Management 4
Solid examples of how management is engineered to fail.
Amazingly, many people still don’t get it. Whole swaths of businesses should be having massive upheavals in their management sector at this moment, just based on what we’ve covered so far, to try to correct the flaws. But we aren’t seeing that. It’s like what the captain that went down with his ship said: “Blub-blub-blub-blub-blub.”
United Way
This swine outfit effortlessly demonstrates how management is a fraud and a scam. Well, of course business shouldn’t be endorsing anything like this, or any other “charity,” or sports, or girl scouts even, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same as if they were to endorse a political party. Amazingly unethical, but it gets a pass, and the NPCs and drones even endorse it, against their own interest.
And never mind how it tries to rob your paycheck with forced “donations.” At one point an employer passed out donation cards for United Way, with names and tax I.D.s pre-printed! Now, if you did something like that, you might go to jail!
Now, what the hell does U.W. have to do with producing widgets, running your business? Your people, your “volunteers” are running around pushing and promoting this on company time. Yet somehow there’s plenty of company time to waste on it. Where are the “managers” to put the kibosh on this nonsense?
There must be some other greedy scam at work here. One thing, is the company can’t take the tax write-off of an employee, but who is to say it isn’t getting kick-backs? Hell-oooo! An actual stockholder with integrity who is paying attention would bring this up at a corporate shareholder meeting.
Note that regardless of what they say, it will make many employees hate the company, its management, and U.W. itself.
Well, I thought no one was talking about it, but there’s a whole Reddit group discussing things like this scam.
The_barking_ant on Reddit (most cursing excised for our more sensitive readers but otherwise unedited):
Okay this is one of those work things that gets me angrier than incompetent management, low pay, **** benefits. THE **** UNITED WAY. The full month of non-stop harrassment infuriates me beyond a place I even knew I could go to with anger, resentment, and hatred.
Some businesses aren't as bad as others, but I have worked for a number that just went beyond the pale.
The worst one by far was a Milwaukee based company.
Every day of the campaign they would have people stationed at every entrance. Sometimes it was employees, other times it was UW volunteers and some times they would hire "special" guests like carolers or low level athletes. Any way you sliced it you had to run the **** gauntlet to get to your desk. They would literally step in front of you to remind you it's the UW campaign (yes, no **** **** , it looks like a UW office got blown up in here).
And getting to your desk wasn't the end of the harrassment. Managers were given reports every morning of which of their employees hadn't donated yet. By 9am they were doing the rounds asking when you would be donating. It didn't matter that every day for the entire last week I said I wasn't going to be donating. Every morning like clockwork they were at my desk asking the same thing and then spewing facts and information at me to try to change my mind.
Then there were the nonstop emails from the C Level going on and on about why we should donate. At least 4 a day so every two hours.
Finally, if you held out long enough it was no longer your manager who would get the reports. It was escalated to your director.
Now, directors at this company were considered too important to mingle with us peons, but they would send us harassing emails in addition to the ones we were already getting from C Level.
It was nonstop it made me insane. I remember the first year I worked there I was so appalled and pissed off about this harrassment that I vowed that I would never, ever donate to UW. The push was overly aggressive.
So the next year I researched a bunch of charities that didn't work with the UW. When my manager came around I told her that I already had 12 charities that I donated to. Once a month. When she said well you can designate the charities you want your money to go to I told her that I didn't believe any of them work with them. She insisted at least one of the charities I donated to had to work with them. So I told her I'd give her the list of charities I gave to and if she could find one, that I might be willing to reconsider. She couldn't find any. And when she came by I would just remind her about the charities I gave to. Did the same when the director came after me too.
Third year. I seriously felt postal during the campaign. I was so sick and tired of how aggressive it was.
That was the year I snapped. When I inevitably made it onto the director's list and he emailed me, I wrote back a reply that probably could have got me **** canned.
I said "Hey, I'm a hard sneeze away from having to use the United Way myself. I'm sure donating is easy for you and everyone above you, but look around. The people at my level live paycheck to paycheck and we don't care about being able to pat ourselves on the back for being one of the largest donors when we play golf at the country club."
I never got another email from him that year. Of course it continued the same way for the next three years until I was downsized. I remember writing on the termination paperwork "Well thank god I didn't decide to donate to the United Way."
In the years since I've worked for less aggressive companies. They just want 100% participation even if that means you just log in and decline to donate. I won't even do that. I literally will not have anything to do with UW. It's like being shook down by the goddamned mafia.
To even have to make excuses to these piglets is abominable. Simply “No,” then, “No means no,” when they inevitably persist, should be enough. Who set these creepos up as the only arbiters of what “charity” is, anyway?
Too Easy
No, the failings of our “managerial systems” are in no way an unknown, and examples are easy to come by. It’s just we do nothing about them.
The Punisher (2017) season 1 episode 3 hammers the point in a “fiction-not fiction” sort of way, basically a dramatization of the type of things that really went down. Frank Castle (the Punisher), whom they’re making very easy to dislike at this point, unlike in the original comics, has a flashback to his soldiering days. His team is ordered out on a mission in Afghanistan to go kill a target. Frank knows its an ambush and delivers the message clearly, but the arrogant spook ops director “Agent Orange” (good name, BTW), demands the team “go where he points” without question. Castle and the team obey, and of course the bloodbath Castle warned of ensues.
But that doesn’t matter, when all that does matter is absolute control by some crazies at the top.
Lunacy
We won’t mention these classics, which, I don't know, seem to help indicate the follies of management:
Missing Indiana Teen Found Buried in Her Boss’s Backyard
Worker Dead at Wells Fargo Desk for 4 Days
Commie?
It’s not “commie” to beef about, meddle with, and try to reform these corporate failings, since what is commie is the way corporate systems are set up now, a way which abets monopolies. The entire mindset has to change to instead foster pure free enterprise, which means a complete overhaul of our corrupt system.
We’ve already tackled and disproved the myth that “private companies can do what they want,” since they are not truly private, they exploit an unfair government-granted advantage.
So when corporate greed runs unfettered, enabled by foul and shady management, we do have a say in objecting. Rotten management has simply become a bacchanal of exploitation of workers, and the company itself.
CEO Greed Feasts on the Sweat of Low-Paid Workers—And Here’s the Proof
After mentioning that buyback maneuvers used to be illegal and are now the norm, the article asks,
Why the fixation on buybacks? This is a CEO pay-inflating financial scam, pure and simple. When companies repurchase their own shares, they artificially boost share prices and the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80% of CEO pay. An SEC investigation confirmed that CEOs regularly time the sale of their personal stock holdings to cash in on the price surge that typically follows a buyback announcement.
All this maneuvering occurs while skimping on employee retirement fund contributions.
Having said that, we don’t need Marxist agitation, as in the title of the article.
It’s too bad it had to be framed in that way. The article itself is good, making our point about the failings of management, which just can’t help itself, gorging insatiably at the trough.
But the sentiment is Marxist because it pushes the rotten “low-paid workers” agitprop. In a free market, (with no minimum wage restrictions), there could be no underpaid workers, since the market itself would effortlessly and automatically set a fair wage, as employees would migrate away from exploitative businesses to fair ones. (There’d be no need for a mandated “minimum wage.”)
However, executive greed is not something admirable, not the fruit of a working capitalist economy where people can be rewarded limitless amounts if their contribution to the company is commensurate. Musk didn’t provide over $56 billion in value to Tesla, for example. There’s something askew here, and it’s a managerial system that has hijacked common sense yet is strangely prevalent.
Also ignored, is that a system with monopolies and/or oligopolies, like we have, exploits most everyone, workers and consumers alike. Simple example, China makes electric cars very competitively, to sell overseas, at half the price of the competition, and then our governments go and slap 100% tariffs on them, preventing everyone from acquiring a ride at a reasonable cost.
It's a Plot, of Course
Mr. Unremarkable:
Funnily enough, I was drinking with some buddies last weekend and HP came up in our discussions...
I used to work for another darling tech company of that timeframe: Motorola. Both HP and Motorola became shells of their former selves by virtue of the financialization of the USA - these were hugely profitable, great places to work, and turned out great products...until the boards of both companies decided to oust their CEO's and get in new, outside CEOs, who had no respect for the company culture and simply did what Wall Street wanted...sell/spin off businesses, make wild acquisitions, hire flashy execs, make unrealistic promises, etc.
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