Why your job sucks: Sub shop employees fired two days before Christmas.

[riqster]

Last edited Thu Dec 26, 2013, 02:35 PM - Edit history (2)

http://bluntandcranky.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/why-your-job-sucks-sub-shop-employees-fired-two-days-before-christmas/

"The company claims it wasn’t retaliation. Yeah, right. Most of the Snarf’s Subs employees who got s***-canned were among those who were out advocating for an increased minimum wage a few weeks ago. And in response, they got fired by email, right before Christmas Eve.

Here’s a bit of the email:

1. Due to increased competition and losses, ownership has decided to consider remodeling and reconcepting the store at 600 West Chicago Ave.

2. The store is closing, effective tomorrow, December 23, 2013 for an unknown period of time for this remodeling and reconcepting.

3. All staff is terminated, effective Monday, December 23, 2013.

Notice the words “consider remodeling and reconcepting”. They aren’t even sure they will do anything , or what they would do if they did. Nobody in business axes an entire location with less than 24 hours’ notice and no plan for the future. This is not a normal part of a long-term business plan; this is a bitch-slap to the workers who asked for a raise, and a warning to anyone else who is thinking about making a similar request.

And that is why your job sucks, fellow Americans. Because your employer can do whatever they want to you, whenever they want, and for any reason they dream up. We have no protection, very few rights, and no one to stand up for us.

And even if you don’t get fired, you get to pay via your tax dollars for the few remaining social safety-net items for the workers who DID get fired. The employer pays almost nothing. We pay almost everything.

All of our jobs suck. We have let them suck, by electing politicians who enable the increased suck. We have turned our backs on the unions and other agents who helped to decrease the suck.

And we now must re-fight the battles of old, to decrease the suck once again. Unless we all want our jobs to be Snarfed up."

Source material at the link.

On edit: removed an inaccurate statement regarding unemployment costs.

[House of Roberts]

1. One more thing.

And even if you don’t get fired, you get to pay via your tax dollars for the unemployment checks and other safety-net items for the workers who DID get fired.

Before our tax dollars pay for this, our consumer dollars pay to support these owners, so don't support them! Keep informing everyone who will listen.

[riqster]

2. A very good point!

Thanks

[eggplant]

18. It does suck, but...

...unemployment checks are paid for by employers.

It doesn't reduce the doucebagginess here, of course.

[riqster]

22. I stand corrected on the unemployment bennies.

Thanks to all who pointed it out.

[eggplant]

38. No harm, no foul. n/t

[PsychoBunny]

3. Torches and pitchforks

has been the historical cure. Not sure how that would work nowadays. The couple of times where it has been tried recently (Egypt and Libya come to mind) I think the results are still undecided.

[riqster]

4. They only seem to be effective in the short run.

Kicking out as many Repubes as possible and then legislating worker protections is a better long-term fix.

[jtuck004]

8. That only works on T.V. Many people dredge up the French Revolution, but they just read chapter 1,

wherein the tyrants are beheaded. If they read through the end of the story, they find out that little dust-up ended with the beheading of tens of thousands of citizens, and the leaders of the revolution.

And the wealthy were left in charge.

One thing that might save us small groups of people finding a way to slowly but surely gain control of assets, and ending the practice of operating them for the benefit of the wealthy. But that will take a long time and doesn't have the sex appeal of satisfying a blood lust, even though a nice, satisfying execution may well lead to one finding themselves on the receiving end in the next go round

[brewens]

5. What's going on will hit more and more people that thought they were safe. It's just too

bad they couldn't see it coming a long time ago. It's like a number of people that used to work for a medical insurance company in my town. It was one of the biggest employers, still is actually but they have had a lot of layoffs. WTF did you THINK was gonna happen? Yup, vote Republican for thirty years! Believe it gets you lower taxes and that beating down the unions and the working class in general makes you farther ahead somehow. But what happens when you've taken medical benefits away from millions and then tried to make up for that by squeezing more profit from those that you still insure? Now you're out of a freakin' job and without insurance too! Didn't work out so well did it?

It gets worse pretty soon. Unemployment benefits and food assistance being cut will have the same effect. Everyone working at grocery stores and their vendors, delivery guys and contractors will all feel it. The potato chip sales/delivery guy will feel the squeeze and cut back on his buying beer or switch to a cheaper brand. The beer guy will lose out on that and cut back, if he keeps his job.

A lot of right-wingers that helped screw themselves might wise up. They can blame Obama at first but that won't fix anything.

[Stargazer99]

20. The wealthy are depending on those not yet hurt

to not care and this is what happens when the population is self-centered in stead of responding on moral principles. the idiots don't know they are next in line.

[brewens]

46. Yup. Some salesman working 60 hours a week making 100 large per year thinking

the 1% have his back will find out different. Oh yeah. His main problem was the taxes. If only he didn't have to pay the taxes, he'd be really rich. If we could just get another tax cut!

He'll find out just how much the 1% appreciated his working all those extra hours when his sales dry up and he loses his job.

[joeglow3]

6. Companies pay for unemployment insurance

And as the claims for their employees go up, so does their premiums they have to pay.

[bluedigger]

11. And when their costs become excessive, they reincorporate and begin again.

The money always ends up in the same place, whatever the name on the door.

[Vox Moi]

14. UI is part of the grand bargain

Another other part is 'Employee at Will'.
Companies pay for unemployment insurance, that is if they can't frame the termination as 'poor job performance' or some other fault on the part of the employee.
UI is the sole (and poor) mitigator for the carte-blanche companies have in terms of firing employees.
The Employee-at-will doctrine gives companies a huge lever with which to control, cajole and intimidate workers.
Underlying Employee-at-will is the 'I built this myself' mentality. My company, my prerogative.
The effect this has on issues like management harassment, whistle blowing, bargaining for wages is obvious.
Your job is a privilege. You have no rights.
That means that your access to resources like housing, health care and just about anything you buy with your salary is also a privilege that can be revoked at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.
-----
Allow me to suggest that since the corporation is a creature created by the state, it should also act to the benefit of the state. That would include the people who work there. There is no reason that the rules of incorporation should not also include providing due process in dealing with employees.

[The CCC]

7. Why your job sucks: Sub shop employees fired two days before Christmas.

Now if we could just arrange for three ghosts to visit the owners.

[Fuddnik]

12. Or three large Chicago men.

With names similar to Capone, Nitti, and Torreo.

[QuestForSense]

15. Sadly, a conscience is needed for that to work. It's the one thing these owners lack.

[SoCalNative]

9. Unemployment insurance

is normally paid into by the employer only, not employees. At least in most states.

[jtuck004]

10. So if they want to make subs, they start their own and compete with the bastards.

Maybe it does suck, or maybe we have just lived on the plantation too long, and need to take responsibility for fixing our own condition. Because, clearly, those who own the assets are only in it for themselves, and we are never going to legislate them into caring...

[Chan790]

17. Exactly.

The means of destruction of the ownership caste that is immediately available to the working class is cooperativism. Learn from the employee-owned collectives of pre-revolution Spain...it worked so well, the fat-cats here paid the fascists there to kill it before it caught on here.

If the employees can do it better and the employers can't do it at all, pool resources and become the competition...coffeehouse people have known this for ages, the best training ground for opposing the 'bux...is the 'bux. Let them train you for 2-3 years, then leave, use your SIP and FutureRoast (Profit-sharing and stock options) to start an indie that does it better.

(It helps that for a major corporation, Starbucks actually sucks at coffee and has a weak business model. The profits of a location go up 300% if you have a full kitchen or a liquor license. The only advantage they reap is bulk purchasing and merchandising deals.)

[jtuck004]

43. >advantage they reap is bulk purchasing and merchandising deals< Which can be largely offset by

face-to-face kinship with your customers - buying from some beat-up employee of a major chain, especially if you can insert reminders into the customers lives that helping you helps their neighborhood, make it personal, and give them reasons to DESIRE to spend more money with you.

Co-operative smaller businesses can be just as good at this as big, impersonal, screw-everyone-for-a-profit business if they will pay attention...

[Stargazer99]

21. this is why we need unions

[riqster]

23. Damn skippy.

[jtuck004]

42. We have\had unions. They lost. And the Industrial Unions that might have done something were

killed off by the Business Unions in collaboration with the government and business.And those were killed off by collaboration between business and government.

Ownership (or at least say so over the assets, like the Ind. Unions tried to push) is the only thing that will protect us - otherwise we will always and forever be in a subordinate position, subject to the whims of our enemies.

[bluestate10]

51. Easier said than done. If a person doesn't own the building, a shop start up rent can run

from $23,000 per year for a 1500 square foot space to as high as $135,000 for that space. Cities like New York and Chicago tend to be on the higher end.

[jtuck004]

57. Nothing easy about servitude either...but if one doesn't try to start walking away, it's

never gonna change.

I fully well understand, and no one should ever take it lightly. The chances for failing are certainly there, though perhaps mitigated with the right group of people that have the right training. The Cooperative Mondragon in Spain started under a dictator by a group that was waging a low-intensity shooting war against a person who personally signed death warrants for his enemies, the Basque who started Mondragon among them. They survived and thrived despite what was almost certainly far worse odds than almost any person, most likely with far better education and access to technology and information, faces in this country.

In this country suicides increased starting in 2010, now outnumbering those who die in car wrecks. The increase came about in part due to an increase in the 50-65 or so age range, a group that is seeing a new, bleak future in which the employment that provided them with a life has been replaced by despair as the government has worked with business to sell their jobs to the lowest bidders overseas for the past 20 years or so. Today the chances of winding up in in poverty or as a suicide, while a relative few gain unreasonable profits, are getting better all the time for tens of millions of people. Those rich few, aided by politicians we and our neighbors elected, only have what WE willingly and with our hands and blood give them of our lives. There are those, primarily people who are profiting from things as they are, suggesting that if we just work toward this or that it will get better. But those solutions nearly always entail leaving them sitting in a far better position that others - sleeping in the master's house, as it were.

Maybe we need to compare what our self-respect and freedom are worth to a 1500 square foot space in Chicago, and think more deeply about what we are willing to pay.

Steve Biko was an anti-apartheid activist murdered by South African police. He said "The most powerful weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." Harriet Tubman, trying to free slaves before our Civil War remarked "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more, if only they knew they were slaves".

I think the problem at hand isn't the advantage the master holds from ownership of the physical real estate - it is his, or her, ownership of our minds. Else perhaps we might see that our servitude is far more costly than what it might cost us to obtain any building in any city.

[FreakinDJ]

13. 2 days before Christmas the Ultimate FU

[TBF]

16. Unions -

We used to have them in this country. Look it up.

[riqster]

19. A big part of the problem has been the legislative assault on unions.

Add to that tactics such as this (firing everybody because most of the people support unionization and a living wage), and we see how far downhill we have slid.

[trekbiker]

24. unions

14 years ago the engineers in my workgroup elected to go union. We are all degreed professionals, about 90 of us in this particular classification in my company (large fortune 500 corporation). A series of management missteps and incompetence over a period of years led to the very difficult process of leaving management and joining the union. We then spent the next 10 years fighting with management for fair pay scales using industry averages (not the completely bogus industry averages the company regularly forced upon us). The dirty tricks and deceptions employed by management during this time convinced the 40 percent of the engineers that voted against going union to change their minds from anti to pro union so that now my group is near 100 percent pro union. There are the usual problems being in a union, hard to fire incompetent engineers, high performers paid the same as poor performers, etc. But the advantages FAR outwiegh the dissadvantages. I myself benefitted from union protection when a certain management supervisor came after me with some false accusations.

Since my group succeeded in leaving management and joining the union nearly every technical group in my company has done the same, nearly 900 of the formerly management technical professionals are now in the union.

[riqster]

25. A great success story!

Good on you!

[cyberswede]

27. Yes, it's so easy to pursue one's dreams...

with no fucking money.

[greatauntoftriplets]

29. Meanwhile, they were Scrooged!

[cyberswede]

32. How nice for you...and yet they still have shit. nt

[greatauntoftriplets]

41. Not to mention shit sandwiches to eat!

[riqster]

49. And with less bread, there is more shit.

[greatauntoftriplets]

50. And following dreams can eat up a lot of bread.

[riqster]

35. The only problem with that approach is that it can be used to the employers' advantage.

The extreme analogy would be the mass executions in Logan's Run, in which the victims had the supposed opportunity to "renew".

And the spectators cheered wildly as their friends and neighbors were vaporized, hoping that one of them would be "renewed".

Perhaps one of the 18 who were unjustly punished for warning to paid a decent wage will achieve a dream. Let's hope so. But the odds are far better that they will wind up in a diminished circumstance, and that their erstwhile employers will pay no price fir their actions .

But we can at least help by not feeding the beast.

[Egalitarian Thug]

33. And of course you yourself are going to be supporting those for whom

it doesn't "line up in amazing ways", right?

Callous indifference based on happy delusions yields exactly the same results as indifference born out of malice.

[LanternWaste]

37. Things also fall apart for people in amazing ways...

Things also fall apart for people in amazing ways... like getting fired days prior to Christmas.

[raccoon]

36. Enjoy your stay. May it be brief! nt

[William769]

40. They will definitely have more time to go to the Library, thats for sure!

But unlike some people they will probably use the Library for good instead of evil.

[Egalitarian Thug]

31. It's too bad we don't have any effective labor laws or an administration willing to enforce them. nt

[NM_Birder]

34. wasn't this the goal ?

the strike may have simply been TOO successful, and shut Snarf's down. "meet us on the negotiation table, or we will shut you down" is the message I've always understood regarding a strike.

The strike shut em down, ...... that was the two choices the strike offered the employer, ...raise our pay or we will shut you down.

Nobody got a pay raise but Snarf's IS closing, what other result was the strike intended to get ?

[riqster]

63. Nobody strikes to lose a job.

Strikes are not intended to have a binary outcome. They are intended to drive negotiations towards a compromise.

[NM_Birder]

68. Strikes are intended to drive negotiations toward an outcome....

"or else"........... what other intentions would you assign a strike ?

That is the whole point of a strike,...... to force the hand of an employer that will not treat the workforce fairly. Strikes serve a purpose and they produce positive outcomes more often than not. However losing a job is the risk a strike force takes by walking out, going on strike or joining a pre-planned nation wide day of worker protest.

better working environment, or shut the business down are the only two predictable outcomes of a strike. If the Snarf employees were striking for their own demands they got a predictable outcome, maybe not the one they wanted, but certainly one of the two possibilities. If they went on strike as a show of support to a nationwide scheduled day of worker protest, .....well there are risks to standing up for what you believe,...changing the status quo has casualties.

Driving the parties to a negotiation IS a binary outcome.

[cbdo2007]

39. A lot of small businesses close down over night.

Not sure why this one is such a big deal. I've worked at places that have fired us with a sign on the door. At least this way they didn't have to drive in to the office.

[riqster]

45. It's a chain, run out of CO. This is the only location that was closed in this manner.

Also the one that has strong pro-fair-wage activity by its workers. Coincidence? I doubt it.

[IDemo]

47. I was part of a Christmas week layoff a few years ago

and luckily only had to rely on unemployment for two months before finding a better job.

My wife was delivered the layoff news along with many others during a Christmas party years ago.

[riqster]

48. During the party? Jesus Christ on toast.

[IDemo]

52. Yeah - how's that for class?

It was kind of par for the course for that outfit.

[riqster]

61. My previous employer was almost as crappy.

They froze wages for 7 years, cut the bennies, and made work rule changes that really made the job suck. Then when a bunch of us quit, they fired the local HR and Recruiting staffs.

Because, hey, it couldn't POSSIBLY be the corporate policies that drove us out the door, right?

[OwnedByCats]

59. My husband just got laid off 2 weeks ago.

The way they handled it was awful.

He had just finished his work week and he had been working the night shift. He came home that morning and went to bed. A few hours later, when they knew he'd probably be asleep, they left him a voice mail. All the person said was the following Monday he was to report to his manager's office to turn in his uniforms and sign some paperwork. Bear in mind this was a Friday afternoon and by the time he woke up and picked up the voice mail, it was too late to call and find out what was going on. He had to wonder all weekend what the hell had happened such as - was he fired or laid off? Did he do something wrong? Obviously we knew he lost his job, but he didn't know why. His manager didn't even have the stones to leave the voice mail herself, she had her assistant do it. No prior conversation about it, just the voice mail that gave instructions for something he was not informed of prior.

So obviously he had no notice, no severance was offered (even though their pay only allows a living from paycheck to paycheck lifestyle), 2 weeks before Christmas and it was done in the most cowardly way possible. He had even spoke to his other manager the day before this happened about an advancement in the same company (in a different department), telling him that he had a good chance of getting an interview. He had to have known that his boss was going to lay off my husband but he didn't tell him, instead making out that he could very well end up with advancement. I'm sure he was told not to tell him he was getting laid off, but he should have just politely said he wasn't sure about the advancement yet.

It makes me sick, these companies act like they are just decommissioning a robot, not caring at all that these are people who have families to support and bills to pay. This company is doing well financially btw, they are even in the process of expanding. He was told he could get called back at a later date, but who wants to go back and work for a company that handled their lay off as badly as they did? Unless of course there are just no other jobs.

[riqster]

62. You said it:

"Unless of course there are just no other jobs."

That is why they treat us as they do.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

53. That's terrible!

Here is what it comes down to; we are the people we've been waiting for. We all, each and everyone of us have to assert our rights to be treated decently and show we won't stand for this. Because there is no one else coming to helpand no one to stand up for us. There is only us............

[riqster]

64. ^^^THIS^^^

[enlightenment]

54. Looks like they may have an EEOC complaint.

Retaliation is one of the categories of actionable discriminatory policies that the EEOC investigates. If "most" of the shops employees were agitating for better wages, the company may think they are safe if the layoff "all" the employees, but that's not the only standard that the EEOC uses when looking at this kind of thing.

Wouldn't hurt for them to pursue it.

[Egalitarian Thug]

58. I hope they do, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

OTOH, this is a small company and there is no political price to enforcing the law, so if this story gains traction, we might see some action.

[riqster]

60. Thence my blog post.

Not that many readers on the average day, but now and then one blows up.

If we all spread these stories, we can help them gain traction.

[enlightenment]

65. Like I said,

it's probably worth a shot to try. It doesn't cost anything to file a complaint - and if they appeared as a group at the EEOC office it would at the least help the story gain some traction.

I hope they do.

[former9thward]

66. It would not be EEOC, it is the NLRB.

EEOC investigates discrimination complaints based on race, gender, ethnic background, age, etc. This was a whole group so it was not something in those categories. The National Labor Relations Board investigates workplace complaints based on "concerted action" which sounds like what happened here.

[enlightenment]

67. Good point. Thanks for clarifying.

[freshwest]

55. 'We have *turned our backs on* the unions and other agents who helped to decrease the suck...'

That says it all.

[Lunacee_2013]

56. Ummm...I wonder if

the owners call themselves "Christian", like my mom's boss does, even after she fired my mom 3 days before Thanksgiving for no reason and with no warning.