I mean... this is a nice thought and all, but all this means is that Australian employees now have the right to be the part of the "difficult decision to reduce our workforce in order to better align with our long term strategic objectives".
Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
251–260 of 449 posts
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sure you heard of red lobster going bankrupt because of endless shrimp. Well, that wasnt actually the case but once again private equity. They forced red lobster to sell off their land/buildings to a PE controlled entity. Which rented it back to them. Also forced them to go to a specific, PE controlled, fish seller. In fact, they got forced into starting the endless shrimp stuff because that seller had too much…
Darden group sold Red Lobster to GGC because it was massively underperforming in it's portfolio due to mismanagement through the 90s. GGC wasn't able to make much headway with it, and so it sold 25% to a vendor on the supply chain as part of debt restructuring and forgiveness, that allowed them to get some unit economics back into reality and the owner of the supply chain company took the rest of the position to cont…
McDonald's, a non-failing firm, not owned by PE, was once described by a former CFO thusly: "We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business." They realised that owning the land upon which their restaurants, allowed them to succeed.
Red Lobster's PE firm, on the other hand, did the exact opposite: sold the most valuable asset out from under their restaraunts, to another PE firm, which then squeezed the restaraunts on rent and ruined their store economics (along with the aforementioned supplier further ruining their unit economics) until they went out of business.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am from India and this is very common thing from Indian managers whether they are in India or working abroad (and I am sure this is not limited to India but since I am from there I am sharing this example). It's just a thing. I often am a pariah at workplace when it comes to views on work-life balance. So I have learnt to never get into discussions about it and just shut up and keep my head down while never giving…
I've had Indian managers and never experienced this. You're probably extrapolating from a small sample size which may all be from same company / industry.
Basing the claim, "you're probably extrapolating from a small sample size" on only your experience, is extrapolating from a small sample size.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." This is the reason why I always tell young engineers to treat companies with utmost business-only mentality. It's not that all managers are bad. It's that the company rewards psychopathic behaviors - that aren't easily apparent to humble people. Companies are merely out there squeezing and exploring employee…
Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on. Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse. Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on. Of course there are companies, too many of them, tha…
I wonder how much of a thing "long-term culture" really is in the tech industry. The culture at Google in the year 2024 looks very different from the culture at Google in 2010. In many ways the culture at Microsoft in 2024 is radically different from the culture at Microsoft in 2001.
I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will be most interesting how this applies to teachers, who often have to prepare lessons and mark work outside of hours.
The teacher situation is strange. One the one hand, they often do seem to work outside of school hours on lesson prep and marking. On the other hand, they generally don't work during school holidays (12 weeks/yr). Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.
a 9-3 school day for students means an 8-4 work day for teachers, minimum. that eats up the 40hr week right there, even for a teacher working the bare minimum.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#256Maybe we should think of these things as employment flags? There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature. I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.
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Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like most things, there's a gaping chasm of variance between teachers that are phoning it in and teachers that want to engage their students in learning. I know a teacher who leaves for work at 6:30am, gets home after 5:30pm most nights, cooks dinner for the family, and spends the rest of her evening marking work and preparing lesson plans for the next few days. Then there's preparing reports, which is like a 6-week…
That's amazing, but all-too rare. I think teachers have a very tough job, and many (most?) of them are not very good it at. My kids have had teachers who constantly shift assignment due dates because they're not ready, half-arse their lesson planning and tell the kids to do the rest at home, and are generally unable to manage a classroom.
> That's amazing, but all-too rare.
No, it's abusive and indicative of a failing system. We should not be celebrating overwork. If a system needs its workers to be doing double- or triple-time to function at the desired level, then the system is not working well and is on its way to failure.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#258I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company w…
Early on in my career when I was first put into the position of hiring both employees and contractors, a guy I was working with said "We can ask him for a better price and promise to give him a better deal on the next one", and I said "but we won't have any more work after this one" and he said "yeah I know but we can just tell him that to get a better price".
It was one of the first times I realised that people are actively being jerks in business negotiations.
Another time was when I put my prices up to $160/hour from $80/hour after I realised I wasn't making any money (in fact by my calculations I was losing $3/hour for every hour my staff worked).
I didn't lose a single customer. They all just said "oh, right, well, okay when will you have it done?".
The same guys who had been crying poor a couple of months prior about how they "just didn't have the budget" were now paying double the rate and they could totally afford it.
People be jerks yo.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#259I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company w…
Yeah i got a peek at how the sausage gets made at the higher levels and I decided I needed to keep my HH costs down and reach FI(maybe)RE asap. Until that happened I was ultimately a wage slave, and that's how they wanted it, with a gun to my head in the form of rent/mortgage/kids's schooling whatever keeping me desperate to perform for them.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing it is something like, you can't be fired specifically for not answering outside of working hours. Nothing stopping companies from firing you for not fitting company culture (the unspoken part being company culture is we all answer calls outside of work hours). Still a step forward because there will be some careless/incompetent companies that leave a paper trail indicating they fired you for this so you…
So, hiding true intentions and needs is better? Why is regulation not to force companies to be clear that you may be expected to be flexible with your corp comunication before signing the contract?
> So, hiding true intentions and needs is better?
No, it is illegal. Your proposed law would have the opposite effect of the law that passed: every company would include this in their employment contract and would have legal protections to make employees work overtime.
In addition, there are exceptions:
> To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers, who can only refuse to respond where it is reasonable to do so. Determining whether a refusal is reasonable will be up to Australia's industrial umpire, the Fair Work Commission (FWC), which must take into account an employee's role, personal circumstances and how and why the contact was made.