Bad Bosses

BNET blog­ger Jes­sica Still­man dis­cusses stu­pid man­age­ment prac­tices in the United States. In response, I wanted to share some of the worst expe­ri­ences I and friends have had as employ­ees at var­i­ous places in dif­fer­ent parts of the world since grad­u­at­ing col­lege in 2002:

• When I was hired, my boss said that I would be given raises of spe­cific amounts after spe­cific peri­ods of time. I neglected to get this in writ­ing. Need­less to say, the raises never happened.
• A friend asked a new employer to write an employ­ment con­tract. The boss laughed and said it was not nec­es­sary since they were a small, mom-and-pop oper­a­tion. Of course, the boss did not do what was said in the inter­view. Rumor also had it that the com­pany would not hire any­one who demanded a contract.
• In Lon­don, a gypsy swin­dled me out of 50 pounds when I was work­ing as a bar­tender. The boss took all my future tips dur­ing the time that I worked there.
• When I was between jobs, I had sched­uled a doctor’s appoint­ment and other errands since I had the time. I found a posi­tion, and the appoint­ment was sched­uled for the sec­ond day of work. When I told my boss, he said, “This will not be a reg­u­lar appoint­ment, right?” God for­bid that some­one have an ill­ness. (It was indeed a one-time thing.)
• Two employ­ers said in inter­views that it would not be a prob­lem to pur­sue my MBA stud­ies part-time in the evenings as long as I was able to arrange my sched­ule and do my work. Weeks later, they changed their minds and fired me even though they said my work per­for­mance was fine.
• My boss said that my com­pen­sa­tion would be a low base-salary and a high com­mis­sion of my department’s sales. The con­tract he offered men­tioned only the base salary; he said there would be a sec­ond con­tract “later” for the com­mis­sion. Of course, it never appeared.
• The boss at a com­pany rou­tinely fired peo­ple just before they would start receiv­ing a higher salary after three months — or he would fire peo­ple just before their one-year anniver­sary just so he would not need to pay a sev­er­ance package.
• I was laid off from a com­pany in Israel in Sep­tem­ber, and I was due to receive my salary for that month in Octo­ber plus another month’s salary as sev­er­ance under my con­tract. It is now three months later, I have not seen a shekel of the NIS 15,000 ($3,750) that the com­pany owes me. My old boss says they have a “cash-flow prob­lem” and that they will pay when they can. (Since this is Israel and the com­pany is still in busi­ness, he is lying.) I have a court date com­ing up.

As hard as these expe­ri­ences were, they proved one thing: in a reces­sion, employ­ers hold all the cards. When there are dozens of peo­ple for every avail­able posi­tion, bosses can do what­ever they want.

Have your own sto­ries? Feel free to share in the comments.

Related: Why My Gen­er­a­tion is Pissed Off