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Got A Bad Boss? You Could Be a Winner |
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Monday, 30 July 2007 |
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We in the union movement often are asked: Why do workers in 21st century high-tech America need unions?
This month, the AFL-CIO community affiliate provides one real good answer to that question: Bad Bosses. In its second annual My Bad Boss Contest, Working America is looking for the worst of the worst workplace horror stories about managers who mismanage and maltreat employees and otherwise act like they are the proprietors of their own personal medieval serf estate. The winning entry—voted on by visitors to the Bad Boss site—will get a weeklong getaway—miles away from the boss. Working America just launched the contest—and already it’s clear that Neanderthals lurk behind many an innocuous office and shop front. Brenda in Oregon describes working as a professional consultant in a small, 1,200-foot square office space with a boss who knew no personal boundaries. Not only did the boss demand employees shop for his wife’s Christmas gifts, pick up his dry cleaning, take his car in for inspection and take his 20-year-old son to try on a suit, but ”more difficult to tolerate,” writes Brenda, were the conversations he tried to have with me about the attractiveness of a random woman in the airport while traveling for business, or my sex life. When my boss started getting his massages (I’m talking full body massages) in the office during working hours, well, it had gone too far. While he was getting his massage in his office, we were working at our desks, answering phone calls (making excuses for where he was), as if it was perfectly normal. Talk about uncomfortable! Being a bad boss is gender neutral, as “Doctor’s Note” from California illustrates. When her husband developed a brain tumor, It was my boss’s policy to call her if we were going to miss any work, even if she was on vacation. So I call her and told her that I was going to have to take the Thursday off to take my husband to a brain surgeon. From her vacation, she started yelling at me telling me that I could not take time off. I tried to explain to her that my husband has a brain tumor. She yelled that I had better bring a note from the doctor saying that I was there. I tried to explain to her that I would not lie about a thing like this. She then started screaming at me that she was trying to run a business and that I should think more like that!!!! She said she didn’t think that it was that serious. Two months after the diagnosis, my husband died. I never received a card or nothing from that bad boss. You get the picture. There are some really ugly bosses out there. And as we say in the union movement: Got a boss? Get a union. Read more Bad Boss stories here. |
