auntblabby wrote:
it has been my experience that 90% of bosses [that I've experienced] give the other 10% a bad rep.
Similar observations here. I've seen a lot of petty corrupt behaviour from them, but even the ones who had no obvious personal bad in them were still in some way a threat. In a free market system, even the best boss in the world is still under pressure to drive costs down and production up. As we have so many unemployed job seekers, the labour market is a buyer's market, which ultimately means that the employee can't bargain as an equal, and has to yield to a certain exploitation rate. Of course you could still have a nice boss, but when the chips are down, their loyalty is for the company, not for you, and they will have to implement painful policies. All you can hope for is a "sorry it had to be you" attitude from them. I don't think it's possible to be a really good boss and survive in a free market.
I've seen (relatively) good bosses at the local level. Much of the political machinations and high-handed edicts came from higher powers who I never met. Even my best boss, who was very courteous and calm, put me in a pretty uncomfortable situation. I was used to working set hours, and wanted very much to keep it that way, but the powers that be were tinkering with our contracts in a complicated way I don't understand, so the right to a limit on the length of the working day was becoming rather cloudy. I found myself being expected to complete a process that wasn't taking the whole working day to do, at first. So far, fine. But the number of units to be processed grew too much, so I found I was being tacitly expected to waive my right to go home at the usual set time.
I racked my brains to develop quicker ways of getting the work done, and that was helpful, but overall it was pretty nerve-wracking. It might have been easier to just give in and work later occasionally, but that would have felt too much like surrendering to a bait-and-switch trick. One late afternoon I realised I wasn't going to get it all done, so I went and told my boss that I'd run out of time. He looked very uncomfortable for a moment, and then said OK, he'd complete it himself. Phew! Later I asked if we could just limit the job to a reasonable maximum number of units to process per day, but he shied away from that idea. Then one day while trying to process an oversize workload, there were a few distractions and I was shaking so much that I couldn't work. Luckily the boss was there at the time, so I showed him my shaking hands and he took the job over and told me to go rest and come back when I felt OK again. He knew of my diagnosis, but I think he'd have done that for anybody.
I'd been in a very similar political situation before, management trying to unofficially abolish proper rest breaks and working hours by devolving the responsibility to get the job done onto the individual and then increasing the workload. But the people who did that were much more aggressive about it. Luckily they were also more inept and ultimately fairly toothless, so I was able to fight back and hang onto my lunch breaks, even without a diagnosis to hit them with. But to do that, I had to disobey my supervisor and walk out. This was pre-diagnosis, but after that incident they didn't bother me about lunch breaks again. Best guess, they weren't sure of their power to enforce the new conditions they wanted. The trauma of those days (there were other fights too) must have had an effect on my stress levels when I found the good boss was doing the same kind of thing to me. All that fuss about a little bit of overtime!
14 Dec 2014, 5:13 am
