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Does Your Company Pay For Broadband?
masq57 writes "My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours. That was changed in the last few years to letting us expense our broadband service. Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen. The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers. What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?"
Next thing's to work on finding an employer that isn't run by such cheap bastards.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
In my experience, it's been assumed that IT pros would have home Internet access because, well, what IT pro wouldn't have at least a consumer dial-up account if not broadband.
Paying for those things is a company's way of passing the employee some cash-value compensation without it being considered taxable income. So, add 20%-30% (depending on your personal tax rate) to the cost and consider that as have been subtracted from your pay package... consider yourself insulted.
I consistently insisted that my cell phone not be listed in the company employee directory. I threatened to change the number when once it was listed. If someone needed me over a weekend, they could call my home, and if I didn't answer, then tough. If the company wanted to pay for my cell phone service, THEN they could reach me after hours.
Don't give in on this issue. Do you really want your employer to have you at their beck and call 24/7 on your dime?
Yes you should be happy to do it, if you were a happy employee. Simply outline that while they want you to innovate, to give your all for the company, to make them better than their competitors, then they should be willing to do the same for you.
Tell them that if they treat you 'competitively' to what other companies are doing, then you will either work as hard as other employees or find a company that treats you better than they do.
We are going through the same thing here, and there is nothing worse than cutting back on employee benefits, pay, and perks and justifying it by saying 'we are doing what everyone else is doing'.
It'd probably help if everyone did it, but if they won't pay for it I don't use it for business. Not that I'd ever get rid of my broadband at home but that's another matter.
My employer will pay for broadband, cell phone but not pager (what's the point? text messages cover paging) for employees it considers mobile which is almost everyone outside of our main sites. Some areas even get better broadband rates because of deals negotiated due to the amount of employees we have.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Your CIO sounds like an asshole. "Dedicated" means dedicated to the work, not dedicated to spending money for your own company. (Hint to CIO: People work to get paid money. Not to spend money for their employers.) If the company needs you to have internet access to do your job, they should pay for it.
Any company which demands you restructure your own personal finances in order to be able to afford an internet connection that they require you to have had their head up their ass. Your personal finances are none of their fucking business. I realize it's much easier said than done, but if I were in your position and had such demands placed on me, I'd quit.
Put this arrogant prick in his place. All of you should collectively refuse to pay for broadband yourselves, and let him see how "productive" you are without his help. It is not your reponsiblity to spend your own money for "the good of the company."
What a crock of shit.
The place you're working for is a sinking ship ... they've run out of cash, and they're trying to download the costs of doing business on to their employees. Having lived through the dot.com bomb, I've seen this thing a half dozen times. If you don't play ball, you'll get bad reviews, and you'll eventually be dismissed for your "poor attitude".
Better start looking for a new gig.
S
Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen. The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers.
What your new CIO is not telling you is that your department budget has been cut back and they are no longer able to pay for your broadband. If they won't let you itemize your broadband connection, ask if you can itemize dialup connection and phone costs for every call you have to make for business reasons.
If you have to be on-call, then they should at least reimburse you for cell phone/pagers costs. I'm not sure about blackberries, tho.
My company pays for my broadband and whenever I'm on-call, they pay for my cell phone costs and they provide the pagers. They also pay overtime for on-call related work, but my personal policy is, if I don't have to leave my house, I don't charge them. Also, they usually understand that if I stay up half the night soving a problem (from home or at the office), I'll probably be late for work in the morning and tend to look the other way.
How is your company's overall situation? Are finances suffering? Read between the lines on what your boss told you and figure out wether it's safe to protest or you should simply start thinking about employment elsewhere.
Disclaimer: IANAL, YMMV, caveat emptor, boni anima teuri amen, and all that.
No sig
My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours.
*AHEM* Not that I'm saying your ISDN line wasn't a good tool to "respond quickly to issues after hours" but...
In reality, your fellow administrators and your used to have a company-provided ISDN line in our home, pretending to need it to respond quickly to issues after hours, so you could get free internet in reality. Trouble is, your company wisened up to the fact that you shafted them, and decided that a a regular dial-up account, an automated phone call, SMS or Blackberry messages work just as well to "solve issues after hours".
Been there, done that. The bubble is finished, get over it...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Essentially institute a "safe auto" contact policy. You have an answering machine on your home phone number that they can call when they need you. You have, as far as they are concerend, no cellphone, pager, blackberry, or non corporate internet. If they send you an email you will get it when you are at work. I can not think of a single profession where there is a similar situation. Do construction works have a BYOB policy (Bring your own Backhoe)? No then why should 24/7 IT guys (which is what your company wants) have a BYOB (Bring your own broadband) expectation?
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
I personally find non-reimbursement incredibly insulting, but let's not forget that the employer must be aware that these are deductible business expenses. At the very least, they should be willing to accept that they are getting the money back from your business expenses. There's nothing worse than an employer telling you to get certified or to fly to see client xyz but refusing to pay for the flight or training. I have had to contend with that on a number of occasions, and it's only with small companies. Any fortune .5k company will not only reimburse you, but force you to use the process. They don't want any audit screwing up their investors' opinions!
stuff |
There is a collective struggle between workers and owners (and their proxies, bosses). This series of events shows the subjective weakening power of the workers side here. They want you to pay for the privilege of being a 24/7 on-call wage slave. There's not much you can do as an individual, although if your company gets worse than industry average you can split.
What you can do is band together with other IT workers and educate and organize. You may remember recently there was a desire to retract the FLSA laws from even moe people. Most IT people legally have no right to overtime anyhow, despite the 19th century battles for an eight hour day. In fact, your time is now around-the-clock, and at your expense. Communicating and organizing with organizations like TechsUnite, the Programmers Guild, Washtech and whatnot will keep you appraised of these things. The ITAA, the IT owners lobbying group, has been lobbying in Washington DC for years, and was flooding newspapers with stories of IT labor shortages in the late 1990s. This has been a common industry tactic - industries used to flood newspapers with stories of labor shortages in the early 20th century, which newspapers like the Industrial Worker used to mock.
The two big factors in the struggle are hours worked and pay per hour. Employers always are trying to expand hours worked, workers if they have any power are trying to reduce the number of required hours. In terms of pay per hour, the fight is over how much of the wealth you create, and workers create all the wealth, goes to you in wages, and what percentage goes to the owner in profit.
Something people say is companies are getting tighter due to the economy, as if political economy was something completely alien from people like the weather. On the contrary, employers felt their expected rate of profit was falling in 2000 so they stopped capital spending, thereby creating unemployment, which drives down wages. They do this until their expected profit rate comes into their expectation range again.
Is the company in dire trouble now (that being the reason for the cutbacks), or are they going to be in dire trouble soon because of such cutbacks?
It's almost certainly one or the other. If the company is hurting, an dthis is a part of across-the-board, temporary cost-cutting measures, they should say so, and you can decide how to react.
Otherwise, there's a clueless twit loose, and s/he needs to be dealt with, or your group (if not the company) is dead, dead, dead unless something changes.
As for the details in the meantime, I agree with the "Easy one" poster. It woiuld be one thing if you'd hired in under those terms. But just yanking them because the new guy has his own definition of reality? Maybe you should explain that a real CIO provides his people with the best tools for their job.
Plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, or pretty much any tradesman, are expected to have their own tools.
Hell, McDonalds' employees pay for their uniforms.
Is it really that unreasonable to expect computer professionals to have a computer and internet access?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
So according to your thinking, anything they pay for shouldn't be used for personal use, right? That means that the broadband is only used for company business and the cellphone is never used to call a friend?
My employer doesn't pay for broadband, since it is just a convenience that allows us to not have to come into the office. We are paid to be on call, which means doing whatever is necessary for access to the systems. They also do not pay for cellphones. That said, if you use your cellphone for work purposes, you can expense that portion of the bill. They do pay for the pagers we are required to carry. I didn't like this at first, but it does make sense. It is a good compromise that lets my employer pay for what they benefit from, and I pay for the rest.
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
"Go figure. *shrug*" is exactly what's gone wrong in the workforce.
Will you *shrug* your way to 60 hour work weeks, pay increases that don't keep up with the cost of living, purchasing your own software, paying for any equipment repairs?
Will you *shrug* your way back into the conditions that made unionism necessary in the first place?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Work paid for my cell phone for years.
Then they decide to stop paying for cell phones. I bitch about it being a short sighted penny-wise pound-foolish policy. Said bitching falls on deaf ears and they cut funding anyways.
Fine. My out of office message now specifies contacting my boss, not calling my cell phone. If work calls outside of my "free" hours timeslots, they pay for that portion of my monthly bill. If I use 300 minutes of the 500 plan minutes in a month, and 30 of those are for work use, then work pays for 1/10th of my bill.
If its the weekend and work calls my cell phone I do not feel an urgent need to pick up. If they leave a voice mail I feel just fine not responding until I'm in the office on Monday.
To put it short, if my employer feels that it is not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building, then I'm going to act like it's not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building.
And you can take your team-player should-be-willing-to-pitch-in speech and stick it where the sun don't shine. You're taking advantage of an expensive resource that I'm paying for out of pocket, if you're not willing to help mitigate that cost then I'm not willing to let you use that resource.
Saying that I should be willing to use my broadband, which incurs a usage fee, for work just because I already pay for it is like saying I should be willing to drive people around in my car just because I already pay for it.
There's a law against forcing someone to use their private vehicle for work related tasks without compensating for fuel and wear and tear... I see no reason that same principle shouldn't apply to any resource.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
That was YOUR choice. You volunteered to do those things, and at a startup, it was recognized and appreciated. This guy's boss is just cheap. It's more of the same old mentality: Let's squeeze as much profit and productivity from these people as we can without spending any money on them. And if they balk, hint at layoffs.
He may not have any choice, but his piece of mind will be greatly increased if he can find another job with reasonable superiors. The ones he has now are making unreasonable demands at his fiscal expense.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yup, you sure do.
You get the "freedom" to come in on the 4th of July to work on someone else's server.
You get the "freedom" to spend your money on work related Internet.
You get the "freedom" to spend your money on work related cell phone minutes.
And for what? To be treated like a professional? Wouldn't you rather be compensated like a professional?
Where I work, we have what's called "leave days", and when we need to take leave, we do, it's why they give them to us. When we are sick, we take "sick days", we don't have to ask, that's what they give them to us for. If work requires us to be on a pager, they supply it, common sense says it's their responsibility.
I'm very sure your boss "loves" you. But as for me, I don't own the company, I require compensation for my work. And, because I work for professionals, they treat me as a professional, without asking me to shell out a lot of cash for the privilege.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck