I’m in Europe, and work for an American company. After a few issues in production, they tried to implement an on-call requirement for employees to check the alerts during their out of work hours (5am to 10pm or something stupid like that). I just reminded them that my country has the “Right to disconnect” law, which protects us from having to work outside our required hours.
They changed it to volunteer basis. I refuse to volunteer (because my off time is my time).
This was my father in-law. He developed sepsis from the foot they had to keep doing surgery on. On his hospital bed where he is hooked up to just about every machine possible, this man was on his laptop doing work and on a cell phone talking to this engineer and that engineer. After his foot was amputated, even on disability he was being called 24/7. He was the most important person in the region, he memorized every fiber optic line and location. His boss was treating him like shit to get him to quit, he didn’t like dad for some reason, so he pushed dad constantly and shamefully. Once dad died, they had the nerve to call us asking if he had any documents that could help them with a project, he was doing the job of 4-5 college graduates and they were barely managing. He only had his high school degree but the man knew his shit. He had an interview lined up at a new higher paying job, he was one week away, and he spent the last few months of his life crying from stress, hating his job, and just in near constant despair, the only thing that he was looking forward to was mine and my wife’s wedding. Corporate America is a vampire and not the sexy kind, the nosferatu kind.
Man, a lot of you Americans need to unionize. None of this happens at my work and it’s precisely because we’re unionized and have a contract that specifically says that our employer is bound by strict rules. Granted, we don’t get a month paid vacation, but we can’t be denied time off, can’t be compelled to be on call, can’t be forced to work overtime and we have PTO accounts, healthcare and a pension that get paid into on a weekly basis.
“but we get paid so much more” /s. I’ve heard this before from people in the tech sector, ignoring the fact that should the shit hit the fan we Americans have no social programs to assist us. I’d take half my pay to get what people in Europe are guaranteed.
Just to fight against the hive mind that America is a uniform hell scape. People from my team routinely dip with only a few days notice for vacations and sometimes because they feel like they need a day off.
Frankly I don’t take my PTO but that’s more of a personal problem than my work’s. I was a workaholic through college because frankly I’m not outstandingly smart.
In some countries, Summer is something you have - not just the name of a season you can see from your office window.
Big part of me clearly knows there is no such thing as a binary right and wrong in life, yet… this is a crystal clear example somehow — and not the only one.
That big part of you is fetishizing nuance and mistaking it for wisdom
Nuance doesn’t stand on its own, there is no sense saying something has merit because it has nuance. I can give 10 examples of things that would be moronic if you tried to add nuance into them. “Nazism bad”. “The crime of loitering shouldn’t exist”. “The planet is getting hotter”
