I have had brushes with unreasonable superiors. A good example would be when I was dietary manager in a Nursing Home. The Administrator of this facility was a career RN before going into administration. She was notorious for not wanting to give employees decent raises, and commonly referred to CNAs (certified nursing assistants) as "a dime a dozen". When I took over management of the dietary department (I was promoted from head cook, one of the few long-term employees), I was the first person in ten years to get the food budget down to where it was supposed to be; my predecessors had a habit of running it up, sometimes doubling it. The administrator was excited for me and very glad that I was able to do that. Next came the labor budget. At this facility at that time, staff hours for the kitchen were not to exceed 41 hours per day. This left room for three full-timers on day shift, and three part-timers on night shift. It was nearly impossible to maintain this 41hr maximum and still make sure resident needs were being met. I frequently filled in for staff who had called in sick on weekends, essentially working for free, in order to give me a few extra hours to work with, a little elbow room.
In Nursing Facility work, there are yearly state surveys, which are four to five day affairs, in which all aspects of patient care are monitored, from top to bottom, to make sure regs are followed and that the staff are well trained. It was during my second state survey, after my second year as manager of this department, that I gave up as a manager. I felt as if I was in a situation that was doomed to failure. The staff I had were being paid a little bit above minimum, because very few did these jobs for very long and you mostly worked with newbies and semi-long-termers, had zero benefits, no union (this is Arizona), and virtually no real incentive to work hard, since merit raises were forbidden. I had tried to initiate raises based on merit but when you talked of this people looked at you as if you were Atilla the Hun. People are trained to believe that they are entitled to the same raise as anyone else, it's only fair, and how hard a worker is doesn't factor in. It's TEAMWORK!!!!!PEOPLE!!!!! That was the rallying cry against any crazy ideas like pay-raises based on merit. Administration wanted nothing to do with merit raises either. "Give em 3 to 4%. That's how it is."
Anyway, I was forced to encourage a group of very unenthusiastic people to obey all the regs and to do their jobs to the best of their ability, but I was not able to pay them what I thought they were worth, or work with their hourly allotment. It was also hard to fire people, because you had precious little to choose from by way of replacement. It was sometimes easier to keep at someone who was not very good in the hope that they would improve than it was to fire them and, most likely, get someone even less capable.
My administrator begged me to stay, but I went back to my job as a cook, at a new facility, which, as it happens, paid me MORE than I was being paid to manage the dietary department at the first facility. When the dietary manager of the new facility was fired for drug use, the admin there offered me the job. The pay would have been somewhere in the 40k per year area, but I refused. I did not want to go through all that frustration again.
As a manager I was upset by the absurd expectations of my administrator: get this rag-tag group of unskilled workers to toe the line and be perfect at their jobs, which in such facilities entails knowing a lot about food handling, prep, sanitation, therapeutic diets, various patient needs, when they could just as easily have gone to flip burgers for the same pay; but I was equally upset by the people who were at the bottom. To be honest, they disgusted me more. There are so many people who DO NOT know how to handle money, who spend way too much time on barstools, who spend far too much money on beer and/or drugs, who are unreliable, untrustworthy, belligerent, careless, selfish, what have you, the list goes on.
I've been working with the common worker my whole life, and it aint no picnic. If there is to be any real understanding, this myth of the noble working class hero needs to be taken down a few notches. Yes, there are millions of very fine people who work at unskilled jobs and who are wonderful all around, and many of these people are mistreated and/or exploited; and yes, the world is full of fat greedy bastards in high places; but let us at least look at the whole picture and be realistic.
For every bastard of a boss you have an anecdote about, I have one for some hapless loser who simply can't get his shit together, no matter how much help is offered.
In Nursing Facility work, there are yearly state surveys, which are four to five day affairs, in which all aspects of patient care are monitored, from top to bottom, to make sure regs are followed and that the staff are well trained. It was during my second state survey, after my second year as manager of this department, that I gave up as a manager. I felt as if I was in a situation that was doomed to failure. The staff I had were being paid a little bit above minimum, because very few did these jobs for very long and you mostly worked with newbies and semi-long-termers, had zero benefits, no union (this is Arizona), and virtually no real incentive to work hard, since merit raises were forbidden. I had tried to initiate raises based on merit but when you talked of this people looked at you as if you were Atilla the Hun. People are trained to believe that they are entitled to the same raise as anyone else, it's only fair, and how hard a worker is doesn't factor in. It's TEAMWORK!!!!!PEOPLE!!!!! That was the rallying cry against any crazy ideas like pay-raises based on merit. Administration wanted nothing to do with merit raises either. "Give em 3 to 4%. That's how it is."
Anyway, I was forced to encourage a group of very unenthusiastic people to obey all the regs and to do their jobs to the best of their ability, but I was not able to pay them what I thought they were worth, or work with their hourly allotment. It was also hard to fire people, because you had precious little to choose from by way of replacement. It was sometimes easier to keep at someone who was not very good in the hope that they would improve than it was to fire them and, most likely, get someone even less capable.
My administrator begged me to stay, but I went back to my job as a cook, at a new facility, which, as it happens, paid me MORE than I was being paid to manage the dietary department at the first facility. When the dietary manager of the new facility was fired for drug use, the admin there offered me the job. The pay would have been somewhere in the 40k per year area, but I refused. I did not want to go through all that frustration again.
As a manager I was upset by the absurd expectations of my administrator: get this rag-tag group of unskilled workers to toe the line and be perfect at their jobs, which in such facilities entails knowing a lot about food handling, prep, sanitation, therapeutic diets, various patient needs, when they could just as easily have gone to flip burgers for the same pay; but I was equally upset by the people who were at the bottom. To be honest, they disgusted me more. There are so many people who DO NOT know how to handle money, who spend way too much time on barstools, who spend far too much money on beer and/or drugs, who are unreliable, untrustworthy, belligerent, careless, selfish, what have you, the list goes on.
I've been working with the common worker my whole life, and it aint no picnic. If there is to be any real understanding, this myth of the noble working class hero needs to be taken down a few notches. Yes, there are millions of very fine people who work at unskilled jobs and who are wonderful all around, and many of these people are mistreated and/or exploited; and yes, the world is full of fat greedy bastards in high places; but let us at least look at the whole picture and be realistic.
For every bastard of a boss you have an anecdote about, I have one for some hapless loser who simply can't get his shit together, no matter how much help is offered.
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