Ethical Treatment of Your Employer -- Question

[abcrystcats]

Is it ever OK to deliberately shortchange your employer with your work product?

I ask because I have a friend -- she's still a friend -- who got fired from our office. MAN OH MAN -- when she left us, I was reeling from all the stuff she hadn't done! I was pretty pissed off at her for doing this, for weeks.

Well, she knew she was going to get fired, so she tells me that she left the work on purpose. I believe that. We were different. I worked my ass off looking for new business. She worked her ass off helping the current customers. Obviously, my production was valued way more than hers, because I have my job and she got canned.

But is it ever OK to DELIBERATELY not do what you are getting paid to do?

I've always done my best. Sometimes my best hasn't been good enough, but it has never been for lack of trying on my part.

My feeling is, that if you are getting paid to do something, you should do it. Or else, not get paid.

To make matters worse, our boss paid her for two weeks advance salary when she let her go. IMO, literally NO ONE these days pays you for two weeks in advance when they fire you. That was very ethical of our boss.

IMO, my boss was way more right than my friend. She tried to be kind to her, but my friend was screwing her weeks before the actual end of their relationship.

Anyways, I am wondering if anyone has deliberately screwed a boss by not doing the work they were trusted to do, and WHY they did that. What was the rationale?

Tell me if you think employers deserve something, or if you don't.

You see, she's still my friend. I can see both sides of the issue and I can understand part of why she let things go, although I couldn't do it myself.

[whimsicaldeb]

Is it ever OK to deliberately shortchange your employer with your work product?

imo...

No. It's like buying a dozen eggs from someone who consistently charges for 12 but only gives 10 or 11.

Would you keep buying your eggs from someone who short changes you? Would your friend? ~ No. And what would you think of someone who would consistently pay more for less? Would you respect that/them? ~ No.

Even when someone is angry or unhappy with their job, there are other choices, but we don't always see them. From what you've described, your boss was fair, gave your friend lots to chances ... but they didn't work and your friend basically left her no choice but to fire her.

Your friend made an immature choice in how she handled whatever the problem was. Perhaps it looked like the best one for your friend to use, at the time. But I wouldn't be surprised, that in hind site, she doesn't end up changing her mind.

[stilltrucking]

But is it ever OK to DELIBERATELY not do what you are getting paid to do?

I was proud to be a Union man, but I never went to the bosses office to report a teamster who was not pulling his wiehgt. I never went to the man's office to eat cheese.

Your boss sounds like a fair person. No I would do my best no matter what.; I fire easy. You know what I could never understand was people who loved their job so much they came into work on their days off. I have had some crazy bosses, nothing worse than that, especialy when it is a job you really love. Like projectionist in a drive in movie.

I wonder if your friend ever saw an episode of Fire Me. Please!

[Lightning Rod]

It comes down to a matter of who owns your time. If you think that your employer owns your time just by virtue of paying you, maybe you should re-examine.

I once had an employer who was trying to have it both ways. I was hired as a hot-shot courier for a graphics company. The boss hired me on a contract basis. That means that he would not have to pay benefits or social security etc.

But even though I was a contract worker, he wanted to treat me like an employee. He would dock my pay if I was late and wanted to dictate my hours. I didn't go for it.

So, I started reclaiming my time. If I wanted to listen to a story on NPR, I would park my car in the shade and listen to it.

If you don't own your own time, you are a slave.

People get paid for several things in this work world. They get paid for who they know. They get paid for what they know and they get paid for what they do. If you don't take possession of your time, you will always fall into the third category. I prefer the second.

[Doreen Peri]

Lightning Rod - What you know doesn't do your employer or client any good if you don't DO anything with it to provide them something of value for the money they are paying you.

Cat -
Most likely this friend of yours gave your employer valuable service for a good amount of time or she wouldn't have been offered severance pay. Perhaps she just got burned out and wasn't passionate about her work any more. That can happen after a person does the same thing day in and day out for a period of time.

To me, you are selling your time, your knowledge and your application of that knowledge (*doing* it for the benefit of your employer's business). Your employment is valued as long as you contribute to the organization by utilizing your skill set to the best of your ability so that what you do adds value to the organization.

I've seen MANY slackers in my time. I don't get it. I don't like it either. I remember the shock of going back to the work place in 2000 after working from my home operating my own business for 9 years. I couldn't believe so many people took so many breaks from work hanging around each others desks, chatting about non-work related topics. So many smoking breaks. So many long lunches. It was truly shocking to me that people were getting paid to work so slowly, get so little accomplished in so much time.

I have a very strong work ethic. I believe in giving as much as I can give to the point of going beyond what is expected of me. But then there's also the burnout issue. If I've been doing the same thing for a LONG time and I'm not passionate about it any more, I can get bored. That's when I try to create new and different work for myself, even when in the same position. I come up with new ideas and present them to my employer or client.

But this is what sounds like happened to your friend. She got bored. And she didn't utilize her skills or insights to create new and different ways to approach the position she held in order to alleviate her boredom and re-create her passion for her job. So, as a result, she didn't accomplish what she used to accomplish before when her employer treasured her productivity. Again, I'm assuming there was a time she offered the company a lot, otherwise they wouldn't have given her severance pay.

Good topic!

[abcrystcats]

I once had an employer who was trying to have it both ways. I was hired as a hot-shot courier for a graphics company. The boss hired me on a contract basis. That means that he would not have to pay benefits or social security etc.

But even though I was a contract worker, he wanted to treat me like an employee. He would dock my pay if I was late and wanted to dictate my hours. I didn't go for it.

This is a different kind of situation, LRod, and I agree that you were right not to let him have it both ways. He was paying you for a result, not for your time.

We were getting paid an hourly wage. I still am. This is in addition to commission, of course. When all the shit hit the fan after my friend got canned, I worked overtime hours and got time and a half for a while.

If my boss pays me by the hour, she DOES own my time -- the time that she pays me for.

I don't think she was offered severance pay for any reason other than that my boss wanted to do the right thing. I learned by reading some things that were headed for the shredder that a previous employee had accused her of underpayment. She may have had this incident in mind when she gave my friend two week's pay.

I don't know if my friend got bored. She is doing the exact same thing now for another agent's office. The thing is, my boss's primary objective is to GROW her business. That means doing things to generate new households -- things like COLD CALLING -- and my friend didn't want to do those things. I did those things. She kind of sat at the desk and waited for my boss's mailers and advertisements to translate into sales commission for her. She was very good at snatching each new lead that came into the office and turning it into a sale. That meant more commission for her, but since she wasn't doing anything to cause these people to call in, they were kind of freebies. That pissed my boss off. After a while it pissed me off, too. Hey, I'd like some of those easy sales, and while she's picking up the phone to answer it, I'm on the other line outcalling and marketing our product, so it wasn't quite fair.

That was the first sign of trouble. The second was when we realized she rarely, if ever, left a trail of her customer activities in the computer. The only person who knew what BJ was doing with the customer was BJ. We had to constantly ask for information, and felt helpless when she wasn't around. She thought that meant she was "indispensable." I thought it was more like "information hoarding."

And it was also a good way to cover up for the things she did NOT do.

Hey, if I hate my job or my boss that much, I'll get a new job and a new boss. I won't stiff the one who's paying me.

************************

Believe me, there are PROBLEMS with this employer. Some are insurmountable and they will inevitably lead me to quit. I HAVE to earn more money and I already know there are companies with more competitive rates, a good product, and other ways for me to get commission selling what I REALLY want to sell.

Some of the problems are caused by The Boss. It irritates me that she waltzes in an hour or two or three after we open, almost every single day. It irritates me more (believe it or not) that she lingers at her desk doing things until 7:00 or even 8:00 at night. I'd prefer to be in the office alone to do my marketing during those times and I feel like she doesn't trust me. I also feel abandoned with the service work because of her indifference about showing up on time. With anyone other person working for her, she'd be setting a bad example for her team. And, without getting into too much detail, I don't care for her personal style with customers, her attitude about multilining her existing book of business, and the way she takes it out on me when her appointments cancel or we don't sell anything in the office.

I suspect she's starting to have financial difficulties, but that hasn't stopped her from posting an ad on Monster.com to get a whole new fulltime, full service agent! She's not looking to replace me. She's looking to replace the person she fired, who we both agreed she couldn't afford! I've had a chance to look around a bit, and most beginning agents start out as a one-man business OR they hire one SERVICE person, either full or part time. They pay a service person's salary and expect to do the selling themselves. This agent wants there to be THREE fully trained selling agents in her office and maybe a part time service person as well, later on. Frankly, we just don't have enough business to merit that. She sacrifices her own salary to pay for all this, then gets mad when we don't sell enough! She has big expectations and her expectations don't match the abilities of the business at this point in time.

***********************

Yeah, I need to find a new job. I can barely stand it. But until I quit, I'll do my work. I'll do it to the best of my ability and not allow my resentment to become a passive-aggressive slacker mentality.

It bothers me that someone I know who is, in many other respects, a good person, could screw her boss this way. I mean, it HAD to have been deliberate! I can't think of it as an accident related to burn-out. There was just TOO MUCH that didn't get done! And there was the fact of that $8,000 check that she was supposed to deliver to the central office. It mysteriously disappeared and no one at the front desk believes they ever saw her. That HAD to have been her parting shot -- You'd think that after she realized that she was going to get paid for two weeks she wasn't working, she would have made SURE the check got there -- even if she was still holding onto it out of resentment.

The whole thing was just a little too flagrant to be anything less than a total "screw you" gesture.

[hester_prynne]

Interesting topic.
So let's take George Bush for example. America's current boss. We just keep on doing good work despite the fact that he is disempowering all of us for his own personal gain?
Or we start slacking.....i.e. passively trying maybe to get some of our stolen power back .......and it's lame yes it is, because we could just get up and leave the scene, all of us, bravely waving our middle fingers behind us...(for fun!)


H

[abcrystcats]

Not doing our "job" for George Bush would, in this case mean ... ?

I'm thinking mainly stuff like not paying our taxes, not voting, not doing anything that supports the government. Passive resistance.

It might work if we ALL did it.

But the thing is, nobody's paying me to live here. Living here is not technically a job (except under the current administration, lol). People live here because it's their home. No one pays us for it.

(God, I just caught myself using "there" for "their." Yikes. Alzheimer's setting in)

[firsty]

ha ha. i love these lets get together and not pay our taxes. for crying out loud we cant all get together to vote out a tyrant, within the system we already have, on a voting day we all already know about. i'd love to see a bunch of idiots like us muster the courage to not send in our tax checks.

i'm at work right now. enough said. bite me.

[firsty]

also - for the employer, paying the person 2 weeks notice isnt that admirable. he probably wrote on the paperwork that the person quit, in order to avoid legal problems later. anyway, the employer will be paying into that person's unemployment afterwards. giving notice pay discourages legal problems FROM the person fired, too. keeps them on insurance longer, which helps as well.

the best way to fire someone is to give them something positive on their end. it's hard to fire someone, even a loser. it's real fucking hard. to have at least a little bundle to throw their way is a positive thing, helps the situation all around.

[mousey1]

No, you must always give your employer fair value. Even if you've been fucked in the ass. They are paying you for your skills and until you can snag another better job, where you are properly appreciated, you should not devalue yourself by performing shoddy work.

I do my work. I do it with pride. I can do no less. At the end of the day I go home knowing I did indeed do my best in the time allotted. My employer pays me so that I can continue to eat, dream in a warm bed, and have a dry roof over my head...if just barely. It's a system that works if not always fairly. But my conscience is clear and I sleep well at night.

[firsty]

and now for something completely different:

i have worked for 2 international companies, 1 national retailer and more than a few local, family-owned businesses.

i have worked in staff positions and management positions.

i can say, unequivocally, that the employer has the upper hand and uses it ALL of the time.

sometimes, often in some cases it's true, the employer is able to conduct business relations with staff in ethical and beneficial ways for the employees. however, this is ALWAYS when it's in the company's best interests.

for employees to get caught up in questions of ethics with their employers is a slippery slope. there are a number of reasons for this.

first, the employee is an individual. this means that decisions affecting him affect him directly. the decisions made by individual managers of a company, on behalf of the company, do not affect any of the individuals of the company, but they all affect the individual of the employee. therefore, the employee has more at stake.

the company represents a much greater asset to the employee than vice versa. the employee has more, MUCH more, to lose, in ALL employer-employee relations.

everyone is expendable in the company. everyone. from the top down. on the other hand, a person's job is rarely if ever expendable.

next, the company has much greater resources at its disposal. it has lawyers on staff that know the ins and outs of its employee relations. for an employee to even gain the knowledge necessary to understand a dispute would cost him usually more than he's worth, while the company has that knowledge covered in its overhead expenses from years past.

next, when a company has to cut and run on an employee, it holds all the cards. not vice versa. if a company is planning layoffs, there is nothing an employee can do about it, even when the employee finds out. sure, they can look for other work, but the odds are against him. if an employee is planning to leave, a company can always ALWAYS find a reason to let that person go, without real cause, simply with a few weeks of paperwork. in most cases, there are ways around it by "laying off" staff instead of "firing" staff. thats likely the reason that most employees give notice pay upon "firing." it's rare for anyone to be "fired" these days. all a company has to do to fire someone without cause is pretend they are laying them off, wait the requisite number of months before replacing the position, and pay some unemployment. it's done all the time.

i'm not saying that it's ethical to slack off. but i am saying that the dynamic of employer-employee relations in this society creates a dramatically uneven playing field. it IS impossible to discuss business ethics as 1-to-1 with employers and employees. what your company will do to you that you dont realize is immense.

[mousey1]

Anyway, I would never intentionally slack, it's not in me.

But if you truly want the upper hand in any employer/employee relationship that is going badly one can always cry...

SEXUAL HARASSMENT!

"Yes (in your most sweetest and innocentest voice) Mr. Jenkins(fictitious name snatched from the air!) did indeed put his hand on my ass. I did not encourage, anticipate or enjoy it. And not only that! I was minding my own business when he stepped up to me as I was bent over my tasks and there it was, big as life, prodding me in the posterior. I demand recompense! Recompense! My only alternative is to sue I'm afraid, as much as it disgusts and degrades me to do so. I will see you in court, as much as it distastes me. And...it's not about the money...it's about justice...justice for the downtrodden workmen/workladies all!"

(geez, I think I've had way too much coffee this mornin')

[Marksman45]

Here's the way I look at employment:

I sell *my* time and skills to a business.
I work for my pay.
But only for my pay.

What I mean by this:
Say, for example, I am getting payed $7 an hour. This means that I will do $7 worth of work in that hour. No more, no less. If my employer wants more work out of me, they will have to pay me more.
I'm a narcissist. My time is valuable.

[Lightning Rod]

The topic of this thread is ethics

Of course we should all do our best work

but it is unethical to give your best work and not receive just compensation

when I get up in the morning, I start working

I give my best

even though they might not be billable hours, my efforts always go to expand my skills and awareness. These hours should be billable.

To quote Janis Joplin: "Try, try try try."