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Corporations Hiring Hooky Hunters
No longer satisfied with your crinkled doctor's note, a growing number of corporations are hiring "Hooky Detectives." Private investigator Rick Raymond says he's staked out bowling alleys, pro football games, weddings and even funerals looking for people using sick days. From the article: "Such techniques have become permissible at a time when workers are more likely to play hooky. Kronos, a workforce productivity firm in Chelmsford, Mass., recently found that 57 percent of salaried employees take sick days when they're not sick — almost a 20 percent increase from statistics gathered between 2006 and 2008."
These corporate sociopath CEO's have enough money to hire private investigators to stalk us. They can come up with whatever excuse or have no reason at all. These investigators have the power to ruin marriages, friendships, careers.
What can we do about the Gestapo America? BTW this article should be titled "Corporations hire professional stalkers to track employees outside of the workplace."
Instead of having to police sick days, a simpler solution would be to combine sick days and vacation days into "earned time off" or similar. Let the employee use the time as they see fit, no policing required, and you probably get better morale in the deal too.
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It still counts as a sick day if you're taking the day off for your mental health, right?
Of course, if American employers would just provide a reasonable number of vacation days, this wouldn't be an issue; unfortunately it seems like the company has to squeeze you for every last ounce of productivity, even when squeezing less might make you more productive.
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Don't be fooled. This is a power play by employers to take even more power from the deunionized employee base. They want to destroy the middle class once and for all and the best way to do that is to reduce the employee to utter powerlessness and promote only the obsequious.
If the boss gets pissed off, a team of investigators can permanently neutralize you. If you think the Union leader can protect you then they'll neutralize him too via investigation. It's a new way to find dirt on people, and it's creepy.
So the PI uses the honey trap on you, you flirt with this new woman and now the PI gives that information to your boss. If you piss off your boss you can lose both your career and your marriage? Tell me how this can be avoided.
You don't think most of the people at the top aren't sociopaths?
The sad fact is that to reach those high levels, it's not only not a hindrance, it's practically a requirement. It's not an indictment of successful people, but rather the way "the system" works. Sociopathy is ultimately rewarded, while honesty, thrift, efficiency... all those things we were taught are good are often impediments to rising through the ranks.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
No, the real question is why are they so STUPID!!!
I agree that there is a strong neo-feudalism movement afoot. I don't think it's any sort of conspiracy, it's merely that class of people doing the type of things that they are prone to do, and neo-feudalism is the logical end-game. But I still assert that it is STUPID, because serfs don't buy the company's products. Each company seems to have this idea that they can drive THEIR employees down into the dirt, and "somebody else" will buy their products, presumably other company's employees. But when all of the companies are doing this, the pool of "somebody else" dwindles. It's just not a sustainable model.
I suspect that in the modern globalized world US companies expect that the growing middle class in the Far East will buy their products. But even if they can either eliminate every US worker or drive every US worker's pay down to 3rd world levels, their products will STILL have the overhead of an astronomically overpaid executive suite. What's worse is that the executive suite has generally grown addicted to cost reduction as the means of profit improvement. Most of them aren't worth spit in terms of bringing truly innovative products to market, improving the revenue side of the equation. (Reality distortion field aside, and though from everything I've heard he's a real prick, I have a strong sense of respect for Steve Jobs for just this reason.)
Congress isn't doing spit about it because:
1 - They won't cross their big donors.
2 - Republicans tend to believe that the wealthy are that way because they deserve it, and therefore they have the recipe for success, and need to be left alone to continue fostering success. (Particularly in the current situation, I believe that the "recipe for success" is short-term, a catastrophe in the making for the rest of the country and only a cushy retirement plan for those execs.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Will the executives be subject to this also? I can suggest staking out golf courses, marinas (when weather is nice of course), Martha's Vineyard (or wherever the local trophy home location is), and their secretary's apartments.
The title of the article is deceptive though. It isn't about people being stalked because they took a sick day or two off, it is about people abusing long term medical leave. That I have to admit I don't have a problem with them investigating. If you say you are unable to work because you can't walk and they catch you helping your neighbor move a sofa down 5 flights of stairs then I'd agree you should be busted.
Investigating someone for being out 3 days with the flu strikes me as a bit petty though. Maybe the problem at that point is your employees need some vacation time or you just have lousy moral. Firing people left and right won't make the remaining ones any better and won't guarantee you will magically get a flood of super workers to replace them (or that they won't end up as unhappy as the first bunch).
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This does not include days like Halloween and Christmas etc.
Who the hell gets Halloween as a paid holiday?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
The hyperbole is strong with this one! No, unions are not inherently bad. But can't we appreciate the irony of teachers' pension funds being wiped out when GM defaulted on their bonds so that unions could have THEIR benefits?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Companies hire you for a 40-hour work week, and then feel no compunction about working you twice that. I know of more than one company that refuses to allow employees to take vacations -- always "too busy now, try again in a couple of months" -- and then institute "hour caps." effectively screwing workers out of their vacations. I know of others that refuse to allow legitimate comp time to be taken.
Once upon a time, after working three 70-hour weeks back-to-back-to-back, and then being asked to put in a fourth week of the same, I came down with a good solid, three-day case of the "flu." To be honest, I actually did feel like hell.
Workers start faking sick days when companies fail to honor their agreements on reasonable work weeks, vacations and comp time.
Now, companies have started hiring private detectives to shadow workers outside of the job. Welcome back to the bad old days of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective_Agency
During the labor unrest of the late 19th century, businessmen hired Pinkerton agents to infiltrate unions, and as guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories. The best known such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
The private detectives aren't there just to enforce sick days. They're also there to quash the unions you advocate as a solution.
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