Settle Down, Settle Down
Let Conrad define 'Deem' for you, as per my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary', which states that it's "To judge or consider" and we will be seeing a lot of considering and judging in this Intro. O yes indeed! Art?
Hmmm. This, if you can believe it, is a 'Nuclear-powered pogo stick' which is a lot more photogenic than 'South Canadian Manglement', the theme that this Intro is going to delve into. Don't even touch on The Mamas And The Papas.
For this Intro - which may turn out to be the whole blog as there's a lot of it - we are going to be concentrating on the Reddit narrator, Burned Out STOre maNager, hereafter BOSTON. He was a - you may be ahead of me here - store manager in a retail chain he is careful to never mention, but which has to be something like Wal-Mart or Target, whose locations cross the whole of South Canada. He was working 12 hour shifts across 6 days of the week for $50,000, which is about 20 years adrift from what he ought to have been earning. Poor bloke, one has to imagine how much worse he'd have been off in the EU, where human slavery is illegal. Art!
One of his more onerous tasks was obtaining sales and credit data of customers, which was particularly problematic as stores did not collect shopper data at end of sales. THEN their headquarters decided to set up a satellite branch, where BOSTON had absolutely no power or influence and was expected to action their collections, which was a problem as the satellite store didn't even check customer details at application. One gets the feeling that someone at Corporate hated BOSTON. Art!ALLEGEDLY
Make a note of this: over in California, managers were moved from being salaried employees to hourly-paid, a change that looks bad on paper and susceptible to hostile interpretation, as in Wal-Tart trying to stiff people over wages by cutting corners. They were deeming.
ANYWAY we find our hero BOSTON pushing back against his boss, whom pushes back even harder, insisting that although BOSTON is not running the satellite site, it's his responsibility to carry out the processes behind it. Art!
BOSTON makes sure to collect all his boss's e-mails, faxes, conference calls, texts and SMS, because he is working on the long plan, and you can never have too much back-up. Today's ghastly digital landscape can provide you with innumerable chances to do yourself in <Conrad crosses himself and invokes a stake of hawthorn>.
One thing that BOSTON's store needed to carry out was financial reports, being an account of what had been going on across his store AND the satellite store, data that he knew Boston's Ass**** Boss, hereafter BAB would need.
When BAB turned up on an entirely expected Surprise Visit That Everyone Knew About - a sure sign that the whole organisation knew of it and anticipated him and that he was not wise - he was hunting for financial reports that BOSTON claimed to have no overview of, in order to cement in BOSTON's responsibility for failure. When not presented with said reports, he fired BOSTON.
Who was rubbing his hands gleefully in anticipation.
BOSTON files for unemployment. To those unfamiliar with South Canadian employment law, if you file for unemployment and win, your employer has to pay you whilst you remain unemployed, which is why many of them, as in BOSTON's case, fight to prevent paying ex-employees. Art!
Duck duck tank
There is a face-to-face meeting between BOSTON, BAB and lawyers, where BOSTON prevails, thanks to having having a metric ton of paperwork - as mentioned above - that displays how BAB had set up a toxic workplace, ensuring that they lose the unemployment claim, for the first time in a decade for the company.
BOSTON sits back and claims unemployment, which might normally be expected to run for weeks, or months, but in this case is for TWO YEARS. At $1,600 per month this totals $38,400. You get the feeling that BAB's bosses are losing patience, because paying an ex-employee a living wage for not doing anything rather rubs. From Corporate hating BOSTON one suspects that they now fear him, an entirely rational feeling and warning of things to come. One suspects that this is why they were totally against rendering employee benefits in the first pace. Art!
O go on we will continue to narrate this tale.
Prior to BOSTON's tale of East Coast credit consternation, we had a financial farrago on the West Coast, where BOSTON's mysterious employer lost a lawsuit about contractual terms, to the tune of $30 million, which is enough to make any employer sit up and pay attention.
They were concerned enough to have BOSTON and his ilk sign weekly affidavits that they were not performing non-manager duties for more than 50% of their working week. This sounds like management trying to back-fill and retro-actively sort out problems they have created in real time. Art!
Here is where we hit what BOSTON and his partners were aiming for, a Class Action Law Suit, which ends up costing their company $15 million. We are not told how many people end up getting paid from this total but you can tell it isn't small or it wouldn't have been mentioned. I did Google for this case but only found mention of Dollar General and deceptive pricing, not salary amendments or California.
Makes $38,400 look like small change, hmmmm?
Nor is that all. Remember what I said about BOSTON collecting all the evidence he could about his boss BAB? In addition to the Class Action lawsuit, he also pursued another lawsuit against the company creating a toxic work environment. Surprise! He lost.
No, only joking. He won. There was no mention of how much he got as a payout, only that it was substantial. Waltarget or whomever decided that BAB had cost them altogether far too much and fired his waffle-patterned bottom. Ooops. Art!
This is why Skynet cannot take over the world. Yet.
Apparently that's a 'Manager with a waffle-patterned bottom'.
It turns out that BAB's marriage had only been held together with money, since his wife divorced him once he got the sack. Ouch. I bet he regretted the day he got on his Corporate high horse to harass BOSTON.
Hmmm I just Googled for 'Walmart' and '$15 million' but once again came up empty in terms of BOSTON and his wage Class Action. I did find that they'd been up to dodgy business with their customers.
"Walmart agreed to a settlement, often cited around $45 million (or in conjunction with other multi-million dollar suits), to resolve claims that it overcharged customers for weighted goods (meat, poultry, pork, seafood) and bagged citrus between October 19, 2018, and January 19, 2024"
Yeah, gotta beware of the old bagged citrus, the hidden viper. One has to stop and ponder why potatoes or onions weren't in there instead.
And there we have today's blog, an Intro in it's entirety, because when I wrote out the whole tale it came to over a sheet of A4 narrow-ruled, so you get the benefit of all that. Art!
A waffle-patterned bottom, in case you were wondering.
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