Shady Employment Practices

For the last few days, I've been reading entries on an Internet site called Reddit.  It is a site on which people post things of interest and sometimes respond to a question that is posed.  The responses I was reading were in answer to the question, "What was the worst thing that an employer ever did to you?" I've been reading for two days in my spare time and STILL haven't come to the end!  Everyone seems to have job horror stories to tell.

I've been retired since 2009, so I am no longer in the work force, but even I have employment horror stories.  I was fortunate in that I had two factors in my favor, for the most part:  membership in the National Education Association (NEA) which is, essentially, a union; and tenure in education, which specifies that after so many years of employment in a school district, one cannot simply be fired without cause.  I was also lucky enough to be a teacher in a field that is required for all four years of high school education.  It's complicated.  I won't go into the gory details.

I am totally aware of shady company policies when it comes to employment...NOW.  But I spent a lot of years trying to teach my students AND my child (and even my grand-nephew) about the realities of corporate life, even though I didn't have a lot of experience in it outside of education.  I taught them to show up on time for work, to do everything that was expected, and to give appropriate notice if they were going to quit.  In short, I was The Establishment.  I believed that everyone and everything would be professional and fair.  I was wrong.  What I didn't understand was that companies could/would manipulate things to make work issues impossible for some.  I've been reading all about that!  It personally hurts me to discern that American business has no loyalty to employees, when I worked hard to make employees loyal to them.

I've had several run-ins myself.  One was in a school district just outside of Pontiac, IL, (where my husband was principal.) There was a teacher on maternity leave in that district.  I was hired to take her place for the remainder of the year--4th grade.  I ran into trouble with the principal because he paddled a student who had choked another of my kids, but didn't inform the parents.  I specifically asked him if I needed to call the parents.  He specifically said NO.  "These kids need to learn to stand on their own two feet."    The very next morning, the parent was knocking on my classroom door demanding to know why she hadn't been informed.  I told her, in all honesty, that the principal had told me not to.   She squawked, and I don't blame her.  The next time one of my students got paddled, I called the parent to inform him/her.  The principal, who had no children of his own, called me into his office and read me the riot act.  "I have to live with these people in the community.  You don't!"  I'd gone over his head, and he didn't like it.  At the end of the school year, the regular teacher resigned.  I applied for her/my job but was told that my one-year contract would not be renewed.  (Big surprise!)  I went to the NEA for support.  I had never been evaluated.  In fact, the principal had never stepped foot in my classroom.  They sent me a totally literate and charming rep, who happened to be African-American.  He stood out like a sore thumb in that community.  In short, my termination stood, but I was still allowed to sub in the district.

One time when I did sub in the high school the next year, the Superintendent was watching me closely.  When I had a particularly challenging class, he stuck his head in the door and was pleasantly surprised that I was getting along just fine.  He told me later that day that he could see that I was capable and was sorry about how the whole thing had transpired the year before.  He didn't change a thing about my employment however.  He was as powerless as I was in the good-ol'-boy district politics.  (I think he left the district at the end of that year.)

Another time, I was working under a principal who didn't seem to like me.  (I never knew why.)  I was teaching seniors at that time and had received a hand-written list from him of the names of students I was supposed to work with outside of class to "remediate" for ISTEP testing---the test to pass in order to graduate.  I happened to pass a classroom that he was supervising for an absent teacher one day.  He hailed me and started to berate me, in front of that class, because one of the students I was supposed to be remediating had reported to him that I hadn't been doing that.  He wasn't pleased.  When I told him that the student in question wasn't on my list, he didn't believe me.  I marched up to my classroom, picked up the remediation list in his handwriting, and went back downstairs to show him that the student was not on it.  Confronted with the truth, he got flustered, realized that he had made a mistake, but never softened his tone nor apologized for the way he had just treated me.  

My first excursion into this new view of companies was when my daughter was in her earlier throes of new jobs.  Invariably, she was the Valedictorian of training groups, but six-to-eight weeks into employment, she would be let go--because that is the cut-off for companies having to offer benefits.  What the companies were doing was hiring young, inexperienced folks, training them to do the grunt jobs, then letting them go without cause just before they had to start providing benefits because it was economically better for them to do that.  This happened a couple of times to Meg, and it enraged me.  (Part of the reason for my outrage was due to the fact that there are safeguards in place--or used to be--in education so that school districts can't do the same thing.  That's the paradigm I was used to.)

The only time in my entire working career that I was fired from a job (by mutual agreement) was right after my family (complete with husband in those days) had moved to Indiana.  I hadn't finished the requirements to obtain an Indiana teacher's certificate yet, so signed on with DePauw University as office manager for the newly-formed Media Services Department.  The director of the department (I'll call Susan) and her right-hand person (I'll call Jane) had developed the whole department and its services.  Not only were they very rightfully proud of their efforts, they were in cahoots.  The gals stuck together in an unholy alliance, only I didn't know that at the time.

Susan and Jane were nothing alike in personality.  Susan spent her time doing the legal stuff of obtaining permission from companies to use their videos, while Jane spent HER time bullying the rest of the office staff.  After weeks of working there, I became discouraged because, according to Jane, I wasn't doing anything right.  I was being criticized by someone who was not my superior.  Finally, at the end of the probationary period, I asked for a three-way conference with Susan and Jane, hoping that Susan would mediate.  Only moments into the conference, I saw how naive I was. Jane personally attacked me.  While I tried to defend myself, Susan did nothing at all to stand up for me.  I saw the handwriting on the wall.  I looked at Susan and said, "This isn't working."  She agreed. I told her that I would be leaving the position.  She didn't try to stop me.  In fact, when I turned in my official two-weeks' notice, she (respectfully) told me not to bother to come in.  It would encroach on the end of the probation period...so I was done.  Had I not quit, I would have been fired.  Plain and simple.

I was both devastated and relieved.  I had never, ever, been considered anything but a contributory employee, so I was crushed.  But I also understood that there was no way I could save myself in that job with the current level of supervision.  I tucked my tail between my legs and left.  How did my husband respond to the news that I'd quit?  He got angry with me, even though I had been telling him how unhappy I was.  So much for support from the spouse! Thereafter, I started substitute teaching in several districts in the area.  I kept track via a pocket calendar, and because I said "yes" 99% of the time, I was called back often.  (Heck, I was a certified teacher in IL and was working on IN certification.  Why not call me to sub in Indiana??)  Long story short, I think I was occupied four out of five days a week.

All of this, of course, was before I got my permanent teaching position in Monrovia, IN.  Thank God for that job!  It supported my daughter and I for the rest of my career and some of hers!

Life isn't always fair.  That seems to be the conservative politicians' cry du jour as they dissolve labor unions and champion people like Donald Trump.  And I KNOW that it isn't fair, myself...but being the eternal trusting optimist, I will continue to say that it doesn't have to be that way.  If thinking people will continue to think; caring people continue to care; Christian people will act more like Christ; and employers embrace fairness in their practices, the world will be a better place!