Closing my eyes and thinking of England

Case in point, my husband (30-something white guy) works at an office where his job description is to oversee the delivery of a weekly free paper. He manages the once-a-week drivers, sets up and tabulates the routes and audits the drivers for courteous and correct delivery of the paper. He also has some computer training, so he has been managing the paper’s website and community calendar as well as dealing with the office networking and troubleshooting issues (this is not on his job description, however). He also gets called upon to be office dogsbody and change lightbulbs, fix chairs, hang decorations and take out the trash. He (generally) tackles each job with determination and gets things done, often going in early or staying late to make sure everything is finished.

Except he has a new, inexperienced office manager and a boss who veers between absent and micromanaging. The boss is also a complete incompetent when it comes to technology, but he loves to have the latest gadget. So, office manager hasn’t learned to handle the boss in that all important buffer role and transmits his temporal panics and whims directly to the staff. This frequently takes the form of “drop Y and immediately deal with X”. Hubby has repeatedly asked for clarification about what the most important part of his job is and has been told that it is the distribution part. He has taken this to mean that he can put off the computer and dogsbody stuff in favor of dealing with the distribution. He has also had it reinforced to him recently that the distribution job is suffering and he needs to get his act together.

Therefore, this past week, the office manager called him in a panic to come in and fix the boss’s e-mail, just as he was sending the drivers out for the all-important Wednesday distribution. Hubby politely put her off, explaining what he is doing, and she lashed out at him for slacking and demanded that he return to the office and deal with the computer issue right then. Hubby put her off again and dealt with the computer issue once he had sent off the distribution drivers.

Imagine his surprise when the boss calls him into the office the next day and suspends him without pay for two weeks because of his “attitude”. Apparently the office manager has been filing complaints for insubordination every time hubby defers or denies her requests for immediate action. This is the first he has heard of these complaints and at no time in the conversation is a plan for improvement put forward. The boss chews him out for “not being a team player” and “bad attitude” with no direct reference to any particular incident except the prior day or conditions for improvement. He is then sent off and told to call in two weeks if he’s ready to come back to work. Not only is this humiliating, bad leadership, bad management and insulting but it mainly involves the failure to do something that doesn’t fall under the scope of his regular duties. He is embarrassed and I am enraged by this treatment, but he has no legal recourse for redress. This seems patently unfair to me.

Now, I complain about working with the labor focused restrictions here, as in some cases they do foster complacency and apathy. But this is a case where I wish I had the clout of a union to bring to play. It’s so frustrating to expect one person to roll over and take that kind of treatment, while another less able and willing worker has to be handled with kid gloves just because they work for different employers. I know it’s a basic inequity of the system and there are people who have it much worse. But I’m angry for those people, too! Why can’t there be a system that treats all people with dignity and compassion no matter what they do? If people’s grocery and rent payments are dependent upon your ability to correctly evaluate, asses and motivate their work, isn’t it incumbent on you to learn how to mange correctly? And shouldn’t workers have some kind of rights? Criminals have the right to face their accuser and answer to the charges that are brought against them, but a small business employee can be suspended or fired for any reason. A loss of income and an employment gap can be more damaging to some people’s careers as a misdemeanor conviction. I can’t hope for any kind of real justice, I can only hope that karma will apply in this case. We are taking the only action available to us and looking for a new job for the hubby. So please send good job hunting thoughts our way.