceptions. More than half of the bank's full-time workers, including senior managers and those with client-facing roles such as branch workers, have already been working full time from offices. The move primarily impacts back-office roles such as call-center workers who had still been able to work remotely two days a week...
Many employees shared concerns such as increased commuting costs, child-care challenges and the impact on work-life balance. One person suggested that they should consider unionizing to fight for a hybrid-work schedule, the people familiar with the matter said. Soon after, the bank disabled comments on the article...
The bank's executives said when announcing the move that affected employees would receive a 30-day notice before they are expected to return to the office full time. They also said there will be a limited number of teams that can work remotely or on a hybrid basis if their "work can be easily and clearly measured."
The bank's executives said yesterday a limited number of teams can still work remotely (full or part-time) — but only if their work "can be easily and clearly measured," according to the article. But they also announced how they'd implement the new policy.
Affected employees will receive a 30-day notice before being expected to return to the office full time.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AsylumWraith for sharing the news.
Many employees shared concerns such as increased commuting costs, child-care challenges and the impact on work-life balance. One person suggested that they should consider unionizing to fight for a hybrid-work schedule, the people familiar with the matter said. Soon after, the bank disabled comments on the article...
The bank's executives said when announcing the move that affected employees would receive a 30-day notice before they are expected to return to the office full time. They also said there will be a limited number of teams that can work remotely or on a hybrid basis if their "work can be easily and clearly measured."
The bank's executives said yesterday a limited number of teams can still work remotely (full or part-time) — but only if their work "can be easily and clearly measured," according to the article. But they also announced how they'd implement the new policy.
Affected employees will receive a 30-day notice before being expected to return to the office full time.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AsylumWraith for sharing the news.
Leave (Score:5, Insightful)
You are not respected, they are even willing to sacrifice productivity and accept higher cost to be able to treat you badly.
Re:Leave (Choose your hill to die on) (Score:2)
Being unemployed is a much better option than having to actually go to work and do the job you are paid for. /s
Don't like it? Negotiate a better contract that gives you what you want -just expect that you will give something in return for what you get.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are not respected, they are even willing to sacrifice productivity and accept higher cost to be able to treat you badly.
Except the employer owns your health care... by extension, owns you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People have been working remotely for years now and without googling I’m going to guess the big banks are announcing record profits.
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. Some rather large banks here have simply sold part of their buildings and added to those profits. For most mental jobs, the "on site synergies" are a hallucination of incompetent C-levels, they are not real.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Working conditions have everything to do with respect, and even more so when the changes done _decrease_ productivity. Seriously. Get rid of your slave-mindset and look at actual facts.
Re:Leave (Score:5, Insightful)
I can 100% be sure that at a big bank like JP Morgan, there will be hundreds of teams comprised entirely of people living on different continents, who will be spending all day, every day, on VCs. What this shift does is make them do the VCs from the office instead of home. For these teams, it will absolutely make productivity worse.
(Iwork for a big tech company, not a bank, but my team members live in Seattle, Florida, Munich, Devon and Bengalaru, while I live in London, and we all spend vast chunks of the day on calls with colleagues in different places too. I speak to another London-based employee once a week max)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No they are asking people to physically move to a desk. Working has nothing to do with it.
Re: (Score:2)
They're telling people to waste time and money commuting to an office for no tangible benefit to anyone. That's disrespect.
If there was a tangible benefit to it that might be reasonable.
Disables Employee Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
Like their employees won't find a way to move the thread over onto X, Facebook, a subreddit, etc. And anonymously as well. The smart managers will leave the in-house feedback system in place. And even learn from it to address widespread employee concerns.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm surprised they even commented on the company side. When we had that we'd always have two sets of discussion, the "official" discussion where sycophants sucked up to the most stupid and asinine leadership, and the real discussion in some other venue bemoaning the boneheaded and malicious stuff announced.
Re: (Score:2)
The fact they commented on the company site shows how seriously this is affecting the employees.
The dual discussion aspect is unproductive, since management is not aware of your private discussions they can pretend that noone is unhappy about it. Sometimes this is used as an excuse, but other times there's a genuine lack of awareness due to there being no feedback.
Re: (Score:2)
They should also leave the comment system open, Because suddenly closing it due to unapproving comments by employees can be seen as retaliation. If the comments constitute "Epicketing" or some other protected concerted activity, Then it is against the law for the employer to retaliate against employees over their exercise of those protection NLRB Section 7 rights.
It's similar to the concept of closing down a breakroom.. Employers can generally close down break rooms, but it is Illegal to do so i
Re: Disables Employee Comments (Score:2)
Re: Disables Employee Comments (Score:2)
Morgan Stanley has 300K employees being ordered back to the office - how many of those workers are Call Center workers?
Re: (Score:3)
It's JP Morgan Chase and not Morgan Stanley.
Re: Disables Employee Comments (Score:2)
How many call-center workers do you think make six figures?
Are they counting the two to the right of the decimal point?
Re: Disables Employee Comments (Score:3)
Employees can do a lot other than unionize. Like quit.
the company is simply choosing to not facilitate the whining on corporate servers.
By that logic, companies would do well to remove all the water coolers.
Re: (Score:3)
Not all candidates are equal, despite what papers they have.
The better ones know that they're above average, and they will go wherever they have better pay and conditions. The ones willing to work for worse conditions will be inferior workers in 99% of cases.
Re: (Score:2)
For every employee who quits, there are 250 to 1000 candidates
Do they have customer lists?
Only measure WFH? (Score:2)
Why would they only measure the performance of people working from home?
Re: (Score:3)
Simple: Otherwise their blatant lies about "better productivity" in the office would become obvious. And they know they are lying.
Re: (Score:2)
I also wonder how do you performance measurements that are relevant. For example, DEX/DEM is the latest stupidness coming around which measures how often a user clicks on things on the screen to judge productivity. However, stuff like that is absolutely pointless when working with some things, especially when something that doesn't require constant user interaction like sysadmin tasks or tasks that are not constant hammering on a machine.
Over the years of history, I've seen arbitrary KPI metrics, to measu
Remote exec here with a remote team of 122 (Score:4, Informative)
"They also said there will be a limited number of teams that can work remotely or on a hybrid basis if their "work can be easily and clearly measured.""
This is actually a horrifying admission that JPM cannot measure the work of virtually all their employees.
OKRs aren't hard, people.
I run a remote team of 122. Work from the moon, I don't care. We pay $400k-$500k TC and one of our employees lives on the beach in Portugal with a house they bought for $40k.
But the flipside of OKR management not being political is that it's pitiless. Miss an OKR and you're fired.
I would be using this opportunity to try and poach JPM people, but I don't interview them anymore as none of them can pass our tech interviews.
Re:Remote exec here with a remote team of 122 (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea about banking, but in engineering you normally cannot.
Re: Remote exec here with a remote team of 122 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that getting competent technical managers is even harder than getting competent engineers. And that is already very hard.
Re: (Score:2)
You really cannot. But you can sort-of classify people into "direly needed", "really needed", "meh", "easy to replace", "should be fired" and you need to do that with a strategic view and it needs to be done by other smart people.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think a global company can be successful without having remote teams that are managed effectively (or at least satisfactorily).
My company is data driven. Every objective has a KPI attached to it, so that we can quantify the results. A general philosophy of OKR starts at the highest level business objectives and goes down to the individual performance evaluations. Not surprising for a company doing metrics-driven decision making.
That said, I don't think we're pitiless (maybe it seems so from my descr
Re:Remote exec here with a remote team of 122 (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious what field you're in.
In startups i've found OKRs to be pretty hit and miss. Like you can set an intention of what you're going to do, but whether it works out or not is determined more by circumstance than anyone's effort.
Like if a big contract shows up you change the roadmap to accommodate. Or you get to some part of the project and it takes 3 times as long. Or some key person leaves and now a whole branch of a project is basically delayed by 3 months. Or all sorts of things. And i don't say these as excuses. this is even w/ creative, skilled, hard working people who stay late, slay dragons etc.
Maybe i should go toward bigger places. Having goals you can focus on for a couple of quarters at a time sounds nice.
Re: (Score:2)
>This is actually a horrifying admission that JPM cannot measure the work of virtually all their employees.
What is truly odd about this... insane even... is that they can't measure the output so their solution is to be unable to measure it at the office instead of remotely.
I dunno about you, but if I really want to, I can goof off with my manager watching right over my shoulder, because they don't understand my work at a technical level. What they know is whether or not the client is happy, and the cli
Re: (Score:2)
People do goof off at the office a LOT, plus all the other distractions.
But you have short sighted managers with delusions that just because you can see someone sat at a desk this somehow means they're working and not on facebook, slashdot, youtube or whatever else they might be doing.
You also have the other way round - i had a colleague who was accused because he was seen spending a lot of time on youtube, but it was clear that he was watching informational videos directly applicable to his job role.
From o
Re: (Score:2)
OKRs aren't hard, people.
Actually, they are, apparently. You need objectives that make sense and don't go out of date. You also need key results that are actually possible, but also make sense. And then even if you can manage them you need to be operating in an environment where senior management don't keep changing srategy every 5 minutes, necessitating changing OKRs to match.
OKRs can easily degenerate into a sort of monkey-see-monkey-do from some managers and an obnoxious system of micromanagement from ot
Re: (Score:2)
"They also said there will be a limited number of teams that can work remotely or on a hybrid basis if their "work can be easily and clearly measured.""
This is actually a horrifying admission that JPM cannot measure the work of virtually all their employees.
It's easier than that.
https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net]
The company value increase since Covid is massively more rapid than prior. It's not like work-from-home is causing them some sort of financial distress. This is purely, 100% licking the Big Mac packaging to get any imagined molecules of food off it, while being morbidly obese.
Re: (Score:2)
Precisely. I currently remotely manage a remote team of 12. I have *no* trouble being aware of who is getting work done and who isn't. And we run circles around other engineering teams that are working from an office.
My company is skeptical of remote work, but has been forced to accept it in order to find enough qualified people. They no longer question my team's ability to perform, and there is no longer any pressure on me to hire on-site people. The results speak for themselves.
Norma Rae (Score:3)
at least one suggested that affected employees should unionize
Right, go watch Norma Rae and then try to draw the parallels between her plight in the clothing industry with your in high-finance at Morgan Stanley. Perhaps take another moment watch the documentary on the Stella Dora bakery workers that struck for a year, then settled, only to see the company sold and the product line moved out of state.
Re: (Score:2)
Unions seem to be working out great for professional athletes with 7-figure salaries. Why shouldn't bank clerks get in on the action?
Oh, and you forgot your bold emphasis point.
Re:Norma Rae (Score:4, Insightful)
Scaremonger a;ll you want, but it's simple: yyes, a union can, if they are morons, drive a company out of business. But that happens far less often than a non-unionized workforce gets taken advantage of by the company, and a company can easily keep a union out by simply treating peopel so well (including top-level pay) that they never want to unionize.
So don't bother whining about "unions bad", they are, on balance, a necessary cog in the machine of capitalism.
Re:Norma Rae (Score:4, Interesting)
The unhappiest employees I know work for a big PE house. They earn 7 or 8 figures, not 6, and they are all miserable as sin. Like hospitalisation for ulcers and then chased for work in the hospital bed kind of miserable. They don’t enjoy their money because they’re in huge debt thanks to making side-by-side investments, they have no friends, they barely know their children and their spouses hate them, they spend all their time working or sleeping and barely take holidays or evenings or weekends, it’s just nightmarish, and by the time they decide they’ve had enough, they’ve ruined their health: the 40 year olds with $100m in the bank look like they’re 60. They are the brightest idiots around, and their and their bosses’ wild lack of EQ is infecting far too much of the modern world: everything from Rishi Sunak’s absurd attempt at running the UK as though the only metrics that mattered were financial (and fucking that up anyway) to those CEOs in India calling for 90 hour work weeks.
The bullshit free version of the announcement (Score:2)
Employees will now be required to make a mandatory expense impacting the environment by consuming fuel on commuting to maintain our property values. We appreciate our employees commitment to taking a salary hit so that the board is not subjected to lower investment yields from unrealized capital gains tax on our real estate assets.
It's a soft layoff. (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to shed headcount, so they ratchet up the intolerable conditions until the desired number of people move on. If they actually cut jobs, they'd have to pay for Unemployment and maybe severances.
Re: (Score:2)
Bingo! You win. Remember that article Slashdot had recently about AI putting Wall Streeters out of work? It's going to affect lots of people in finance. It's up to the banks and investment houses how they want to trim headcount. Making them quit is certainly efficient.
Re: (Score:2)
This is exactly what zions bank did, and when they didnt lose enough, they pushed hard to write people up for "same day" and eventual fire them with a list of trivial things like complaining of co-workers in 1:1 with a manager.
Terms of employment or get fired.... (Score:2)
Measuring the Metrics of Control. (Score:5, Insightful)
So some employees can work remotely if "work can be easily and clearly measured."?
And yet you’re sending call center workers back into the office?
If you cannot clearly and easily measure a fucking call center worker with all the technology available today to do so, then you should be fired. Along with your incompetent middle-earth-management cube farmer boss who’s also too stupid to learn.
How about we prevent RTO from happening until companies can clearly and easily prove how much environmental tax they should be hit with, forcing millions of tailpipes to start polluting like it’s 1999. For the sake of Control of course.
Re: (Score:2)
Y'all are drastically overthinking this.
There's a large segment of the American population that thinks the following things:
1) Some people are inherently better than others (because God, though most of them aren't actively thinking in those terms, it's still baked in to the underpinnings of American society)
2) The 'inherently worse' people deserve punishment for being inherently worse, even if it's completely arbitrary
3) 'Work' is a synonym for 'punishment.'
So no, they're not trying to put people back into
Re: (Score:2)
3) 'Work' is a synonym for 'punishment.'
Speaking of punishment, my logic circuits have been getting hammered harder than a two-dollar whore on nickel beer night trying to grasp the arrogant hypocrisy of the RTO leadershit bragging about how “green” a company they are, deserving of all those environmental tax breaks they falsely get credit for to pad the executive bone-us slush fund with.
Lets do an audit of all those “green” initiatives and figure out exactly where we should shove the RTO initiative of 10 million+ tailpipes
Re: (Score:2)
It's often assumed that working from home introduces more security risks, but in practice it actually reduces them in most cases...
When someone is working in a call center, callers can often hear their colleagues in the background. This is potentially an absolute goldmine for data breaches - record the conversation, filter out the agent in the foreground, and see what you can hear in the background.
A home worker is likely not to have any useful background noise.
Corporate networks are often trusted which mea
I don't get it (Score:3)
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
But, that is not frequently the case . If you've ever worked in an office, you would know that people just play different games. There is more opportunity to cover
Re: (Score:3)
They have people doing work that the managers do not understand and cannot determine if the work being done is really appropriate for the amount of time spent on it, or if they are outright being conned. They also know that in their heart of hearts if they were in the position of the employee, they would be conning the hell out of the manager, so they assume everyone is running a con if they can get away with it.
They think that forcing people to sit at a desk with "nothing better to do" will cause them to
Plebs should do, not talk (Score:4, Funny)
This says a lot about what kind of employer (Score:2)
Chase is.
No thanks, I'll work for somebody else.
"Come Back To The Office" == "Let's Form A Union" (Score:2)
Department of Redundancy Dept. (Score:2)
Sorry, repeating something isn't measured as more work.
Re: (Score:2)
"Few top executives have been more vocal in making the case for working from the office than Jamie Dimon, the veteran CEO of JPMorgan, who – as early as 2021 – sought to restore pre-pandemic working habits. “And everyone is going to be happy with it,” he told a Wall Street Journal event that year. “And yes, the commute – you know, people don’t like commuting. But so what?” - https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]
I guess... nothing.
They do pay your wage. JP Morgan h
Re:they pay your wage (Score:5, Insightful)
The power at the bargaining table is asymmetrical. As an individual... you don't eat if you don't accept what they offer. As a company... they move on to the next person until they find one who agrees. The execs are just fine.
A union is a way of evening up the power between the two sides so employees get a bigger piece of the pie.
And why shouldn't employees get as much as they can, just like the execs do? Companies are not going to be nicer to you because you fight to protect their advantage over you.
More... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unions are seemingly the premier way to get an employer to honor their damn contract.
As enforcement is lackadaisical without a hefty war chest to advocate on your behalf, and government recourse is a joke anymore; unions are the most direct, I daresay libertarian means of contract enforcement.
Re:they pay your wage (Score:5, Interesting)
Butbutbut, unionizing is communism, it deprives you of your chance to become a billionaire and anyway unions are all mafia outfits. Don't believe me? Just go ask bezos and elona to tell you the long version.
Re:they pay your wage (Score:5, Informative)
I grew up with that attitude. Don't tell anybody what you make, it's a secret was another one.
You know why management doesn't want you discussing wages? Because it lets you figure out who is getting screwed the worst.
Deep down, we believe equal work deserves equal pay. Equal work should not deserve pay based on your ability to negotiate a raise. Your work product is either worth it or not. You being scared to lose your job doesn't mean the value of your work to a company is any less - it means they can turn the screws and treat you unfairly unless you have some means to protect yourself. That's a union.
I was in my 30s when I worked in my first union shop, and while they're not perfect, it's amazing how quickly you get used to knowing everyone's salary because it's in the contract you vote for. There's still room for performance bonuses and experience bonuses. Better employees can still make more - but good employees in vulnerable positions don't get hosed. When you go to the meetings and discuss what you want to see in the next contract, it tends to work out to something reasonable.
Just don't ask me to like picket lines; you put people on a picket line and at least half their brain shuts off.
Re: (Score:2)
Just don't ask me to like picket lines; you put people on a picket line and at least half their brain shuts off.
Yeah, it is a known bug in many species.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But sometimes you can't do without, even if you don't like it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, I have seen contracts with clauses that were supposed to be generally applied suddenly get very specific after the ink dries. And it does become a bit of a 'gentlemens agreement' when it comes to job descriptions, otherwise the system is too inflexible.
But it tends to work out better than non-union in the long run, because if management plays games on the current contract, they're going to have a much worse time in the next round of negotiations.
I have also seen owners just fold rather than deal with
Re: (Score:2)
At Anheuser-Busch, they union voted for a contract that basically protected the senior employees and hosed the junior and new employees. Self-interest always seems to win.
That happens in many unions when external market changes require changes in work practices in order for the company to remain competitive. Existing employees largely get to keep their existing arrangement, and it's only the new hires after that point who are hiring into a different agreement.
Including existing lower-level employees in the new agreement, as you report, is a bit harsh, though, and indicates that either external circumstances changed very quickly, or the timing of contract renegotiation delaye
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The new employees were being hired to do the same jobs as the old employees, just with less pay and benefits. The older employees simply did not care about them as long as they could protect their own.
So now it sounds like you're saying that there were not actually any junior employees whose compensation package was significantly reduced after all, and the scenario was exactly as I laid out. To repeat myself, I don't see where this is bad. The union protected the compensation/benefits that the existing employees had hired on to, and only new hires got the new package, so everybody got a comp package that they signed on for. Are you suggesting that the union employees were greedy for voting for the new co
Re: (Score:2)
I've never worked in a union shop, but I didn't learn until my 30s (?) that lawyers ("associates") at mid and upper firms all make the same amount of money (at least within a metro area) for at least like the first ~7 years out of school (basically before they make partner or go in-house).
And even after that they'll change jobs for like 5% extra comp. They're almost as mercenary as enterprise software sales guys.
After a few decades in tech i'm feeling a little sheepish about the amount of times i haven't l
Re: (Score:2)
Loyalty is almost always a one-way street once you're beyond the 'mom & pop' scale of business. Your dedication to the team and the project will mean nothing if the employer decides you're redundant or you've annoyed the wrong person or whatever.
What you have to learn to really succeed is that you have agreed to do a job in return for money. You do that job well because you have pride and want a reputation that will keep you employed, but that doesn't mean 'employed at the same company'. When the jo
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OP clearly mentioned bonuses available for performance targets. So it's both with clearly outlined and public information, but you chose to cherry-pick one line. Have you already made up your mind, and are seeking to validate your own opinion while ignoring clearly mentioned solutions to problems? Or did you simply miss that point?
Asking a question is not cherry picking, and those "clearly defined solutions" are not even applicable over all careers.
Not every job can be defined tying bonuses for performance targets. In my present line of work, it ether performs as it should, or it is failure. That is exactly why I wrote that equal work has to be defined, homie. If equal work/equal pay means everyone doing the same job description must have the exact same pay, that means the person who has been there for thirty years gets the exac
Re: (Score:2)
So, in terms of per hour, you were maybe being paid double, maybe less than double?
Well, to be certain, I did work more hours, so that would kinda be like less pay per hour.
On the other hand, I got most of my food as a part of the job, and a lot of social dinners and happy hour time which might be difficult to figure out if that was "work" or not. But it was part of the job.
And that was the kicker - they wanted my pay without doing what I did.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Hippie communes probably came closest and you know what tends to happen with communes? The most powerful personality rules them while pretending that's not the case, and everything falls apart when outside funding dries up. I think there are a couple of modestly successful cases, but as a rule it's a bad, bad bet.
The truth is that humans in significant numbers do best (i.e., can create more complex societies with higher productivity and standards of living) when we specialize, and some of those specializa
Re:they pay your wage (Score:5, Insightful)
Actual "communism", as practiced in and exported by the Soviet Union, has never been about "the people". However, it along with Nazism scared the capitalist world enough to allow some real democracy at several points in history. Of course, there is the "traditional values conservatism" that wants to roll back that social change.
There's a reason this conservative movement goes along so well with modern prc and russia in the department of "values". They truly share them.
Re: (Score:3)
No, they haven't. They've been funding right-wing, conservative, "patriotic" movements across Europe this whole time.
Except when they were busy talking "business opportunities" with trump and musk.
Re: (Score:2)
As usual leftists always lie [x.com]. Putin's been funding your friends like Saint Greta to the tune of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Pretty good payoff considering it got Europe to cripple itself so badly they kept handing him giant sacks of cash for oil even as he invaded Ukraine, and nobody dared lift a finger to actually do anything about it for fear he'd simply turn off the tap.
Re: (Score:2)
you must be a true putinist, as you lie with zero evidence, but with conviction.
also, just from your mention of "Saint Greta" I know who you are, as nobody in Europe cares about her.
What's the weather like in Lakhta tonight, tovarisch?
Re: (Score:2)
Employees probably didn't get inflation pay rises whilst remote, numerous articles suggest remote workers on the whole are happier with less money for the flexibility.
Now RTO ordered I bet WFH-ers onsite are 10% or more lower than those who recently hired as onsite.
Re: they pay your wage (Score:2)
Are you really thinking that the 300,000 Morgan Stanley didn't get cost-of-living pay raises for the past several years?
Are you imagining that they happily earn less than their peers at other investment houses?
The vast, vast majority of the 300K Morgan Stanley employees were hired pre-Covid (or do you you think that some 100-200K jobs turned over since COVID-19?) and therefore have no reasonable expectation that temporary, emergency work from home policies would become permanent.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm thinking the WFH-ers didn't fight/argue for rises like RTO-ers did. Likely they're not paid the same.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Unions are great when it comes to negotiating wages and working conditions. That doesn't mean they are perfect. Unions protect bad workers. And if unions are universal in an industry and the union negotiates wages much higher than the competition, the net result is that the union employer ends up at too much of a financial disadvantage to their non-union competitors. One could argue that paying better improves productivity so there isn't a huge disadvantage. But when non-performing workers are paid the same as performing workers it poisons the workplace.
This. In another post I asked if the demand for equal work getting equal pay should be based on Job description or performance.
If based on job description, we end up with the union protecting and making the bad workers the defining metric. Not good for the high performers.
If based on productivity, the bad workers go reee.
It should be obvious that when the worst employees rule, the outcomes are a slow circling of the drain.
Re: (Score:2)
The power at the bargaining table is asymmetrical. As an individual... you don't eat if you don't accept what they offer. As a company... they move on to the next person until they find one who agrees. The execs are just fine.
A union is a way of evening up the power between the two sides so employees get a bigger piece of the pie.
And why shouldn't employees get as much as they can, just like the execs do? Companies are not going to be nicer to you because you fight to protect their advantage over you.
Everyone should get as much as they can, as long as it is legal. Now if WFH is mandatory on an employee's list, then they should never have to go to an worksite ever again. Choices. Standards. If your employer does something that offends you so much, time to get a new employer.
I've found however, employers are remarkably conciliatory when an employee brings value added. Disclaimer - Slashdot hivemind believes that "value added" is a weakness on an employees part and being a suckup.
The trick for most p
Re: (Score:3)
It's not that it's THAT hard, it's that technology and processes have evolved to the point that doing that 5 or 6 days a week is no longer necessary in these industries.
The past 5 years have shown the strengths ( and weaknesses ) of remote and hybrid.
Right now full time RTO is kind of like an 80's manager demanding that business and accounting groups not use spreadsheets and do everything by hand because using spreadsheets makes you weak and we're a company who does arithmetic by hand (or desk calculator wi
Re: (Score:3)
That's the problem. Presenteeism means everyone comes in even if they're sick, and that's how the entire office gets sick and stays sick for months because it's just getting passed around and mutated.
Then again, I guess everyone gets to listen to everyone else coughing up a lung. Always a f
Re: (Score:2)
That's the problem. Presenteeism means everyone comes in even if they're sick, and that's how the entire office gets sick and stays sick for months because it's just getting passed around and mutated.
Then again, I guess everyone gets to listen to everyone else coughing up a lung. Always a fun thing to do in an in-person meeting.
I'm trying to build a steel mill where everyone works from home.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would there be a RTO command when they were never sent home? (That said, tech's getting there that one might be able to do things remotely =P)
A completely automated steel mill, where no one needs to be present hardly needs any employees at all.
Re: they pay your wage (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just stupid - the company says return to the office and work there, like you for all those years before March, 2020 - what's so hard?
Because they've had an experience of something better and now you're telling them to downgrade back.
People lived in caves and hunted/scavenged for food for thousands of years, what's so hard about going back to that way of life?
People lived without electricity for thousands of years. What's so hard about giving it up?
This is a case of ignorance is bliss, people put up with shit because they don't know any better or because nothing better is available. Once they know there's a better way they won't put up with the shit any more.
Re: (Score:3)
Do you require the grass mower to exclusively work for you? If yes, they they should unionize.
Re:they pay your wage (Score:4, Insightful)
How much is that lawn being made worth to you?
You don't have a right to force people to work for whatever pay you want them to.
If they decide they want $1,000 an hour and nobody hires them, then they'll negotiate for lower pay until you can find a level that's acceptable to the employer and the employees.
Or you can just find someone willing to do it for only a little bit more than current market rates and not deal with the union
If you can't find anyone that will do it under $1,000 an hour, than your out of luck.
They should absolutely try to get the absolute maximum benefits for what they are doing. They are not your friend or your family.
Your post also ignores that in the real world it's the employer that is the one setting prices in industries because they know if a welder cant get a job, they lose their house and not feed their family, but the worst case for a company is bankruptcy and the execs will be fine. With cheap airfare and travel nowadays, it's easy to find scabs that slightly lower your profit until the union breaks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If all the affected employees just slowed down about 20% or so, JP Morgan would grind to a halt. So sure, so your work, but take your times. If all the employees do that then there's really nothing JP Morgan can do.
Fire them all? Nope? Give them a stern talking to? Sure, but that won't change anything. If everyone is working slow and it's systemic, there's just not a lot you can do to make them go faster.
Re: (Score:2)
Enjoy the rights and lifestyle that others have built for you: you're welcome.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not how employment works. Employment is an agreement between an employer and an employee. It is not a fiefdom.
The employer needs work to be done, and is willing to pay for that work. The employee needs income, and is willing to work to get that income. But there are plenty of other elements of the employer/employee agreement, which make the deal workable, or not.
The #1 rule of negotiation is, if you aren't willing to walk away from a deal, you've already lost. Too many employees will put up with what
Re: (Score:2)
"We need someone to fill office chairs so we can justify paying for an office space and still call it a business expenses!" -JPMC Manager
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just demanding everyone come back to the office "or else" is just another brain-dead management mistake. If there really is value in people in the office, then pay for it - give families a better discount on chi