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| Strange Company rules and manipulations |
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| CatalinaWOW:
--- Quote from: PwrElectronics on September 19, 2019, 04:24:45 pm ---The heath & safety dept would regularly inventory the contents of the first aid supplies in the lab. If the count of band-aids changed and there was not a corresponding "incident report" filled out, the lab supervisor would get grief that was passed down to all the engineers and techs who may have been working in the lab during that time period. If you DID fill in a incident report, that would set off some annoying drama and a meeting with H&S and your supervisor. The stats then end up on the quarterly OSHA reports, etc. All employee memos on how to be more safe at work to follow. Makes sense if you were really hurt BUT totally stupid for a nicked or jabbed finger from a probe or X-acto blade, etc. Most everyone started to keep their own stock of band-aids in their tool bag. OR, like me who was out once, washed off the blood, put some paper towel over it and wrapped in electrical tape and went back to work. --- End quote --- At a company I worked at there was a formal policy that you could not have your own bandaids, aspirin and the like, and most especially could not share them with co-workers. There was a somewhat logical explanation for this, similar to rstofer's comment. They needed to know how much exposure to injuries they had so that appropriate insurance and treatment facilities could be funded. The practical effect of this, on a huge plant site with hundreds of employees was that a paper cut or other minor injury handled the officially correct way meant a long hike to the nurses location or major drama as the plant fire and rescue team showed up. So many scofflaws kept band aids and other stuff around. This company was also one with a formal policy against archiving emails beyond a fixed period (90 days as I recall). Based on a real life problem with an engineer I knew well who generated some well intentioned emails that were quite embarrassing to the company when taken out of context. They decided that the value of old emails was not worth the potential embarrassment. And were probably statistically right, as an high percentage of company email has no value when written, and the value of most of the remainder drops off very rapidly as time passes. I was a scofflaw on that one also, and received neither approbation or congratulations when my archives were useful to the company defending themselves against a lawsuit a few years down the road. |
| Brutte:
--- Quote from: Rick Law on September 21, 2019, 03:45:28 am ---If you start to destroy things when a law suit is filed, even if you did that before a court order to preserve evidence, you are destroying evidence. If a long long time before there is any legal proceeding in the works, email got destroyed as regular company policy (that all emails are NOT stored after X days), they are gone. You merely destroyed your property but you did not obstruct justice (which would be a felony). --- End quote --- This might of course explain this rule. However, when I read that back then (1+ years ago) I came to the conclusion that the true reason was different. I believe it was a part of a "Protection Act Against Whistleblowing". I cannot quote this and other regulations literally as I do not work there any more, but this particular paragraph meaning +- was like that (for sure it was in one sentence): It is forbidden to archive documentation that could have any potential value to competitors, or any value to government authorities in case of a litigation. Now imagine a hypothetical situation where a corporation gets involved in illegal actions (discrimination, mobbing, theft of intelectual property, falsifying documents, etc). Then a whistleblower will have to collect the evidence, violating second part of this rule. If he gets caught, corporation will prove he was collecting that for competitors. If however whistleblower succeeds with collecting evidence and goes to court, by law this evidence will have to be presented to lawyers that represent the corporation. Then the lawyers can copy this evidence and "prove" beyond any doubt in a second litigation that this information was sold to competitors by whistleblower, incurred losses and demand compensation. Concluding, this is for protection against whistleblowers. Of course this is by no means 100% effective but it will discourage most of the people from even thinking about collecting evidence. |
| Brutte:
--- Quote from: Brutte on September 24, 2019, 10:18:48 am ---It is forbidden to archive documentation that could have any potential value to competitors, or any value to government authorities in case of a litigation. --- End quote --- Resurrecting old topic. I have just found a relevant Donald Rumsfeld quote from Wikipedia article which IMHO explains where the above corporation rule comes from: --- Quote ---We're functioning in a – with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise,(...) --- End quote --- For the entity, by setting such rule it is not the abuse that has to be prevented, but rather the collecting of information that proves violation of law. That is why entities penalize or threaten the fact of documenting when they are involved in violating of the law. Be it violating Geneva Convention or violating Criminal Law or some other standards. No proof == no violation. |
| VK3DRB:
The early days with IBM was a good company to work for. But they had punitive rules against conflict-of-interest. I wanted to buy $1,000 of Microsoft shares shortly after they floated in 1986, which would be worth around $1.6 million today. But IBM would not let me, as clearly spelled out in the employee booklet About Your Company. Being loyal and trusting of IBM, I did not buy the shares. In 1997, IBM sold hundreds of employees in Wangaratta off to a start-up funded by private equity. The then Chairman of IBM Australia, Robert Savage, told all the Wangaratta employees at a town hall meeting verbatim, "You either join the new company or be deemed to have resigned in which case there will be no redundancy". Having no other suitable high tech employment in the town, almost everyone signed up "by our own free will", including me. In the transition, IBM surprised me with an offer of a 30% discount of a new PC - and revoked $40,000 of my retirement savings in a company held retirement scheme. IBM was highly manipulative and certainly greedy, in my opinion. I should have sent them a bill for the many thousands of unpaid extra hours I worked over the years. The startup failed within a few years. Since then, Robert Savage dropped dead and the CEO of IBM worldwide at the time Louis Gerstner (net worth US$ 630 million) had a son who died choking on a steak sandwich. I am alive, healthy and can sleep at night. In retrospect, I wish I have bought those shares in Microsoft, because in the end I realised I was just a disposable resource to IBM. I vowed never to work for a large multinational company again. |
| Brutte:
--- Quote from: EEEnthusiast on February 07, 2020, 01:48:13 pm ---I worked for 17 years for Texas Instruments before being fired for standing up for my rights.. I worked on a project for about 5 years and when it was almost 95% complete, the managers asked me to move out of that project as it was going to be shelved.(..) --- End quote --- What I suspect that went wrong is that you have expected to benefit from two sources: from salary (past) and raised status (future). Once it became clear that the contract does not include any future benefits of your past effort and the salary is all that you can expect, you accepted the shift as a lost profit. Been there, done that same mistake. :palm: So in the hope of (getting promoted) or (raising your position) in the company you have accepted lower salary from the very beginning. Had you been explicitly informed in day 1 about the fact you have had no chance for any promotion or personal development and about inevitable shift at 95% of the project done, your demand for higher salary would have been obvious and no disappointmens would have taken place. To be fair, I think that unless I/You had some explicit written contract rule, everything that is not written in the contract (and does not implicitly come from applicable laws) does not apply. --- Quote ---How shameless those guys can be --- End quote --- Homo homini lupus est. |
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