let’s talk about times when speaking up as a group got something changed at work

by Alison Green on September 12, 2024

We talk a lot here about times when you need to band together with coworkers to push back on something as a group — an unfair policy, a problematic process, or anything that you’ll have more luck changing if you speak up as a group rather than as an individual. (Here’s advice on how to do it.)

Let’s talk about times you’ve actually done it or seen it done. How did the group organize itself and why? What did you do, and what was the outcome? Please share in the comment section.

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{ 343 comments }

{ 343 comments… read them below }

  1. Arctic Grue*

    I was a teacher. New admin decided to schedule mandatory “teacher training” for a week late in the summer but before the school year started. This was to be a week long off-site that required most people to stay in college dorms and eat cafeteria food so we could attend useless lectures – and now it was going to be smack during our precious summer vacation.

    Folks pushed back HARD. So the admin said if folks had proof of travel plans that conflicted with that time, they’d be excused. Everyone went and bought $13 bus tickets to a town just across the border that…isn’t exactly a vacation destination, hence the tickets being $13. But we all had the tickets for the dates of the training, so everyone was excused. They canceled the training. (None of us actually took the bus trip. $13 was worth it to get out of that nonsense.)

    4. Bunch Harmon*

      This sounds like you could have used a union! All of my teacher’s union reps would have shut that down fast.

        1. Bunch Harmon*

          Thank you! She’s my favorite. Your user name reminds me that it’s been a while since I’ve read any Sayers – I should plan on it.

    5. Edwina*

      What if your vacation plan was sleeping late and doing whatever you wanted AT HOME? Grrrr, this sort of pretty bureaucratic crap makes me so mad. I’m glad the teachers found a creative way to stop the plans.

      1. Hlao-roo*

        iT’s NoT a VaCaTiOn UnLeSs It InVoLvEs TrAvEl!!

        As someone who has enjoyed my “sleep late and do whatever I want at home” vacations, I’m right there with you.

        2. Harried HR*

          100% correct,
          However at my job, even if I put an OOO on and don’t answer e-mails / calls / texts / teams etc. people will STILL try to contact me.
          So now when I go on Vacation I go international / cruise / hiking etc and state that I will not have access to internet or cell service and miraculously everyone either contacts my backup or figures it out another way !!! SMH

          1. The Cosmic Avenger*

            My OOO message always has alternate contacts “for urgent matters”, and say I may not respond until after I’m back. And I stick to it! But I also make sure clients contact a specific group with certain requests; I even went as far as getting an email alias set up, [Project]Contact at company dot com, that I had sent to myself, my backup, and my analog in the IT department.

          2. Rainy*

            My standard OOO message says “I’m out of the office without access to email” because like you, I found that if I didn’t say that, people at my old job expected me to be on email regularly even if I was on vacation or out sick.

    6. Unkempt Flatware*

      The amount of worthless BS that teachers were required to do was astounding. I only did it two years and I can’t count how many stupid activities I’ve done while sweating about how much work I had waiting for me. My partner is now an adult educator and he still deals with this crap. Learn a dance for new student orientation, volunteer to be pied in the face for our social media, etc. It’s insulting.

      1. Not a Vorpatril*

        Yerp. Currently a teacher, and I’m glad to have a reasonably good union (paying my dues, but we’re starting to lose having enough teachers in it to properly give force, unfortunately) but, more importantly, I’m also glad I have a bunch of other teachers around me who are happily vocal over how various things are crap, and I’m pretty good at finding my lines in the sand and making sure they are not crossed. Still have to put up with a lot of junk that in no way helps me out, but I’m certainly not going to allow the admins to step on my free time more than contractually .

        Doesn’t stop Admin from saying unhelpful things, like suggesting we use lunch/after school time to work with our content groups (other teacher teaching the same subject) while they waste our professional development time having us work through some basic “what a good content group meeting should look like” activities. But at least my compatriots are with me, and I’m old enough to not get trapped into doing stuff just to “fit in” and please the boss.

      2. Artemesia*

        It has been nearly 60 years but I still remember as a new HS teacher scrambling to design my classes (we had no prescribed curriculum given to us just the subject e.g. Civics, American History etc — the teacher designed the course and instruction) and get ready for 6 classes of HS juniors and seniors and having to take time to attend BS like this including the very important hour long session by the head counselor on why we should refer to the counseling office, not as ‘the counseling office’ but as ‘pupil personnel services.’ THIS was very important.

        The sad thing was that this head counselor has actually been my art teacher when I was in 7th grade and I still to this day appreciate and remember what he taught me about things like perspective, and medieval and renaissance art and use that knowledge when visiting places like Florence. He was a great teacher who made my life better — but ‘pupil personnel services’? seriously?

    7. Selina Luna*

      What, exactly, did they think about teachers who have kids? Not all teachers (or anyone) have someone who can keep children for an entire flipping week. What about pets? This would cost my family nearly $500 in boarding fees.
      I’m happy your teachers got out of it, and I’m also delighted that there’s effectively NO money for something like that for this year in my school.

      1. Plate of Wings*

        I have neither kids nor pets and this is the first thing I thought! So many jobs require travel, even if it’s once a year, but this just isn’t one of them. It’s so out of touch to think travel is a reasonable ask for jobs that don’t have it as a typical requirement.

    8. LL*

      This is hilarious, but also, what the hell at making people prove travel plans instead of just, you know, not doing the training?

    9. Miette*

      I am also picturing some marketing manager at the bus company going, “Hmm, this seems to be an in-demand destination, should we put some promo dollars behind it?” Next thing you know it, travel posters are everywhere, the town’s on everyone’s up-and-coming travel destinations blog posts, and unfortunately the town’s infrastructure can’t support it. Suddenly there are developers sniffing around and people bringing their businesses to town. A Starbucks opens. People complain of gentrification as public services continue to fail to keep up with demand. A Shake Shack opens. Pure chaos.

      Sorry, LOL, I love plotting fanfiction.

    10. 1-800-BrownCow*

      I’m now thinking about everyone in town hearing they have a busload of tourists coming to visit and getting all excited. I’m picturing the scene from the movie Cars where after the new interstate is built and the whole town thinks they’ll get all kinds of travelers and visitors stopping in their town while traveling the highway. And they’re all waiting with signs welcoming the visitors and then no one shows up and everyone is disappointed.

      Those poor townsfolk’s in the town across the border deserve some visitors!

      1. Arctic Grue*

        Actually I was kind of hoping that some poor beleaguered mom and her six kids got to have a nice bus ride all to themselves thanks to our scheming lol

  2. DD26*

    About fifteen years ago, the entire project team was told on a Friday that effective immediately there would be mandatory 50% unpaid overtime with no known end date. No vacations allowed that hadn’t already been approved.

    We started by replacing our nameplates with barcodes of our employee number. By April we had reached our limit, and banded together to force a meeting with management. We had a two day off site meeting to air our grievances. Emotions were high to say the least.

    We as a team committed to meeting the August release date for the project, but we had to do it on our terms. No more overtime. Management agreed, and of course we met our commitment when we were being treated fairly again.

    We’ve never been forced to do anything remotely like that again.

    1. Thankfully no longer a manager*

      Were you all salary employees in the US? Because that doesn’t seem legal otherwise. Good for you all to band together for change. And oof, overall, that sounds terrible! I’ve done mandatory OT- 10 hour days with Saturdays optional. I was young and needed money, but honestly I found it just makes you tired and work slower as time goes on.

      1. Venus*

        Very likely to be salary employees in the US, and I’ll guess a tech company. The managers likely thought that more time at a desk results in more code, without understanding that well-written code needs a healthy, well-rested mind.

        1. DD26*

          Yes, salaried and tech. And managers who committed to an unreasonable timeline without consulting with their dev team.

        2. Rainy*

          The job I left recently had a really hard time with the idea that innovation of any kind requires, as you say, a healthy, well-rested mind. I hadn’t had a really groundbreaking idea in four years, mostly because right after that idea, they cut my program from two people to just me, while expecting the same amount of work (and more) out of me. It is very hard to even keep up on trends in your field, let alone come up with anything that is both new and useful, when you are running on fumes.

          1. Paralegally Blonde*

            It is, if you’re exempt from the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. A FLSA-exempt employee is expected to work until the work is done. This should equal some 30 hour weeks to balance out the 50 hour weeks, but realistically just means you’re normally working way more than 40.

            (Twenty-five years ago, first year law associates in my town were generally making $1,000 in yearly salary for each hour of weekly work. So, if you’re fresh out of law school and offered a job at $125,000 annually, you could expect to work 125 hours per week and your firm had a concierge to handle your dry cleaning. I imagine this math isn’t nearly as tidy today.)

            1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

              7×13=91, and that’s 8 am-10 pm every day with one meal (probably your only meal of the day). I’ve done that for months on end and know firsthand what it looks like (f’ugly, until we come up with an accurate word). I can’t wrap my mind around trying to fit another 34 hours of work, almost 5 hours per day, in a week beyond that.

              I guess you’d save money on renting an apartment or a mortgage payment on a house, since you’d never actually spend any time there.

              1. anon24*

                I can’t imagine. I’m doing 130ish hours every 2 week pay period plus taking 2 college classes and dealing with everything in life that comes with living alone and I’m absolutely exhausted and rarely get to sleep more than 3 or 4 hours a day. I can’t even fathom.

                1. allathian*

                  Yeah, no. I’ve done a maximum of 55-60 hour workweeks for a crappy project some 8 years ago, and I ended on the brink of burnout. When that project was done I needed 2 weeks comp time, 2 weeks sick leave and 2 weeks normal vacation to recover. My then-boss got chewed out by her then-boss for allowing the overscheduling to take place. (She was a feeelings person and not a particularly competent manager, and she absolutely folded every time the higher-ups put pressure on her, but thankfully her boss had our backs that time, even if a bit late.) For reference, my standard workweek is 36 hours 15 minutes.

                  When I was a student I could work PT about 20-30 hours per week while completing my classes, so about 40 hours of studying per week, both in class and elsewhere, but I couldn’t live with a schedule like that anymore.

            2. Smurfette*

              125 hours a week?!? That’s like… 25 hours a day for a 5-day week. Or 18 hours a day for a 7-day week. I couldn’t do that even for a month.

    2. aunttora*

      Heh! At a lawfirm I worked at, all of the “who is calling” info screens on our old school telephones were programmed to show “Fungible Work Unit” for all associates and staff, as part of a prank. It was glorious.

  3. Project Manager*

    I worked at a University housing office that had 5 staff members who lived on campus, including myself, and 4 out of 5 of us were new to working at this University. For some reason, University legal got it into their heads that we had to be paid for the housing and then have it deducted from our paychecks because we had to pay taxes on that compensation.

    I knew immediately that wasn’t right. This was the 4th University I had lived on campus as a staff member at and had never been paid/charged for housing in this manner, and I thought, the other places I worked and lived at haven’t been dodging taxes, I mean, we’re talking some major (think Big 10) schools here! And, my co-workers had all had the same experience, and were equally confused.

    We came together as a group to appeal to the Dean and he agreed to set up a meeting with all of us, though he and legal still insisted this had to done. Prior to the meeting I spent 7 minutes Googling tax code and found the appropriate exemption, printed it out, and highlighted the relevant information. At the start of the meeting with the Dean, he starts to say he knows we’re upset yadda yadda…I slide the paper with the tax code towards him, he reads it and completely reverses his stance, saying he’ll follow up with University legal and, we’re all set! I still think legal and I should have swapped paychecks for the week.

    1. TracyXP*

      If it was accounting coming up with it, I would have thought that they figured out a way to pass the taxes on to the employees instead of the company paying it.

      1. Christmas Carol*

        Back when the Big 10 was still 10 schools, 9 of them were public universities, and even Northwestern is still a non-profit, so they weren’t paying taxes as a company.

          1. Dancing Otter*

            Only on unrelated income, such as book store profits or renting the auditorium for outside events.
            Though some schools semi-voluntarily pay something in lieu of the property taxes from which they are legally exempt.

    2. anonymized_for_me*

      I work at a university as well as a staff member. Several co-workers also worked as adjunct profs at the university, and the university made… oooh a really stupid decision. They said ‘if we pay you also as adjuncts, you’re double dipping, so we won’t do that. We’ll just pay your staff pay and you can still teach’. Every single one of them said ‘fine, we won’t teach’.
      As it turned out, all the staff members were teaching in one department and they made up something like 75% of the teachers in that department and by quitting… no more teaching.
      The university quickly rescinded the rule and said ‘sorry! we pay! don’t quit!’.
      The person that told me this said it wasn’t much money, but it was the principle of the thing.

      1. Tuckerman*

        That’s insane. Did they really think people would just do it for free? Or did they raise salaries with an expectation that the new job description included teaching?

          1. Rainy*

            Some years back, SIU Carbondale attempted to “hire” alumni holding terminal degrees as “zero time adjuncts.” These non-employees would, the university imagined, do things that people in paid (underpaid, but still paid) adjunct positions were doing at the time, like lecturing for classes (i.e., *teaching*), serving on graduate thesis committees, serving on department or campus committees, and participating in proposal-writing and research. So, basically, being a faculty member. For free.

            SIU’s glorious vision involved requiring these people to apply as though it were an actual job, checking their credentials and references, and then selecting the most qualified applicants for a three-year appointment that would be completely and totally unpaid.

            It went over about as well as you’d expect. My sister, whose PhD is from SIU, was horrified, and her dissertation chair, who was in the neighborhood of retirement age (but we all know how much that actually counts for with faculty), retired from the university in high dudgeon over it.

            1. Smurfette*

              What did they think these people were going to eat? Or were they supposed to take a weekend job in retail to cover their bills?

              1. Boof*

                Academics are supposed to be independently wealthy I think? That or live entirely on knowledge and curiosity, and live entirely in theoretical space (and of course, not actually have a life or do anything not in service to academia or something).
                /s
                I swear I’m perplexed where all the college money goes when it clearly isn’t going to the teachers as far as I can tell

      2. Paint N Drip*

        If absolutely nothing else, I could NOT accept that decree knowing what that would mean for the next hire after me. Genuine malarkey!!

  4. dulcinea47*

    I’ve been working for 30 years now and can’t think of a single time where pushback was both organized *and* successful. (I can think of lots of times the loud and continuous complaining was successful.)

    1. Don’t put metal in the science oven*

      Same. I’ve seen a few leaders of rebellions tell management that the employees won’t take it anymore while those employees hang back awkwardly while the leader stands alone

    2. I Can't Even*

      I agree there is blatant sexism and mismanagement. When someone brings problems up to management they are told to “not be so proactive” and when it is brought up to HR management pretends they were never made aware. It’s a vicious cycle.

    3. Aggretsuko*

      I think the only pushback that worked at my old job was people complaining when the toilet paper covers were removed. Those were put back in a few days.

  5. Wilbur*

    The company had been renovating every single office space (besides ours). We were not a fan of our janky chairs and beige on beige on beige on beige on fake wood office furniture. One of our managers came up with a few plans, hooray! His plans included having maintenance sawzall our cubicle walls shorter, shorten every desk from a nice big L (great for looking at prints and parts) to 4 feet, and double the number of desks in the office area. That was when we discovered he didn’t listen to any of our complaints, he just wanted to split the office space costs with another group. Keep in mind, our building had tons of empty space because this was the 2nd year of quarterly layoffs. I don’t even know if he could find another group to share the office space with. We pushed back pretty hard, and 6 months later I was laid off shortly before Christmas. The office was not remodeled, maintenance did not sawzall any cubicle walls, and that office remains a beige wonderland.

  6. Hiring Mgr*

    It’s worked on me as a manager – one example is from a few years ago was changing the criteria for promotions.

    At first just one person asked me about eliminating or altering a certain item that was required to move up – I didn’t go along with it at the beginning, but then they approached as a group and made their case I was convinced.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      Thank you for sharing the other side. It is good to know that successful group action is not management giving in.
      I don’t think it should be that way. I hope it is not. I hope it is like your experience where you accepted the invitation to dialog in good faith and then a happy outcome for all.
      And your confirming that is great.

  7. Strive to Excel*

    This was in school, not at work, but I think it fits the spirit of the question.

    I was enrolled in 1-year Masters program in 2020-2021 with a cohort of others (basically we were all in the same classes at the same time). One of our classes was business law. That year, the program had a new teacher, a lawyer whose retirement job was giving lectures at the university. He wasn’t new to teaching at the university, just new to this program, and his prior classes has been primarily freshmen and sophomores taking Intro to Business Law. It’s also noteworthy that this was a popular program for people coming back to college after working for a while, so I’d put the average age somewhere around 24 or 25.

    In the particular program we were at, there was a big emphasis on synthesis and understanding over memorization. Most of our assignments were group papers, presentations, or projects – design X business plan, analyze Y financial statements, etc. Class tests were generally open note and along the lines of “considering X rubric, analyze this situation”. So you can imagine our surprise and mild dismay when the professor announced that he would be having pop quizzes, closed note exams, and would require very invasive monitoring software on our computers. His reasoning? “I care more about you memorizing the basic concepts” and “I’ve found in the past people will steal my tests and upload them to the fraternity/sorority test banks, so I want to make sure you can’t steal them”.

    This did not go over well. However a group of us figured we should try and push back, so we stayed on the call after class that first day to talk to him about it. We made the point that a) one of the stated goals of the program we were in was to move past memorize-and-regurgitate and b) the software he wanted us to install was way more invasive that he was suggesting, and none of us were putting that on our personal computers, thank you.

    To his credit, he was very receptive to our concerns and admitted that he was mostly familiar with teaching much younger groups. After that call he moved to the same open note, less memorization and more analysis exam style, and did not require invasive software. He was also a fantastic teacher in all other respects, and I still respect him for being willing to say “OK, I think I’m in the wrong here. I’ve never done it this way but I’m willing to give it a shot”.

    1. ScruffyInternHerder*

      Similar situation with my spouse’s online professional master’s degree program, and I think the end situation would have been better had the professor in question shown the maturity that the one you reference did.

      A professor who was used to 18-19 year old freshmen, in person. Not 25-30 something professionals who lived across the United States (it was an online-only program, and was an additional two semesters when compared to the in-person program) and typically had full time day jobs in a completely separate professional capacity beyond “student”. Lets just say that the first week was a bit bumpy, and the program head and dean wound up involved over “Mandatory Online Discussion Group at 3:30 pm Eastern Time Zone three days per week” and the professor sticking to her guns over that. Most group classes were online after 8 p.m. Eastern Time, in order to accommodate those in the Western US.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        When I took my first asynchronous online class it was 2013 and required online discussion groups… and we didn’t have a mandatory time! That’s wild dude

        1. ScruffyInternHerder*

          They were actually synchronous if I remember correctly. They had live lectures over Skype, I think. Small cohort, like 12-15. But its not like it was an every single day lecture or anything either. I know that he spent significant amounts of time in small groups, but they were scheduled by the members of the group.

          The mandatory group work hours for the full cohort of working professionals that were good for nobody with a day job was a pretty far stretch.

    2. Silver Robin*

      I took a class in my master’s program that was meant to teach us how to write particular types of short form semi-technical pieces. We had weekly assignments that he was supposed to read and give us feedback on. His feedback was often just crossing things out entirely or “no” or similarly useless. We were expected to go through the various guidance materials we read each week and identify the reason this was wrong ourselves.

      This class was now during COVID, our semester was shortened and he was not prepared for the increased workload that would result in (no mid-semester break to catch up) and he fell woefully behind on giving us feedback.

      He told us that grades were based on good faith effort and that he generally expects to give folks high marks. To his credit, everyone did get an A. Everyone also ripped him to shreds in the teacher evaluation and he was no longer allowed to teach that class afterwards. Which is honestly a damn shame because the concept of the class was actually quite good and I think would be incredibly useful for that program.

      1. amylynn*

        I finished my second bachelor’s in Spring 2020. As a matter of principle I refused to complete the course evaluation because I didn’t think any instructor should be held to anything other than basic human decency and good effort. I did email the instructor directly with feedback, which he appreciated (he had just taken over the course from someone else).

    3. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      I’ve been part of two groups that have noped out of spyware on our personal devices. Both times, we stuck to our guns and Management to theirs, and the spyware was only installed on company devices and by those who weren’t tech-savvy.

      The first time, I was an established, senior programmer, and there was an overnight hit to productivity and after-hours responsiveness. The second time, I was a relatively new employee and had no baseline to compare against.

      1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        The first time, the excuse was “we have to protect any PII that ends up on your device, so this spyware creates an encrypted enclave for any email or IM apps.” In order to do that, it required the Files permission and admin access, which is also the permissions for a remote-wipe. Sure enough, if you requested the discrete policy from HR, in the fine print the company asserted a right to wipe your phone, tablet, and/or home computer if you were willing to receive communication on any of them and put in your notice and/or were fired.

        Draconian, but the cover story was that audits to maintain certifications required it.

        1. Arrietty*

          It’s possible that the certifications DID require it, which is why the company should have provided company devices and not allowed or encouraged personal device use. The answer to “our company needs to do this” isn’t “everything you own becomes the company’s”.

          1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

            I would have had more respect for it had Management been up front with the facts that uninstalling the app or leaving the company would trigger wipes of your personal devices, including photos, instead of just leaving it up to the individual employees to connect the dots.

            1. Rainy*

              I refuse to install work apps on personal devices, and that’s one of the reasons. Every time an employer has tried to make me use a work app on my personal phone, for example, once I’ve gotten into the “required permissions” part of the specs for the app, it’s a dealbreaker every time.

              The one time I actually did install an app, it was for an exercise incentive program at my old job that required the use of a third party app, and I did install that, because free money (exercise for 30 minutes 12 times over a month and you get $25–I walked to and from work every day, about 1.5mi each way), and all it accessed was location while I was actively using the app, harmless enough. Until I got an Apple Watch–the app wanted to connect to it for step count, but would also need permission to view every part of my Health app, which as we all know includes a period tracker, and, uh, nope. Absolutely the funk not.

          2. Observer*

            Bingo!

            That’s been one of my arguments for situations where sensitive information is being handled. We need to be able to do a remote wipe, and people are being reasonable to not want us to allow that.

          3. Slovenly Braid Cultist*

            +1

            For personal reasons I am opposed to having my work email on my phone- I don’t WANT to be reachable outside my paid hours and I figure if there is a true emergency someone can call me. If it’s not a true emergency, they can wait until I’m back. But it always goes down easier when I frame it in terms of company info security: why would you *want* me to have this on my personal device- then if I lose my phone, we’ve given access to God knows who.

            Long ago when I was a receptionist we were having some issues with our phone service, and my boss wanted me to make my number the rollover phone number if the line went down (since I was the one who answered anyway and handled most queries.) I told him I wasn’t comfortable with that because what if the phone system went down when I was elsewhere- and I was about to go on a long weekend vacation where I wouldn’t always be able to answer. I think if I hadn’t had the time off he might have pressed, but instead he put his own number on… and spent the whole weekend getting calls all evening. He never asked about that again and we came up with a better solution.

            Personal device hygiene saves sanity!

            1. CeeDoo*

              I used to check email on my phone, but we switched to 2 factor authorization this year. I set up my phone number on it as my classroom phone number, so if I’m not on campus, I can’t access a daggone thing. I love it. If I find myself getting curious about my email, I can’t do anything about it. And I refuse to change the phone number to my personal cell because work doesn’t pay for it. I painted myself into a corner, then I got really cozy in that corner.

        2. Smurfette*

          I also declined to install a company tool on my (personal*) phone because of this. I queried it and was told “of course we aren’t going to wipe your phone!” But the fact remains that they CAN wipe my phone.

          * many people have to use their personal phones for work in my country

      2. AVP*

        I did this a few years ago, too! A client requested that the small agency I worked at (6-10 people) gave us a pretty strict security requirement, and our outside IT group recommended a very invasive monitoring software as the solution. But we were all using personal devices for this job and there was no way we’d be putting that on our own laptops. We got together and told the business owner that we’d be willing to do it if she provided new work-only laptops, or she could go back to the IT group and client and find a different solution. To their credit, the minute that IT realized they were personal computers and phones they were like “oh lol no.”

      1. Strive to Excel*

        He did turn out to be a really good professor! Knew his stuff backwards and forwards, and really good at teaching. Once we got past the initial mismatch in expectations the class went very smoothly.

    5. Beth**

      My college had a tradition of unproctered exams and self-scheduled final exams. We had a strong honor code, so people didn’t cheat, even when the professor left the room during an exam.

      I took one class taught by a visiting professor from another local university. When he gave us the mid-term exam, he sat down again and it was clear he had no plans to leave the room. We explained that the normal process at our university was for the professor to stay for a couple of minutes so everyone could check they had all the exam pages and ask for any clarification and then leave. He was clearly not expecting this, but we were all clear that this was normal for our college and eventually he relented.

      By the time it came to the final exam, he went along with the usual self-scheduled process.

      1. Sarah Canofcoke*

        But… why did it matter if he stayed, if nobody was going to cheat anyway? It seems so odd to even bring up “Oh professors trust us here so they don’t stick around for exams; you should leave now.” I would have been like “Uh, nope that wasn’t part of my brief, so I’ll be here reading a book if anyone has questions. Your test time begins now.” Like…what was the big deal?

        1. Mirve*

          I went to a school with similar honor code and it discouraged faculty from proctoring exams as it does not show the appropriate trust.

        2. Gumby*

          Practically speaking – nothing. However, I also went to a school with a strong honor code, although exams were not self-scheduled, and the honor code itself said that proctors could not remain in the room. Normally the professor stayed for a few minutes at the start and then a TA stayed outside the room for the rest of the time in case of questions.

    6. Anon for this*

      A million years ago in a one year accounting masters degree program that was super intense and very condensed. It was at a big name east coast school where we did six months of school, three months of internship at a Big 6 accounting firm, then six more months of school. If you did your internship right, you got a job offer at the end of it, so there was a LOT riding on it.
      One of the last classes before the internship was a statistics class. You really really need statistics in auditing to determine sample sizes etc.
      The professor had never taught in our program before. He was Indian (which fine, a lot of the professors, and students, were international), but his accent was unintelligible. I have tons of International friends and my husband is an Eastern European immigrant, so I know from accents and can understand just about anybody. Even I could.not.understand.nine.out.of.ten.words this guy said, the rest of the class was worse off than I was. Plus, he was as arrogant as f. The whole class was freaking out because it looked like we would go into our internships with zero knowledge of statistics, plus we were all going to fail the class because we had zero idea what he was saying and he wasn’t using a textbook. (!) And we were required to maintain a 3.0 GPA to stay in the program. We all went to the director and within three days we had a new professor who was WONDERFUL. I still remember everything he taught us, he was that good. And we all had great internships and got job offers. Whew!

      1. Sarah Canofcoke*

        So similar! I (a liberal arts major) was told by my counselor I needed more “hard science and math” to make me marketable and put into a statistics and probabilities course that I’d never have chosen to take. My professor was nice enough, but his very strong Korean accent made a difficult topic full on impossible for me, and as a new college student, I didn’t even know I could withdraw from a course with no penalty for the first couple of weeks, so I just … didn’t go and ended up with an F. Man, I’m still mad. That’s the only non A I ever got!

        1. Chauncy Gardener*

          And the whole premise was BS to start with, plus the F? UGH!
          That would stick in my craw for sure.

        2. Tinkerbell*

          Back in the mid-70s, my father was told by his academic advisor that he really needed to learn German to get into medical school (despite already having taken classes in French and Latin). He did, and ended up starting German I alongside several students who had already taken it for several years in high school but wanted an easier grade. His professor passed him with a D as long as he promised not to take any of the man’s classes again.

          That single D did, in fact, keep him out of some medical schools :-\

      2. Tiny Soprano*

        My goodness, one of my stats professors at uni didn’t have a strong accent, but she was very nervous. I know this wasn’t her fault, but her wavering breathless voice made it so hard to take in any information.

        1. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

          This reminds me of the prof I had for Calc 2, Calc 4 and statistics. He was a Maths prof because that is what his parents wanted him to be. He hated being in front of people so he would look at the board or the floor and never once look at the class.

          He also taught entirely from the theoretical perspective – how the math was developed – much more appropriate to a PhD level, not undergrad. He didn’t follow the book at all, gave no homework, a 10% midterm, the rest of the grade was the final exam which was 100% out of the textbook that he had never referenced the entire year. But it was open book/open note

          By the time I had him for stats I gave up going to class, went only to the class before the mid term and final where he would say what chapters were on the final and then spent the rest of my time doing every odd number question in the book.

          I tried to warn my friends who never had him before as he only taught the “off semester” cohorts of calculus but they all kept going to stats and got C’s & D’s and I ended up with a 99% on the final. As proof he never looked up, he said it was great having me in class.

    7. AMS*

      That’s so refreshing. It brings up memories of trying to complete my degree in a fully online program – as I had a full time job and two toddlers I was the full time (essentially only) parent for while going through a divorce. My professor didnt use a textbook. She’d post chapters of text in the classroom on a Monday evening, and expected assignments based on the reading to be turned in by Wednesday…. emails to her explaining that the reason most of us were in an online course to begin with is because we needed FLEXIBILITY and if we can’t read ahead to prepare for next weeks’ class when we have the time, we cant reasonably keep up. I went to the dean. Who confirmed that despite what the instructor said, this schedule of posting the reading on Monday with assignments due on Wednesday was NOT a department policy. Didnt get me anywhere. I nearly withdrew. Instead I did poorly as she was the type to mark off if you forgot minor irrelevant details or were short by one word in length. I hated that woman.

      2. Smurfette*

        Your professor and the dean both suck. Studying while working and/or parenting is challenging enough without being set up to fail.

  8. Jane Bingley*

    I worked for a boss that was very much a micromanager and especially hated seeing people using their cell phones at work. Our team’s desks happened to be closest to his office, so whenever he walked by and saw someone using their cell phone, he would email our boss and have her scold us for “wasting work time”.

    But the thing was, we were using them to work! Our team worked closely with staff overseas in extremely remote areas who had limited cell service and internet access. Our team members were using their phones to send instant messages via Whatsapp to answer questions and support our overseas crew whenever they happened to have a working phone. This was far more efficient than sending emails back and forth, which is how our boss preferred to communicate.

    We put together a short written explanation of how Whatsapp works (he was not at all familiar with smart phones) and how much time it saved both local and overseas staff, and he (begrudgingly) backed off.

    1. NotBatman*

      Glad to see that worked! The total ban on phones almost never takes into account the sheer amount of modern work that requires phone use.

    2. Disappointed Australien*

      My new contract is pretty generic across the company, from the warehouse staff to the software team lead. So we have two clauses in different parts of the contract. “staff may not have personal cellphones with them while working”, followed a couple of pages later by “staff must be contactable by cellphone at all times”. I suspect the latter is only in some contracts, but it’s in mine.

  9. Someone**

    Not me personally, but a sports facility once tried to make breaks unpaid. The contract was that the staff would work for 8 hours (full-time), but they’d take a 30-minute paid break. Therefore, they’d be on site for 8 hours.
    The work was intensive, so they deserved this paid break!
    The proposed new contract would make the break unpaid, so they would be on site 8.5 hours.
    The staff replied that they didn’t care whether the breaks were paid or not, they would be on site for 8 hours and leave.
    It worked.

    Does the famous intern petition letter on AAM count as speaking up as a group?

    1. Yvette*

      I am sure it does and that it should be filed under “Poorly Thought Out”, “Ill Conceived” and “Spectacular Fail”.

      1. NotBatman*

        The interns were right that collective bargaining can work, in theory, but if they’d asked even one single employee who’d been there more than a few weeks…

        Then again, if they had then they would’ve learned what a bad idea their proposal was and known not to go through with it.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I think they misjudged what the “collective” part needed to be. The company doesn’t need interns. It does need admins. So if the interns had talked to all the admins, adjusted the petition’s form and demands based on their advice, and gotten a number of well-positioned admins to make the case for them…

          It probably wouldn’t have made the news.

  10. Medical Office Instigator*

    It was the early 90s and anti-smoking campaigns were popping up everywhere. I was working in a group surgery practice where it was commonplace for doctors to smoke in their offices that were in a long hallway split across from patient exam rooms. Several of us medical support staff (medical assistants, nurses and secretaries) decided to push back against smoking in the hallway offices and it caused a scene. The docs eventually relented and a couple who did smoke retired anyway. I was one of the more vocal anti-smoking assistants and afterward needed to speak directly to the office administrator about some time off; she deliberately smoked in front of me across from her desk.

    1. Bulu Babi*

      We did this at uni when we were students! Some 20 years ago, smoking was allowed inside the department, and after we went to the director as a group and complained that we couldn’t study in the halls like that, “no smoking” signs popped up like magic. I think that the director had been wanting to implement a smoking ban for a while and we provided… leverage. :)

    2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      I’m nearly 45 and live in a state that banned indoor smoking in public buildings (except for private clubs) and it’s genuinely wild remembering where people smoked before. Also, it’s amazing when I go to states that don’t have the ban and suddenly, I have to ask for a non-smoking section seat or am confronted by smokers whereas I don’t normally anymore. I was at ATL’s airport and was amazed that there was a smoking lounge. I hadn’t seen one in so long!

      1. GenX, PhD, Enters the Chat*

        I used to have a smoke with one of my grad school professors in her office. She was delightful. I think they finally banned smoking in the building after she retired.

      2. Chocoholic*

        I live in a state where not only is smoking banned in public buildings, but it is also banned in public spaces, so places like the zoo or baseball stadium and similar are all non-smoking. It is always wild to me too, when I go to another state and people are smoking in places where you can’t smoke at home.

      3. N C Kiddle*

        I’m about the same age and based in the UK, which has had an indoor smoking ban for about 17 years. I was remembering the disgusting job I used to have in a workplace cafeteria where smokers would use their plate as an ashtray, and it boggled my mind that we used to have situations like that.

    3. OlympiasEpiriot*

      When I was a young child, my father moved us to Minnesota as it was the first state to require non-smoking sections and I had had several cases of bronchitis AND died from pneumonia and been resuscitated by then. He was a militant nonsmoker himself and was someone who had provided commentary on OSHA prior to its issuance, so, safety was big in his mind.

      This was the 1970s.

      I also spent too much time in hospitals and doctor’s offices and sometimes encountered some who smelled of it on their clothes. Once I was old enough to direct my own care, I refused care from anyone who smoked.

      Any medical professional who is a smoker deserves to lose their license.

      I have recently noticed that it seems vaping was a gateway to regular smoking.

      I really thought we had left cigarettes in the 20th century except for some early millennials and older who were still addicted.

      Nope. I’m seeing So Many early 20-somethings smoking. Clubs and bars aren’t allowing it again, but, there’s crowds outside smoking and generally making it extremely unhealthy for themselves and people walking by.

      Dear cigarette smokers: Note that people who have severe reactions to your pollution have adrenaline surges from feeling their lungs seize up. Adrenaline surges can lead to violence. Please take up an addiction that doesn’t make a foul cloud around you nor float through an open window… injection of substances doesn’t affect me and you can play with your body as you want.

      1. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

        As the child of a chain smoker, I sympathize deeply with your condition and agree totally with the idea that smokers should consider the second-hand effects of their habits. But I don’t think “Stop smoking and start shooting up, or I’m gonna smack a fool for living” is really going to win people to your side of the debate…

  11. B’Elanna Torres*

    I was working in a semi-seasonal job in an area where no one wanted to live full-time (think oil fields, but not that). One of the major perks was free utilities and cheap rent in the company-provided housing. Everybody was off for the same two months during the year. For years, the policy was that during those two months, you packed all your stuff into one room (so that they could rent the housing unit out if needed), and didn’t have to pay rent for that time period. Except one year they told us that we actually had to pay rent for that time period, with like a month’s notice. All of us traveled during that time off and counted on the money budgeted for rent to use for travel. I could make it work, but it was the principle of the thing. I spoke to my coworkers in person and over email and confirmed that everyone thought this was ridiculous. I told my direct supervisor as well, who had no skin in the game as she was the only one of us who could afford a house outside of town. Nothing happened. Then I posted on social media about how frustrated I was, and somehow it got back to the big brass. My grand-boss reached out to me and told me she thought I’d handled this badly, and I responded with about two pages as to why I thought this was a deeply unfair practice. It sort of worked? They elected to enact the policy the following summer so at least we had some notice. I quit before then anyway. Overall a mixed bag.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      “You brought up an important issue, but you did it the wrong way.”

      “How should I have brought it up?”

      “A less effective way, obviously.”

  12. ZinniaOhZinnia*

    This is more malicious compliance than a full-on pushback, but I worked as a teen in a botanical garden. That year, our boss decided that we needed to look tidier than previous years and insisted we buy khakis to wear, along with the standard logo’d uniform shirts.

    We tried to tell her that there’s a reason we all wear darker pants/shorts and not khaki colored ones, but she refused to listen because she decided we’d look neater and more professional in khaki pants.

    Well, when you work in a garden, you can get pretty dirty. And khaki pants don’t always lose their grass stains. It took exactly one week after the new pants were worn for her to revert back to the former policy. I guess she decided that all the dirt and grass stains that didn’t come out in the wash were less professional looking than our dark green/brown pants :)

    2. Observer*

      our boss decided that we needed to look tidier than previous years and insisted we buy khakis to wear, along with the standard logo’d uniform shirts

      In a botanical garden?!?!?

      Where on earth was she coming from? What else did she have zero clue about?

      1. ZinniaOhZinnia*

        Truly, I have no idea what she was thinking! I know she was trying really hard in her first year to put out new and “innovative” ideas to distinguish herself from the outgoing boss (who was deeply loved by the community), but truly it only served to put her at odds with her group of 50+ teenage employees– not a great look, overall!

    3. NotBatman*

      Company dress codes that require employees to buy lots of new clothes, only to abandon those dress codes after a few weeks, drive me up the wall. It’s such an unnecessary financial burden.

      1. allathian*

        Yeah, at least where I live employers are required to provide employees with either the uniforms themselves or a stipend to buy suitable clothes. This doesn’t apply to office workers, but certainly to construction workers, etc.

    4. Paint N Drip*

      bro… why???
      One summer I worked on a farm and part of that was assisting at the farmer’s market (or in the slower times, running it myself) – we had to be up at 3/4am depending on the crops to be sold, do farm work, pack the crops, pack the van/truck with the tables and tents and signage and crops, eat breakfast at some point, then get to the market with enough time to set up. The boss suggested that I spruce up a bit for this ‘customer service’ event beyond my usual farming look… when? how? I was living in a job-provided camper with an outhouse (NOT a bathroom) and was expected to manual labor before, during, and after the event – just… no

  13. SaraV*

    I need some success stories. Our team has been given new responsibilities, more admin-like work, and illogical deadlines. Plus, they tried to bring in underqualified help, and it’s just made more mistakes and problems to fix. Not a single peep about raises. Plus, add-in when things really came to a head 6 weeks ago, we got a new (internal) supervisor. *sigh*

    1. Thin Minds didn't make me thin*

      Ask for a meeting with the new supervisor. Bring 1 or 2 of your colleagues with you. Bring a list of the duties and deadlines your team is responsible for, and a list of the training you think is needed. Ask him/her to work with you on a plan to get everyone trained and to prioritize which work is most important for your team to accomplish.

      At the same time, get some resumes out there. You don’t need to stay for this.

  14. OrdinaryJoe*

    Christmas/Holiday Gift Exchange Revolt! Our fearless leader *loved* Christmas (small group, everyone celebrated Christmas) and the culture in the office had been for everyone to get everyone (8 people) a small gift, exchange as a group, everyone watch everyone open, etc. Two years ago, 6 of us banded together privately to work out that … Person 1 would ask for the Christmas plans during the October meeting, #2 would suggest drawing names, #3 & #4 would chime in that they love that idea, #5 would suggest how to do it, #1, 2, 3 & 4 would all back that idea, and #6 would be like Great! Are we all good with that?

    Fearless Leader tried to protest but #1-6 kind of steamrolled the conversation. It was fantastic and a well coordinated attack!

    2. Butterfly Counter*

      My department did a similar thing when it came to the committee of doom that was held every year. We had one awful department member who would stretch it out for hours, mostly just to hear himself speak and explain how he was the best department worker who had ever existed. It didn’t change any outcomes of the meeting, just made them unbearable.

      So one year, we planned it out: #1 suggested limiting the number of faculty to the committee of doom in order to have to accommodate fewer schedules to meet, #2 agreed and suggested limiting the committee of doom to the minimum required by the union (x number), #3 agreed and called for a vote (which passed because omg that was a horrible meeting) and #4 seconded. While my awful coworker tried to filibuster the discussion of this change, we did make the change. Then x number of faculty self-nominated for the committee (not agreed to ahead of time, but those of us not a part of the plan figured it out quickly), plus my awful coworker. We all voted for those to be on the committee and the awful coworker didn’t receive enough votes, so he was out.

      The committee of doom went swimmingly for the first time in years. Awful coworker retired soon after, thank goodness.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        Beautiful! That self-nominating coworker reminds me of a funny aspect of my religious tradition.

        I was raised Quaker (a.k.a. “Friends”), and part of our faith tradition is leadership via a near-endless number of committees. We have a committee just to nominate people to serve on other committees. During that process, the traditional and accepted way to object to a nomination is to say, “That Friend would not have occurred to me.”

        1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

          My mother was raised Quaker in the Midwest. I never connected her ability to get along with people and be a leader on multiple teams (PTO president, School Board President, Service Club President) as part of her faith. I was raised with a strong moral sense, but without religion. Mom and Dad have passed now, but you’ve inspired me to look into this faith in her honor.
          Thank you!

          1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

            My father was a Friend; on a visit back home about a decade ago, I was working on a crocheted model of a uterus-based reproductive system. We went to a Sunday night singing group (Shape Note; creaky old hymns with wild lyrics and lovely tunes) and my mother was gently mortified about my having brought that project along. Naturally, all the little old Meeting ladies saw my project and started reminiscing about their lifelong history of involvement in reproductive rights campaigns.

            2. MsSolo (UK)*

              It reminds me of when equal marriage came into law in the UK. Initially, the plan was that you could only hold same sex ceremonies under the terms of a civil ceremony – no religious sites, no religious words, no religious music etc – at which point the Quakers stood up and said “sorry, you mean we’re going to have to stop doing same sex weddings because you’ve legalised them?” So they had to go back and suggest maybe religious organisations could opt in, if they really wanted to (apart from the CoE, which is bound by a 1533 act to only perform opposite sex weddings, apparently!).

              1. AF Vet*

                Now I want to go down a rabbit hole to determine WHY that law was created in 1533. Was it part of Henry’s initial “reforms”? Was it slid into the bylaws just in case John and John came to ask the priest for a blessing? How has it not overturned, when the American Episcopalian church was one of the first churches to promote a gay bishop? So many rabbit trails….

    4. Artemesia*

      I have turned around policies set to be implemented using that approach several times. We would organize to support the first person in the meeting who pushed back at all. (this person was usually not a co-conspirator). And then it was ‘I really think Shirley raises an excellent point that I hadn’t thought of before.’ (Shirley preens) and then another conspirator would pick up and advance the ball until the plan, policy or award that the person running the meeting thought was in the bag, was overwhelmed and our plan selected.

  15. Elle*

    We currently have management who is very sensitive to employees needs and receptive to areas for improvement. They are committed to making working life better for staff. That’s great but this has been leading to a lot of mandatory trainings for managers and staff on a variety of topics. It’s too much and staff pushed back because we’re having trouble getting actual work done. They’ll be less trainings in 2025.
    I should add that we are given the opportunity to push back. We have annual employee surveys with room to say what we’d do better. Management reports on the results and what they will do about it. Supervisors also have regular open meetings with the ED.

  16. Melissa*

    I was a nurse giving Covid vaccines during the first rollout. The clinic started scheduling so many patients (triple booking them into time slots) that there was no way we could keep up. It was a patient safety issue, as well as just a miserable work environment. We had all complained to various bosses, with no effect. So we got together (there were about six of us total) and emailed the clinic’s attorney, asking for a meeting. It took about four seconds for her to recognize the validity of our concerns, and she immediately wrote to the administrators and schedulers to stop the overbooking.

    1. Ally McBeal*

      Out of curiosity, what is the legal angle here? Or was it just that you’d exhausted all other options and figured you’d hail-mary it to the attorney?

      2. FuzzFrogs*

        Sounds like the patient safety was the relevant issue for the attorney–since it was a policy enforced by administrators that was making patients unsafe, the clinic was opening itself up to lawsuits.

        1. Melissa*

          That’s right— it was dangerous because we could easily have given the wrong dose to someone, or vaccinated someone who wasn’t appropriate for the shot, etc, due to being rushed and trying to work too quickly.

          Secondarily, I think she was concerned that they were violating employment laws. We were missing lunches etc because of the volume of patients.

    2. Butterfly Counter*

      Yes, this sounds awful and I’m glad your clinic figured out how to do the vaccines safely. But I’m also jazzed that the misinformation and politics in your area were such that so many were trying to get vaccinated during that important time.

      (My parents in a very red state could walk in to any clinic they liked during the beginning of the vaccine rollout and get seen immediately.)

      1. OrdinaryJoe*

        My area too … grocery store pharmacy workers (they had the vaccine and were giving shots) were literally walking around the grocery stores asking if people wanted it. It was so easy and quick – I felt for people who were waiting hours and days to get appointments in other areas.

        1. Gumby*

          Ugh. I was able to make an appointment fairly easily online. For 8:10 a.m. on the day I was eligible. So I show up at 8 a.m. The vaccinations are happening in a huge tent in the parking lot. The line is long. By the time I get to the front of the line it’s around 8:40 a.m. I’m a little put out at the poor planning. The people who were in front of me check in. They had an appointment for 3 p.m. They get assigned a spot and enter the tent. I get the staff not pushing back because you want to get as many people vaccinated as possible. Obviously. But it was so unfair to people who showed up for their actual time slot. (There were at least 3 other people around me in line who were hours off of their scheduled times and we were spaced out by 6-feet in line so if I was able to hear that just from people talking about their appointment in earshot of me, it was probably very wide-spread.)

          1. Alexander Graham Yell*

            I got the first slot I could get at the drive through vaccine clinic in my area. It was 8:15 on the first day they were holding it – I was in line for 3 hours because people just rushed in and there wasn’t actually a way for them to get OUT of line, even if they weren’t supposed to be there. So my 2nd dose I went in expecting another full morning waiting and was back home in under 40 minutes (Not bad since it was a 10 minute drive and I had to wait 15 minutes after getting vaccinated.)

  17. Mildrew*

    Almost a year ago I started at my current job, fully remote, great on paper. I got a few minor flags during the interviews with the CEO and project manager but I let it go. I had an orientation type thing with two other new-hires for different departments and for a marketing firm I was shocked at how over-complicated their processes were. I could tell the other new-hires were just as confused as I was. The project management software, which I’d been using for years, was an overcomplicated mess and I have no idea how anyone got their work done.

    Within a week I was blown away by how horribly the staff spoke each other, now accusatory and mean they all were, also overworked and flustered since the procedures were needlessly complicated. I got the inkling that the project manager fostered a lot of this and was one of those people who created a complicated system so they had an actual job to do, that job being making a mess and then fixing it themselves.

    The culture was awful. As a former onboarding trainer myself, I’d never speak to a new employee or trainee the way I was spoken to by management or my coworkers. For example, I had to mute myself as there was construction going on outside my window, my coworker yelled at me for muting myself and said I wasn’t paying attention. I unmuted myself and then they yelled at me for the noise and not taking work seriously. They had a policy that all work calls were recorded, so I recorded it and kept it, along with MANY others like it. It was one of the most toxic environments I’d ever started in.

    The other new-hires and I met in on a personal zoom call after hours and decided to talk to the CEO. We collected screen shots and video calls from our first ten days and asked to meet with the VP and CEO. They were appalled, especially with how department heads, the project manager, and especially HR spoke to us. That was a Friday on a holiday weekend. The next workday the CEO, VP, and two other silent partners had a staff call where they apologized for not being as present as they should be but also the attitude and tone of the company has to change. It also helps that me and another new hire who are SMEs that they desperately needed were both were willing to leave with nothing else lined up. Magically the project board got organized and intuitive, people started saying please and thank you, and we don’t record every thought and idea we have as a gotcha. We have a new HR person. We’ve had four new hires since and their onboarding is smooth, organized, and most importantly, welcoming.

    2. NotBatman*

      Man, every time there’s an AAM letter to the effect of “our new hires keep leaving after less than a year” I wonder how much of this is going on under the surface.

    3. MigraineMonth*

      Wow!

      If I may ask, what were the factors in your decision to meet with the VP and CEO, rather than just quitting and finding another job? What do you think made that course of action successful in this case, when I imagine it very often wouldn’t be?

  18. HailRobonia*

    I, unfortunately, have a “failure” story. In my previous office the 4 of us on the team were crammed into a shared cubicle that was better suited to only two. We thought that a dedicated WFH day for each of us each week would help solve the crowding problem (this was pre-COVID).

    We came up with a plan, made sure to indicate we would be in the office for important meetings, projects, etc. and would be sure to communicate our in office/WHF status clearly.

    Our manager immediately shot this down, saying that NOBODY in the office had a dedicated WFH day (a lie, one entire team worked remotely on Fridays, and another team worked from home so often I forgot some of them even existed). She then launched into a rambling and confusing story about her young son getting used to his new room after a move. So she was literally comparing us to toddlers.

    She then followed up with a statement that “not everyone is compatible with every work situation and sometimes it’s best to look for a situation that suits you” – basically “my way or the highway” – so she was evidently fine with losing her entire team over this.

    The least she could have done was a simple “I will consider this and/or check with the higher administration.”

    1. cat lover*

      i feel like every office with a mandatory in person policy or hybrid policy has at least one department or team who just completely doesn’t adhere to it with zero consequences

      1. JustaTech*

        My building has essentially two departments. One department comes in maybe one day a week (fine, whatever, I know they do good work).
        My department, on the other hand, gets periodically hassled for not coming in on the weekends. (Which sometimes we do!)

      2. basically functional*

        Yup. I am staff at a university and we have to get our telework agreements approved at the state level if we are requesting more than 2 days a week. My coworkers and I recently received permission from our manager to go from 2 telework days a week to 3. But we need to request this through the proper channels and get it approved. Our requests have been pending with the governor’s office for over 2 weeks without response. Our new schedules are supposed to start next week, but we’re being told we can’t make the change without the official approval. Meanwhile, staff in other departments across campus are able to telework 4-5 days a week because their managers don’t care about about having an official agreement on file. I get that my department’s leadership wants to cover their bases and do things right, but it creates an imbalance.

        1. basically functional*

          And to address the actual topic of the post, we will certainly be pushing back as a group if our agreements are not approved!

    2. ThursdaysGeek*

      You said “previous office” so I’m hoping it wasn’t just you that left, but all four of you. Because that would still have been a success.

  19. Anon So I Don't Get Fired*

    I’m a state employee at an agency where our Governor has been featured twice on this blog. (Maybe more but I only know of two instances.)

    I heard this Governor tried to mandate a statewide government employee dress code and failed so one of his appointees at our agency thought he could do it to prove himself. All employees got a copy of the dress policy this guy drafted for internal comment before it was supposed to be rolled out.

    Oh. My. Goodness! I don’t remember every detail, but I do remember the bulk of the policy applied to people who had breasts and butts and weren’t rail thin. No tight clothes. Nothing tight across the chest or butt. No loose clothing. Nothing that looked like lingerie. (What?) No visible bra straps. No cleavage. Leggings were allowed if the top completely covered the butt area. No tennis shoes in meetings with external people.

    The only thing mentioned about disabilities was that my agency would make a “reasonable accommodation” if the employee had medical documentation that required specific attire.

    It wasn’t all bad. The proposed policy banned ripped jeans, flip-flops, and earbuds/headphones for non-work related use when employees were away from their desk (for safety reasons).

    Our internal system doesn’t allow for anonymous feedback, which means the hundreds of responses were from employees who signed their names. The gist of the feedback I heard from some people was this draft policy was: sexist, ableist, racist, classist, elitist, and discriminatory against anyone who had the tiniest bit of body fat anywhere. At least five people asked if we were going to get pay increases to buy new clothes and shoes. My friend asked what she was supposed to do about her DDD chest because everything she wore showed curvature.

    Predictably, the dress code never came to fruition! I’d like to think that guy learned a lesson but probably not.

      1. Paris Geller*

        That’s immediately what I caught too! Like the worst case of Goldilocks–can’t wear anything tight that reveals you have a figure, but also can’t wear anything loose that hides your figure.

      2. GenX, PhD, Enters the Chat*

        I suppose a head-to-toe burqa would have also been unacceptable.

        You can’t win with these weirdos who want women’s bodies to be both decorative and invisible at the same time.

        2. MigraineMonth*

          “Your neckline must show exactly four square inches of upper boob. Any more, and you’re a [gendered slur]. Any less, and you’re a [different gendered slur].”

        3. Hamster Manager*

          Yeah I always enjoy “we must NOT know you are wearing a bra by seeing a strap, but we also fully require the wearing of a bra!”

          So you wanna know I’m wearing one, but you also don’t want to know I’m wearing one? K.

    2. long suffering govie*

      I like how it’s “no tight clothes” but also “no loose clothes”! I guess go for no clothes! LOL

      1. Lenora Rose*

        But no clothes reveals cleavage (including bottom cleavage so both genders), so that doesn’t work either.

        I think the person making it intended as their solution: “be a robot”.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        If I had to guess, based on the red-state implications in this story, “loose clothing” might be a racist dogwhistle for baggy pants.

          1. Anon So I Don't Get Fired*

            Ding, ding, ding!

            You are correct. I miss the days when Ken Cuccinelli tried to cover up the boob, got mad, and then blamed the media for his failure.

            BTW, if anyone has one if those covered boob pins, they’re worth a lot of money!

            1. Intern dumpster fire*

              I had Cuchinellis daughter as a one day intern. she was interested in my field as “something to hold her over until she got married and had kids.” I’m not even sure she was 21 at the time.

              how rude is that? oh I know you’ve been working hard for 10 years at your job and taking a day out of your time to entertain me, but I see your job as something to play at.

              I’m pretty sure her thank you note referenced Jesus.

      2. Anon So I Don't Get Fired*

        I’ve never met this guy’s (who wrote the dress code) wife, but one of my coworkers has known her for many years. When that coworker read the policy, she immediately asked, “Do you think this guy intentionally based this bullshit dress code on his wife’s body type or is he just that prejudiced? She doesn’t even work here, yet she’d easily be able to adhere to this policy.”

        Yes. The answer is yes.

        1. Paint N Drip*

          well he’s certainly NOT talking to or otherwise entertaining the existence other women, so that makes sense!

  20. Definitely not me*

    I’ve always operated under the “don’t bring complaints, bring solutions” idea of workplace relations, and that has worked very well at my current position. We run a small state agency that provides an important service to other public employees (retirement benefits). Our proprietary software system, which is great in most ways, lacked some features such as automated communication to new enrollees with instructions for completing certain important tasks. Suggestions that we automate the process were met with skepticism or the familiar “sounds nice, but we don’t have the time or resources…” look from decision-makers. I exchanged glances with the manager whose department was most directly affected and we silently agreed to write up a plan ourselves. We brainstormed the process, created a flowchart, and all the rest. We kept bringing up the idea in meetings, and ultimately senior leadership agreed we’d be silly not to proceed, since we’d already done all the necessary business analysis and had drafted system requirements. It’s been in place for a couple of years now and all cite it as a successful example of automating a formerly manual business process.

  21. Former Call Centre Rep*

    So not me but Spouse. Spouse was in a call centre for a telecom. They were level 1 sups-so they got the angry people calling over their phone bills (9/10 out of the customer’s own ignorance/fault but I digress). They were not a sales team, they were let’s talk the cx down, solve the problem through policy and procedure and make sure customers realize, if you give a twelve year old a phone, they will go over their data and this budget line does not have data blocks, that’s the parent company. Or that we can’t stop phones from calling long distance without adding a block that you have to specifically ask us for because…it’s a phone.

    That sort of thing. No one is happy talking to them. No one wants to add extra lines/deals etc to their phone when they’re calling about their bill.

    New CEO came. New CEO is very sales pushy. Now if they don’t offer and document an offer on each call it’s a coach back.

    The level 1 supervisors all point out that they aren’t a sales job, and that the policy doesn’t make sense. They show a business case. The twenty of them go for 1 month, 10 of them doing the job per usual, the other 10 doing the job per the CEO. They switch half way through which group does what. The results of offers are the same-no new lines, no upgrades. Customers still mad they have to pay a phone bill.

    CEO puts the team all on PIP and ignores the results that the supervisor position shouldn’t be doing sales. The twenty person team has lost twelve people, including spouse.

      1. Former Call Centre Rep*

        No it didn’t. But the question was when did you see pushback as a group, and what was the outcome.

        Success is not always guaranteed, and even something as organized as what they did, tracking stats, and evidence based they had, sometimes it just won’t work.

    2. Shiny Penny*

      Thank, FccRep! I appreciate you sharing this story. It was a great example of coordination and cooperation among workers, as well as illustrating excellent use of relevant data— and in a better world it should have worked! Very instructive re exactly how it failed.
      The win I see is the clarity it must have given to the employees, about exactly who they were dealing with. Glad so many were able to leave.

  22. NotBatman*

    I work for a college. Our health insurance costs recently went up by 50%, while also offering less coverage. The president tried to announce this as “austerity measures, but it’s not that bad, and we all have to chip in” and then brush past it.

    The math professor raised his hand to give the exact dollar figure that the increase would represent for anyone with a kid. Then the accounting professor raised her hand to point out that we met our budget this year. Then the sociology professor raised his hand to mention that health insurance costs had recently decreased in our area. Then the anthropology professor raised his hand to ask how this fit with the school’s stated mission to support working parents. Then the media studies professor emailed the entire room a link to price comparison across different health insurance providers. Then, then, then.

    The 20-minute meeting let out 90 minutes later. It’s been 6 weeks, and the president just emailed all faculty to announce we were changing health insurance providers and to expect a 75% deduction in monthly costs. Sometimes I love PhDilibusters.

      1. NotBatman*

        Can’t claim credit! It’s an academia-ism that refers to professors being annoying know-it-alls who hold up meetings, because a lot of PhDs assume they already know everything.

    3. No Tribble At All*

      I bet they coordinated. That’s an incredible level of response, and I can’t believe it WORKED.

        1. NotBatman*

          As far as I know, it was not. But it was a room full of fast-thinking pissed-off people with laptops, so the means motive and opportunity were there.

    5. Sociology Rocks!*

      Oh this is beautiful, absolutely spectacular. As each department brings up caveats that relate to their area of expertise it just gets better and better for them and so much worse for the president.

      I wish we could do this at my university and keep the insurance they’re had for years and everyone likes, but we’re public so we’re subject to the changes the state republican legislature decide are best, with no say in it ourselves. The old health plan is suing about the situation, and I never thought I’d root for a health insurance provider lol

    6. Sociology Rocks!*

      This is so beautiful, absolutely fantastic, everyone chimes in on caveats related to their areas of expertise

  23. Gator*

    When I was a new attorney at a large law firm in the late 00s, we had a committee of associates that tried to persuade the partners on a number of issues. The partners’ view was that we should all be thankful we still had jobs (given the recession, who can say who was wrong?). Anyway, the committee kept making asks and kept getting nos. Finally, I decided to target an area where we could get a win – Coke Zero. The soda machine had Coke, Diet Coke, but no Coke Zero. So I drafted my proposal and took it to the partners. They looked so relieved to finally get to say yes to something, Coke Zero was in the machine the next week.

    Sometimes all you can do is book small wins, but you should still book them!

  24. Red-Headed Stepchild*

    My manager called me on my day off to let me know my team was transitioning from hourly to salary. I did the math and realized that with the amount of overtime I worked I would be losing about 7K in income a year. When I came back to the office, I talked to my manager about it and told her I wasn’t happy. She said the OT had been taken into account by HR when creating our offers and there wasn’t much to be done. I said “Well, I’m still not happy, so what is our next step?” And then I was quiet. She agreed to get me a meeting with the higher ups. From there, I went to my team and asked them if they had the same experience. They had almost all decided to accept the change but when I pointed out my large income discrepancy (and I was the most junior team member working the least OT) they ran their own numbers and then everyone was mad lol. I asked for their permission to speak for them at my upcoming meeting and they agreed.

    Meeting day came and I was given a lot of PC BS about how they ran the numbers and they accounted for OT and I just needed to sign the paperwork and get past my feelings. I stopped them mid-sentence and said “I hate to interrupt but I just wanted to check and see if we should reschedule this for a time when the whole team can be present, because nobody is happy”. They paused and said no one but me was complaining. I told them I had discussed it with the team and everyone was unhappy and asked again if they wanted to reschedule the meeting, and then I was quiet. At this point my manager stepped in and said she never found me to be unreasonable and that my attention to detail was great so if I ran numbers and found an error then something was off. Upper management ended up going back to HR and discovered that everyone’s OT had been calculated at .5 instead of 1.5 and the HR person who did it just didn’t realize because of how our payroll system listed everything out (suuuure).

    My entire team ended up with salaries that were $7-15K higher than originally proposed for the transition. It was a great experience in team bonding and taught me a lot about being calm but vocal and the power of remaining silent at key times. If it hadn’t been for this blog and Alison’s advice, I don’t know that I would have had the guts to do it.

    1. Hlao-roo*

      And then I was quiet.

      So simple, and surprisingly difficult! Good job harnessing the power of silence at key times!

    3. Anon for This*

      I had the opposite happen: We were told we were going from salaried to hourly at the start of the next month (slightly over a week away). This was blamed on the FLSA, even though our jobs clearly were eligible for exempt status, and it came with a pay cut and change in classification that affected our benefits. Both members of my tiny department that was responsible for near daily federal requirements told them we’d have to crunch numbers and see if we could even afford to keep working there.

      I spent the next week sending questions via email to upper management and cc’ing my coworker (I had been there longer and wasn’t responsible for a mortgage and I’ll family member like she was, so I took both her suggestions and any hear that might come our way). While they did not reclassify us, they cancelled the pay cut (interestingly, they did for another department who I thought could have had their pay validly cut based on how a similar department in a different division was already set up).

      And that, my friends, is how I became the highest paid bargaining unit employee in the company (usually, higher paid hourly staff was given a different, non-BU, status). Once we were in the union, my teammate and I started refusing to do the job duties that we had done before but we’re clearly not appropriate for BU staff based on our contract. (And we happily paid our dues – which is optional in my state. Because we are pro Labor.)

      I left a year later for a contract job with higher pay and better benefits, which led to my even better government position.

      And I have run into many people who have left since then. We are all much happier.

    4. Strive to Excel*

      I’ll say this: the way payroll systems math out overtime CAN actually result in this error. This is because the way that Worker’s Comp and other benefits are calculated is often based on hours worked and do not include the overtime bonus, so payroll systems spit out the bonus at the .5 rate and “hours worked” includes the extra 1.0 hours.

      But this also would involve HR only looking at the per hour rate and ignoring actual hours worked, and also the actual wages + overtime paid out for the year, so it was still stupid.

    8. Skytext*

      Seems to me they would have had access to your prior year W2s. If you grossed $55,000 with overtime last year, and they are offering you a salary of $48,000, they KNOW they are cutting your pay, no complicated calculations required!

  25. CowWhisperer*

    It was the late 1990’s and I was a teenager working at a regional grocery store as a bagger. The turnover for that worker group was 400% annually (I did the math) but there was a core group of 10 of us who were solid worker.

    A pair of Eastern European immigrants teen sisters worked in the department. They kept to themselves mostly – but they worked hard and would pitch in to help others out.

    About 18 months in, the sisters requested that they not work on the lot during Ramadan because it was spring and pushing in carts without being able to drink water was rough. The teenage baggers thought this was fine; the weather wasn’t hot enough that we needed frequent rotations on the lot for safety and nearly everyone preferred lot work (with minimal customer interaction) to bagging where you are directly in the line of angry customers. Essentially, they were opting out of the fun job!

    Well, the department boss was clear this was unfair “because everyone has to do the same job”. We all heard the unsaid bit that she didn’t like Muslims.

    So…. we started talking to each other and 90% of the experienced baggers threatened to quit if the store didn’t stop discriminating against them.

    The sisters were allowed to bag instead of being on the lot.

    Ironically, we were a union shop – but none of us thought to involve a rep. I told the story years later to a person who repped during that time period and she was clear the union would have stepped in in they knew

    2. Jay (no, the other one)*

      Sounds like my ex-boss who refused to let me work on extra holidays to earn comp time that I could then use for the Jewish holidays. Everyone else was happy to have me work the extra and he insisted that wasn’t fair because “everyone has to do the same job.” I pointed out that only person it was theoretically unfair to was me, and I was the one who wanted to do it. He called that “Jewish special pleading” at which point I gave up (and don’t ask me why I didn’t quit. I should have, for that and a bunch of other reasons). I just waited until a week before each holiday, approached the person scheduled and switched with them.

      1. CommanderBanana*

        ^^ I find this so bananas – I take two days off per year for the High Holy days (sometimes less if one is falling on a weekend).

        In exchange, I’m always in the office Christmas week and Thanksgiving week because I don’t celebrate them, while my coworkers take several days off around both holidays and many take the week after Christmas off. They don’t have to worry about coverage because I’m here.

        My last workplace were dicks about taking time off for Jewish holidays because the CEO was a rancid anti-Semite.

    3. Liina*

      Eastern Europeans snd Ramadan? This does not make sense. I’m from Eastern Europe. Estonia. The % of muslims here is below 1%.

      Either the geographic description is wrong or … you happened on the 1%. I’m thinking grography ;)

      1. MsSolo (UK)*

        I think this might be a slightly different definition of “Eastern Europe” (i.e. anything east of Germany) – several of the Balkan states are majority muslim, though the region is usually referred to as Southeast Europe, these days.

  26. Pokemon Go To The Polls*

    At a former workplace, we all began working from home due to COVID. After a few months, when things were opening back up again, the owner wanted people back in the office (not him, of course, he was building a house in another country and also had pickleball commitments). We all said no.
    It would come up every couple of months for a while, and we’d still all say no, until eventually they got rid of their rented office space and there no longer was an office. Since we were still generally a local team (except for a few totally-remote employees the owner chose to hire), we could easily get together for team lunches as desired, which was nice.
    Then the owner tried to get us all to use a rather invasive website where, essentially, there was a digital office space that you had an avatar in and could wander around. This would be fine on its own, but your mike was always on so anybody who walked by your avatar would hear what you were doing, and you would hear them which could be quite jarring as a single woman living alone always alert to strange noises. Also, I don’t need to be constantly listened to in my own home by anybody except my cat. Aside from all that, it was way more distracting and time-sucking than just using IM to chat with people. Again, everybody but one team refused, so we didn’t have to use it.
    Perks of a small company, I guess, because the owner knew that he couldn’t afford to lose any of us and at the salary he paid he was unlikely to be able to easily find replacements.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Look, elderly family members, affordable housing and reliable childcare are negotiable, but you can’t just move away from your pickleball commitments!

  27. Worker solidarity!*

    I worked at a very small company under a very bad and inexperienced manager. Our office hours were 9-6. And not 9ish-6-ish—it was an ISSUE if you showed up a few minutes past 9 or tried to leave a couple minutes early to catch a bus. Me and the two other employees lobbied our bosses to make it 9-5 instead. They shortened our lunch to 30 minutes, but they agreed! Job was still a horrible shitshow, but at least I got to see the sun on my way home more often (did I mention it was a windowless office?).

    I remain a big believer in the idea that more hours =/= more or better work output.

    1. Lenora Rose*

      Since repeated studies indicate you’re right, at least for the difference between 9 hours and 8*, you should remain a big believer.

      *obviously this doesn’t apply below a minimum threshold, but that minimum is lower than the average workday, and repeated studies show that 10 hour workdays are no more productive than 8 hour ones.

      1. Worker Solidarity!*

        I strongly believe we should move to a 4-day, 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay. We can do it. There was a time when “the weekend” wasn’t a thing, either. We can aim high.

        1. JustaTech*

          The city (county?) workers on one of the islands near-ish Seattle did this, and it’s been very successful!
          It’s a big benefit to them because if you live on that island and you need to go to the doctor or dentist or anything, it’s a whole day because you have to take a ferry.
          The reason the local government accepted it was because they employees agreed to not get a pay increase.
          So far there’s like, one guy who’s mad and everyone else is like, cool.

  28. HugeTractsofLand*

    I worked at a school that- despite the pandemic years pointing to the contrary- didn’t believe that admin assistants could work remotely. So whenever the school closed due to snow storms, admin assts were expected to use PTO to cover the day off; otherwise, we had to come in like it was a normal work day, even though school had been explicitly cancelled *because* the weather was too dangerous for travel! It really made clear how the safety of kids, teachers, and admin was valued over the safety of admin assts. It also was infuriating that somebody had to be there in person to answer the one (1) random phone call that came in on snow days. There were days when I was the only one in the building and only the emergency lights were on, which made for a boring, spooky, and depressing day.

    Finally I asked around and found out that one department director was letting his admin asst work remotely on snow days, and had been doing so for years. So I went to the principal (after talking things over with the other assts) and asked if we could all work remotely since 1) call forwarding exists, 2) we could send him a task list if he wanted accountability, and 3) remote work had been working out SO well for X department. Lo and behold, we were finally allowed to work remotely!

    1. Ellis Bell*

      This is bananas. Wouldn’t the authorities responsible for safe working conditions be interested to hear that apparently different safety conditions applied to different types of staff?! The thing that’s really got me scratching my head regarding their liability is that by requiring people to work alone in the building (in dangerous weather!) they’re ratcheting up the safety risks on numerous levels..!

      1. HugeTractsofLand*

        Yeah, we didn’t have a union for admin assistants in that district, unfortunately. I think the optics are pretty obviously bad, though, which is one reason I think my request was approved!

  29. Selina Luna*

    At the beginning of the 2020/2021 school year, when some states were sending all students back to school regardless of health and safety, and others were keeping all kids home irrespective of mental health and academic achievement, my school district made a terrible decision that has continued to impact all students since then negatively: students were not allowed to get less than a 50% on an assignment. Education is in its infancy as far as a studied science goes. We’ve been educating students for millennia, but until extremely recently, the students we’ve been educating have been almost exclusively wealthy boys. Few girls received formal educations, and no one who lacked wealth or nobility received formal education. However, since we’ve been studying education, one discovery is that if students turn in an assignment, they’ve done it to the best of their ability. The teacher gives them a minimum of a 50%, the student is likely to perform better overall. However, if students are given grades for assignments that have not been turned in, the student is expected to perform worse overall.
    When my school district disallowed grades lower than 50% on any assignment, even missing assignments, it gave a false impression that student performance was higher than it was. My school had about 60% of the teachers approach the administration with a compromise: 50% on assignments that have been turned in, but a 0% “missing” on assignments the students have not turned in, and options to turn in the assignment either on paper or online. The compromise worked, and my school could give missing scores for assignments. Hooray. It also trickled to other schools. The elementary schools never adopted this, but most middle and high schools eventually did.

    1. Not a Vorpatril*

      Oh, yes. And we’re still fighting it. High School here, and while we finally convinced admin that we hated the program, they instead implemented a new grading scale which has managed to make things worse, at least from a perspective of trying to hold back kids who haven’t actually grasped the material yet (I teach math, so my fellow math teachers and I are notably concerned as seeing kids who can barely do Algebra trying to do Geometry is not enjoyable for anyone)

      But admin is focused on trying to make sure students pass (we apparently have an excellent graduation rate!) instead of focusing on how well students are actually learning, so I am not expecting much as the years roll on.

      1. Selina Luna*

        I wonder if your school could implement standards-based grading. Everything gets a rubric, and you can give zeroes for missing assignments OR missing components because you can’t grade against a rubric that which is not there. I’m pushing this in my school, but some holdouts want grades to be punitive, not descriptive.

        1. Not a Vorpatril*

          I mean, maybe in theory, and that would likely be better for classes that use rubrics, but math is a lot easier to see where things fall apart. And the current system is bad because it both helps students who are doing very little (do well on one performance grade and ok on most/some homeworks? Pass even if you do nothing else) while also harming stronger kids (do badly on one performance grade? There goes your A)

          There are work arounds, particularly for pushing the stronger grades up, but it’s aggravating to have to do, and upsets those high achievers if we don’t get it done fast enough. And it has lead to better work completion, as missing assignments are a zero, but it is also extremely opaque for everyone involved and feels designed to just push students through classes regardless of ability.

          Personally, I had no problems with the old system, as that was fairly easy to understand and still allows for a lot of flexibility. This new system is just trying to solve the self-inflicted problem of mandatory 50% minimums, which could have just been removed instead of giving us something new and shiny.

  30. Pink Flamingo*

    This is definitely not what you had in mind, but my co-workers and I once banded together to get better pizza. My company had free catered lunch once a week, and whenever they ordered pizza, they ordered it from the same pizza place, which we all hated. The pizza was dry, flavorless, and usually delivered lukewarm. We begged the admin in charge of placing the food orders to get us something better – hell, pizza from the Costco down the street would have been an improvement – but for some reason, this was a sticking point with the admin staff, and they refused. Our company sends out annual employee satisfaction surveys, and one year, we all decided to band together for the greater good. We told everyone in earshot to mention wanting better pizza on their employee survey, and sure enough, it worked! After years of complaining about the pizza, that finally got them to switch to a better restaurant. I’m not sure if our strategy would have worked for a higher-stakes issue, but we all felt very empowered, heh.

    2. Ellis Bell*

      I would watch this movie; I only ask that the pizza place you’re all advocating for is Mystic Pizza with the original cast, and that the office workers stop by regularly to refresh their pizza palette and to tell them how the awful office pizza is driving them insane.

      1. Hannah Lee*

        There could be a sequel, where another branch of the same company lobbies for pizza from Demoulas/Market Basket in the spring of 2014. (It’s a New England grocery store chain that has in-store kitchens with pizza ovens in their larger stores that make pretty good pizza)

        The lobbying employees get caught up in the drama as cousins Arthur T Demoulas and Arthur S Demoulas struggle for control of the company. Arthur S wrested control of the board/company and Arthur T was out.

        The thing is, Arthur T was big on treating employees respectfully, paying them well and investing in the company vs maximizing short term profits, and raiding cash from the company like the Arthur S faction seemed to want. So, when Arthur T was kicked out, some senior, middle managers walked out. Meanwhile Arthur S fired others he thought were loyal to Arthur T.

        This led to a massive employee walkouts at every store, protests and picketing that went on for weeks and then stretched for months. Customers joined in the protests – boycotting the chain, going to other supermarkets, then stopping by their local Market Basket to tape their receipts up on the window in a show of support (“look at all the sales you’re missing”) The walkout/protests/boycott went on almost the entire summer. Stores were empty of customers, and with empty shelves and few employees.

        It became a highly visible public campaign against what people saw as corporate greed threatening to destroy a successful business that provided good jobs and reasonable prices to people. The Arthur S faction considered selling the company, or filing for bankruptcy and shuttering now-empty stores. Multiple governors (Massachusetts and New Hampshire) got involved to try to help resolve the issue.

        Eventually employee-favorite Arthur T pulled together financing and offered to buy out his cousin. After much wrangling, a deal was struck, Arthur S was out, Arthur T was back and employees and customers all celebrated. Arthur T welcomed back workers who had been fired, and thanked customers with a 4% discount on all sales for the next 12 months.

        10 years later, the chain is still thriving. Pizza and low grocery store price fans everywhere can rejoice!

        https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/08/27/business/market-basket-protests-business-grocer-arthur-demoulas-sales/

  31. YouDon’tOwnMe*

    I was working in a one year fixed-term post which had a specific contract of 40 hours a week, Monday-Friday 9-5pm. This was a rolling group of around 10-12 posts year on year, which people in our industry usually took as a form of sabbatical as part of their career development.

    Despite the contract, the job duties very clearly stated that there was a mandatory out of hours on-call rota which equated to around an extra 20 hours a month. When I specifically raised this, I was told we should arrange with our managers to take this back in lieu during the normal working week. Fair, right?

    The trouble was, this job was a combination of personal research and fixed work commitments – so the only time we could take back had to be carved out of our precious and often-threatened research time. As a result, for years, people in the job had just sucked up the extra hours rather than lose their development opportunities.

    About two-thirds of us banded together to push back. After several months of blaming us for not “organising our time better” (), claiming we would bankrupt the programme and ruin it for everyone, and nebulous threats against our future career prospects (yay academia), they eventually paid out the outstanding balance.

    Fun fact – I later found out through the grapevine that our grandboss received funding from the main organisation for their research projects in exchange for our (essentially free) on-call labour – something they neglected to mention during our talks.

    2. Wolf*

      Academia is… special about labour laws. When I left, it felt odd that my first industry job actually followed laws, such as paying for the entire time we worked, and providing safety equipment.

  32. Ophelia*

    I work for a largeish company that is generally a good place to work, but it wasn’t as great as some of our competitors on family leave policies. A few of us got together to talk to leadership about it, and the result was that we were asked to review comparable organizations in our industry, compare those to our company, and make costed recommendations for an update to our policies. The upshot is that we now have some improvements in paid family leave (we’re still American, but they are better), have more clarity around policies for eldercare, and added miscarriage as an approved reason to take bereavement leave. All in all it was a moderate amount of work, but we were listened to, and I think the updates were a benefit to a wide range of employees.

  33. Elle Woods*

    About a 15 years ago a friend of mine joined a medical group that was going through a growth spurt. Because it was a medical practice, having people on-call each weekend and on holidays was a necessity. The trouble was that those were chosen by seniority and when sign-up time for each year arrived, senior doctors and staff would leave nothing but holidays and summer weekends for the newer doctors and staff. The first year my friend practiced medicine there, she was the doctor on-call for the New Year’s, Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas holidays plus seven summer weekends.

    The sign-up procedure came under more and more scrutiny as additional employees were hired. The tipping point came when the practice hired a couple of doctors away from another group who were taken aback at how on-call sign-ups were handled. These new doctors started talking to other doctors and staff at the group to assess how people felt about it. A group of employees came together and formulated a new on-call plan: a maximum of two weekends per summer; no more than three weekends in any quarter of the year; and one major holiday per year, with that each holiday on a rotating schedule so that you would be on-call for that particular holiday no more than once every 6-7 years. For the weekend sign-ups, the staff was split into four groups and group A would choose weekends first for the first quarter of the year, B for the second, C for the third, and D for the fourth. In following years, the order would change to BCDA, CDAB, DABC. (I don’t recall my friend sharing how people were placed into groups.) This policy also applied to the staff working with physicians.

    The employee group took their proposal to the more senior staff, who put up a bit of a fuss for a while. Eventually the senior staff realized a change needed to be made and agreed to the new sign-up schedule. From what my friend says, everyone is much happier about things now and really like being able to know ahead of time what holiday they’ll have for any given year and being able to choose weekends. The medical group has even used the new on-call sign up system as a “perk” when recruiting new employees.

  34. hypoglycemic rage*

    I have one from a past job. I left because of management, and lowkey went off in my (online) exit interview. One of the reasons I went off was because only certain people were allowed to work from home in my specific office, and it was all about whether the (very problematic) regional manager liked you. We had no reason to be in the office every day – management said it was for the mail, but other offices in our building managed just fine with a box outside their doors, and we didn’t get a lot of incoming mail for us.

    Anyway, I guess my interview made its way back to management (coworkers said they heard problematic regional manager talking to his managers about me and other stuff I said in the exit), because I heard a month or so after I left, the people in my office made up a rotating hybrid schedule that was somehow approved. But I like to think I played a part in this, however small.

  35. But Of Course*

    Two examples.

    1) My current employer hired an absolutely unqualified, terrible person (staff at my level actually think she was working two jobs, based on the records she left behind, which were … minimal) who was rude, abusive, narcissistic, and just overall awful; the hiring committee had recommended not hiring her but my boss overruled that decision. Things piled up badly enough that when the two staff who were on her side were out of the office, the rest of us wrote a letter to the boss demanding that she be fired, giving reasons for that, and requesting a date of reply. She was fired, in part because of our letter and in part because her complete incompetence was becoming visible from outer space, but our letter pushed the decision faster than it would have happened, according to a member of the personnel committee.

    2) Same boss, who tends to go through cycles of rudeness; we ended up drafting and sending another letter requesting that she treat us with respect or we would file a grievance (we are unionized). It actually worked, and it seems to be sticking. She wasn’t on the order of the kind of screaming outbreaks that we see here, but it’s not very pleasant to be treated disrespectfully by your boss because she can’t manage her own feelings, so I still feel pleased we did it and it worked as well as it has.

  36. Def Anon for This*

    The school where I work at my university is the highest ranked in the world for its specialty, but our adjunct professors are the lowest paid in the state. Our administration thinks it’s an honor to work here, and therefore they don’t have to provide reasonable pay and benefits.

    So the adjuncts have unionized. Negotiations are in progress right now, but the administration is slow-walking everything. The big discussion: Can/should the adjuncts strike — and would a strike be more effective at the beginning or end of a semester?

    No end to this story yet, unfortunately. People are hopeful that things will change. We’ll see.

    1. Beans*

      I always find it fascinating that universities don’t wonder if they can’t attract/retain talent due to low wages, how long will they remain at top ranking? And if their ranking drops, how will that improve recruiting? Good luck in your fight!

  37. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    At my first programming job, we were hourly and habitually understaffed. My long-term average was over 50 hours/week and the peaks were a little over 100 hours/week. One morning, just before lunch, my supervisor called the team together and explained a proposal the VP in charge of the plant had made: in return for a 10% raise, Programming would be reclassified as as salaried/exempt. (I don’t think the 10% was charity; I think the lowest-paid of us needed the extra 10% to meet the requirements to be salaried/exempt. On paper, “full staffing” would be reduced by 2 programmers (~16%), but since those last 3 positions were never filled…). The impromptu straw poll was evenly split between “cut back to 40 hours, no exceptions” and “abandon job without notice.”

    When I left over 3 years later, we still had never heard the words “salaried” or “exempt” in that context again after that.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I’m surprised the programmers were ever paid hourly. Everywhere I’ve worked before this job, you were given the privilege of spending all your waking hours doing programming, which is obviously the only thing any programmer ever cares about. Because we do it for love, right?

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          It was an hour commute from the closest suburbs of the closest major city. The job had to have some redeeming quality to get anyone to show up for it–this was around 2005, and while they had remote capability, Management was also extremely butt-in-seats oriented.

  38. TinyLibrarian*

    It was March 13, 2020. The University library where I worked was in an uproar because no one could tell us what was going on re: pandemic work plans. Students had been sent home in an emergency action, some departments were sending their faculty and staff home, some admin offices refused. The library director told me he could not make a decision about our work from home status until it came from an administrator. I gathered up all the library employees (around ten of us) and said, “Get your computers, we’re leaving.” I told the director that we were going to start working from home until further notice, and we left. A few days later the University decreed that everyone could work from home if deans/directors allowed it, so it was all good. Honestly, I hold no animosity towards my director. This was a decision he wanted to make, but had not been given any guidance whatsoever, and we are a public university in a deep red state. I wish he had just given us the order to go home anyway, though. It shouldn’t have been on us to take that initiative.

  39. essie*

    So, this took awhile (too long, honestly), but it did end up getting a terrible manager out of the organization.
    Long story short, my department got a new manager, and she was awful. She made 5 people cry within her first 4 months. She joked about having to regularly apologize to other managers around the building. She was accusatory, she openly mistrusted her staff, and she was badly mismanaging some of our most successful projects.
    Two assistants left because they didn’t get paid enough to deal with her. We encouraged them to be honest in their exit interviews, but both were early-career and really didn’t want to burn any bridges. A few of the veteran staffers went to HR individually, but they didn’t seem to get very far. Mostly, HR insisted that any displeasure with the new manager was just because the old manager was so well-liked and respected.
    Finally, our staff started banding together. We talked out exactly what we wanted to say to upper management, we went to HR in groups of 2 where it made sense, and we all followed through on requesting meetings with HR right after any incidents with the manager. One person left during this time, and she was very honest and direct in her exit interview.
    Eventually, management started observing our manager more closely, and surprise surprise, they didn’t like what they saw. She was given the option to leave voluntarily, or be fired. She left without saying a single word to any of the staff she’d managed for well over a year.
    I think this worked because the department was very organized, high-functioning, professional, and friendly *before* the issue. We all really, genuinely enjoyed working together, we trusted each other, and we were willing to organize to heal our department. For upper management’s part, while I think they fumbled & missed the early warning signs, they handled the aftermath particularly well. They individually met with each staff member afterward, apologized for allowing the situation to go on for too long, and laid out how they were going to ensure a good pick with the next hire. The culture rebounded better than I would have expected.

    2. Anon for This*

      We (team of four plus one person who we worked closely with but reported elsewhere) got a terrible manager removed. She was known to be a terrible, dishonest, credit grabbing careerist who would throw anyone under the bus. But my company didn’t usually do anything about bad managers except shake their heads. Luckily, she also was a gold bricker who was often gone. (She worked out of two separate offices in different buildings, and we figured out that she consistently told people she’d be in the other location, and just… not show up at all.)

      However, we had just won a big government contract. Our team was responsible for one of the first deliverables, a new website incorporating new information and information from the previous contractors’ sites, and we were we on track to meet the deadline. Then Bad Manager decided to start meeting with other departments about the new site and make promises and change things. (None of us were invited to these meetings.)

      We met with the director and explained why our project was in danger of not meeting deadlines. She thanked us and said she’d look into it. I had a couple days off after that and came back to an interim manager. (She was not allowed to contact any of us without a member of the management team being there, so I think someone was finally paying attention to how awful she was to her staff. Also, her bad behavior was starting to be directed to her peers and superiors.)

      It took a few years for Bad Manager to finally be fired. She was moved around the company as a project manager (despite being incredibly disorganized as well as lazy), until she ended up in the actual Project Management department. I’m not sure if that director (who did actually know what he was doing) could get rid of her fast enough.

  40. iNot*

    Once COVID hit, my supervisor decided our team needed daily staff meetings at 8 a.m., each lasting an hour. Three meetings were focused on “work,” while two were dedicated to “fun.” I couldn’t stand it, especially the “fun” meetings. I didn’t need to log into a virtual meeting to chat about my weekend for an hour, especially when we were already doing icebreakers in the “work” meetings. Several of my co-workers felt the same, so we banded together, becoming the “renegades,” and stopped engaging in the fun meetings.

    Our supervisor eventually noticed and, on one pivotal day, tried to include us in a discussion about American Girl Dolls. The renegades consisted of men and women of color. The men expressed that while dolls might be enjoyable for others, it wasn’t something they were interested in. As for the women, the only American Girl Doll that represented us while growing up was a former slave. So the dolls had no appeal to us. That effectively shut down the conversation.

    Later that day, our supervisor called each of us into separate meetings to ask why we weren’t engaging (we saw this coming and had a unified response ready). We explained that while we understood some people needed social interaction at work, we preferred to focus on our tasks unless the conversation was something we found engaging. We also expressed that meeting every day felt counterproductive and was adding stress during an already anxious time. We suggested that we would be more productive if we didn’t meet daily, especially since we had previously only met once a week.

    By the time the third person shared that same message, our supervisor realized a munity was likely. They reduced the meetings to twice a week: one mandatory team meeting and one optional fun meeting. As a show of good faith the Renegades popped into the optional meetings about once a month and felt much happier with the new structure. It is interesting to note that often no one else was in the optional meeting (supervisor included).

    1. i am a human*

      We had daily meetings at 8:15 at a place I joined a few months into COVID. They started because at the beginning, there were only two employees – the director and an admin assistant, and the admin lived alone so the social interaction was good for them. They hired someone else the same time they hired me, and I hired someone immediately after that, so now it’s five of us meeting daily to talk about pretty much nothing. We came back to the office after a month or two and I polled everyone else about the 8:15 meetings. Everyone agreed that they were pointless and actually discouraged working together the rest of the day because you figured you could wait until the morning meeting. I took the poll to the director and we went down to two meetings a week, one a check-in meeting and the other a strategy meeting. Eventually I got the check-in meeting down to a Teams message and the strategy meeting was just leadership. This was probably my biggest accomplishment at this job and I left after less than two years.

  41. Beth**

    We deal with a lot of confidential information at work. One time a Very Senior Person left a highly confidential document on a train. Suddenly, an edict came from above that no one was allowed to take any confidential information out of the building for any reason.

    This was pre-Covid and we still did a lot on paper. Lots of people had a day a week working from home and some of them specifically used that time to review big complicated (and confidential!) documents. Cue uproar.

    I was a member of our women’s network committee and we were getting lots of complaints from members about the new policy. I put out a formal request for comments to the membership and got some great feedback, including concrete suggestions for how to make our documents safer without punishing everyone for the error of one senior person.

    I wrote a paper to senior management, documenting the impact on productivity and morale and making suggestions (drawn from members’ submissions) for alternatives.

    The employer wound up using one of our suggestions, which was to create an online system for tracking documents taken out of the building. The idea was that if you had to log your documents in and out, you would be more conscious about taking care of them. The uproar subsided and people were able to get on with their jobs with only a small additional admin task.

    Then the pandemic came, and we largely went paperless. (We aren’t allowed to connect our work computers to external printers for security reasons, so we all had to learn to work online for the months we spent outside the office.) So the logging system still exists, but very few people need to use it these days.

  42. Unkempt Flatware*

    I’ve only experienced a group effort that moved management to act but not on purpose. I worked at a bank and a normal bank holiday fell on a Saturday. So that meant for the first time, we were to be closed on Saturday and those of us who were to work that weekend were thrilled for a paid day off and a full weekend to enjoy. Until the higher ups decided the week before that we would instead be open. Why? Saturdays are not a business day for banks so all transactions would have gone on Monday’s business. The ATM worked. We did not exist in an area where the workforce was being paid by paper check needing to be cashed.

    I guess our collective sighs and obvious anger was enough to make them take it back. The next day they said “nevermind! haha you all fell for our funny joke” and we never spoke of it again.

  43. ArlynPage*

    I work in a regional office of a global company. Every year, global HR sends out a staff survey, and I noticed that the leadership likes to pick one little complaint that popped up in the survey and address it and make a big celebration about the improvement. So every year when the annual survey comes out, I round up as many staff members as I can and we agree on the one thing we are going to complain about, so it can’t be ignored. One year we all complained about the terrible health insurance, so the leadership started offering a better health insurance option. The next year, we complained about paltry salary raises that don’t even match typical cost-of-living increases, and the leadership gave us all better raises. Most recently, we all complained about the lack of paid parental leave, and the leadership came up with a parental leave package that we were all pretty happy with. If the leadership has noticed that the complaints are remarkably similar between different staff members, they haven’t pointed it out.

  44. Anon for this*

    We got a new Grand Boss who, upon her interview, seemed open to listening to people, willing to get a feel for how we do things, respectful of staff, etc.–great, right? Within the first month of her starting, she was demeaning everyone who didn’t have a ph.d (our field has a master’s terminal degree, so a ph.d is not expected), making judgements about people’s work without so much as having a conversation with a person’s boss (let alone with the person they were judging). She told certain staff members that soon they would be replaced with robots. Faculty going up for tenure were ridiculed to their faces for thinking they should get it (and these were active faculty with zero reason to think they wouldn’t get tenure). We lost all flexibility we’d had, and all trust that we knew how to do jobs that many of us had been doing for years.

    But also, she fundamentally did not know how to do the parts of her job that she needed to know how to do, especially budget stuff. She wasted our outreach funds on 2,000 tote bags (which had the wrong branding so we weren’t even supposed to use them). She refused to okay standard budget things that we needed to be okayed in order to do our literal jobs, then went after us for not doing those jobs…that we couldn’t do, because she wasn’t doing *her* job. It was such a mess.

    I have never seen morale so low as it was in those days. All but 1 person working under her went to our ombuds office. We had faculty across campus speaking to the provost about what was happening to us. As a group, we met with said provost. It took time, because nothing in academia is fast, and her actual incompetence with her job had to be documented on top of her incompetence managing people, but after 8 hellish months, Grand Boss stepped down to “spend more time with family”. She still works as part of our department(because tenure), but given that one of the faculty she ridiculed is now *her* boss, she doesn’t go around telling people they can be replaced by robots anymore.

    It was the first and only time I have seen something like that happen in academia, and I doubt I ever will again, because at the time, we had both a provost and a university president who cared deeply about employee morale.

  45. Katie*

    My work took the doors to the bathroom entrances off in order to be handicap accessible. For those close to the bathrooms it was problematic (Loud and sometimes smelled). We grouped together and complained. They tried to fix it my putting in noise cancelling machines. Didn’t help. We complained more and they finally put in a push button door opener.

  46. JanetM*

    The event that got me to join the union (not officially recognized by either the state or my employer, but still effective) was reading in the newsletter that they had banded together and successfully put pressure on administration to provide gloves and Hepatitis B immunizations to the Housekeeping workers in the dorms (who had previously been required to purchase their own PPE and been required to pay for the mandatory vaccines).

  47. Scrappy Queen*

    Years ago I was a manager at a fast food restaurant. Payday was on Friday. The owner had several restaurants in town. The managers, including myself, successfully argued that we needed to change payday to Monday. The reason? Because the number of folks that either didn’t show up or called in the sick the day after payday was INSANELY high. We lived in a college town where football was very popular. It especially hurt us on game days to be short staffed. The impact wasn’t as great on a Tuesday. He immediately understood and changed the payday to Mondays. I am not mad that I no longer work in fast food.

  48. Anon for privacy*

    At Old Job, we were having a lot of problems: improper payment of OT, lack of transparency, improper handling of PTO, pay inequity, and burnout. Eventually, one person quit and ended up having to go to the labor board to get money they were owed. I think that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because not too long after that, someone made a huge group chat on a non-work platform so we could talk about all our issues, and from this an informal committee formed with some of the team leads and other folks who had more capital to spend.

    The committee had a series of meetings with upper management / HR about our concerns. It took ages (months), but eventually some of our main concerns were addressed. Of course, there was a ton of back and forth, the president told us to stop whining and be more positive, and some of the proposed replacement policies were also trash, but we kept speaking up directly in all-hands meetings or through the committee and eventually we got new (legally compliant) OT and PTO policies and a new transparent bonus calculation formula.

    The company restructured soon after that, which led to opportunities for more improvements, but from what I last heard, progress was still slow in certain areas. I quit shortly after the first round of new policies was introduced because my personal life was a mess and I was just exhausted by everything going on at work.

    Also: Parallel to all this, a group of folks got a union started, and while red tape / managerial delay tactics kept it from taking meaningful action until after a lot of the issues were resolved, I do think the dual pressure forced management’s hand. There’s even more to this story, but I don’t want to *totally* doxx myself haha.

  49. Chaos Farmer*

    I was working at an event, located inside the entrance to another business (think voting at a grocery store). The weather outside was freezing. It was 40 degrees in our area and the door wouldn’t close. We wore hats, gloves, and coats plus extra layers. Someone brought a tiny space heater that wouldn’t overload the outlet. Customers were cold, but they could come and go. The workers, on the other hand, were stuck in the cold for up to 13 hours a day. This was especially bad for the older volunteers with health problems. As the group leader, I had no real power and wasn’t involved in the contract between the event and the business that allowed us to use their space. We complained to both but nothing changed. Then two of the workers decided to call the corporate level of the business. They basically refused to work in such poor conditions. Complaining to corporate got immediate results. We packed up everything in the middle of the day with the store’s help, and moved to a different, much warmer spot for the remaining days of the event. Several months later, the store added outlets so we could use the new spot in the future without awkward extension cords. However, the couple who spoke up the most were not invited to work at any future events.

  50. NotHannah*

    I’ve shared this before, but here goes — this is along the lines of “37 pieces of flair” from the movie Office Space. The summer after graduating high school, I worked as a car hop for a small ice cream shack in my hometown. No, we didn’t wear roller skates; the owner was afraid of getting sued if we injured ourselves. But we did have to wear a uniform of scoopneck tees and short baby-blue satin shorts. There was a matching satin baseball jacket if it was too cold (this happened in Central NY) but it was whisper-thin. All this we could deal with, because the tips were pretty good. Until the owner decided to punch things up by requiring us to wear helium-filled yellow balloons tied to our apron strings throughout our shifts. He envisioned these balloons beckoning drivers off the highway into our parking lot, emptying their wallets for soft serve and fried food. These balloons bobbed around us, bumping into the ice cream cones we carried, whipping around in the wind, getting in the way of us making change. Children always wanted a balloon of their own when they saw ours, so we had to add balloon-filling and selling to our task of serving food. If we had to use the restroom or just take a break, we had to untie the balloon and find somewhere to put it before tying it back on. Plus, it was just plain humiliating. We car hops — all very young women — didn’t have a lot of power, but we banded together and told the (male) owner we weren’t going to wear the balloons anymore. And he didn’t argue! So it felt like a victory.

  52. merula*

    This is more of a “be careful what you wish for” story.

    Around 10 years ago, my company wanted to replace the 25 year old cubicles with new ones. The old walls were 60″ high, and the new ones had two different heights: 54″ for most walls and 68″ for separation along high-traffic hallways.

    The cube reconfigurations came along with condensing multiple buildings into one, so there was a year or so of swing spaces and construction to deal with, with construction going floor-by-floor to minimize noise and disruption.

    One department, whose function has a reputation for introversion, was scheduled to be the last floor to be converted to the new cubes, so they were in swing spaces and areas with new cube heights for months before the change. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people in that department logged complaints that lowering their cube walls by 6″ was an outrageous disruption that would kill all productivity. Facilities pointed out that, in a building with as wide of a footprint as ours, more use of the higher walls would mean virtually no natural light past the first row of cubes from the windows, and it would be very difficult to find anyone’s cube with walls significantly higher than most people’s eyelines.

    This department did not care about any of this, and after months of this coordinated campaign, facilities caved. 68″ walls were installed along EVERY walkway external to the cubes.

    The result? That floor is like a rabbit warren. There’s no natural light, so they had to add extra fluorescent lighting and ban light filters unless someone brought in a doctor’s note. It’s impossible to find anyone, so when people from other departments are trying to meet with that department, they have to come to our area or meet us to lead us to their desk. I’ve heard there have been complaints, but facilities isn’t changing anything now.

    When I heard about that poor woman at U.S. Bank, I immediately thought how easy it would be for that to happen at my company, but only on that floor.

      1. ThatGirl*

        It was Wells Fargo, actually, but woman was found dead in her cubicle four days after she’d clocked in.

      2. Observer*

        It wasn’t US Bank. It was Wells Fargo. A woman came in on Friday, died at her desk and wasn’t found till*Tuesday* – because someone smelled something and they went looking.

      5. Goody*

        I wonder if merula is referring to the Wells Fargo employee who was found dead at her desk four days after she had last clocked in. This was just a few weeks ago.

  53. Kaylee Frye*

    Company decided to change terms of one of our major benefits to “make it fairer” for a certain demographic. One demographic was protected from change, but there was a large group of us who would have missed out. Cue private chats to discuss our outrage, spreadsheets to calculate the money we were losing out on, people sharing the wording they were using to make their displeasure known. We all pushed back on the change (lots of individual emails to HR) and we won! Goodness knows what they were thinking, maybe that we didn’t talk to each other!

  54. FocusOnMe*

    Oh, this happened a few months ago; although it was not a group that changed policy, it was one person (me)! Employer was not allowing prior service with state/county/city/municipality to be used to calculate vacation accrual. Conducted research and found a Supreme Court Decision regarding this issue (which confirmed they MUST use prior service credit) and an opinion from the state attorney general, forwarded that to HR along with revised code (state rules/regulations) and asked them to contact the AG. Two weeks later an email comes from the HR Department-Subject line-“Prior Public Service Credit”. I ended up with over 4 weeks of vacation in my bank, and instead of accruing 2 weeks per yer; it is now 5 weeks.

  55. High Score!*

    We had a fancy coffee machine at work. The department that was paying for the coffee decided that they didn’t want to anymore and site management would not take over the expense so the cover machine was removed.

    A majority of the employees were coffee drinkers. When employee feedback rolled around, scores were at an all time low. They put together focus groups. Most of what was discussed in the focus group sessions was the lack of good coffee. Lack of the high quality coffee was also the root issue of every other problem. Now there are multiple high quality coffee machines at every single site. Employee satisfaction is at an all time high.

    1. Lady Kelvin*

      I work for the US federal government where we aren’t allowed to use funds to pay for food – including coffee, because how *dare* you use taxpayer money to pay for people’s coffee. When people agree with that reasoning, I ask them what do they think would happen at non-public sector companies if they took away the free coffee because shareholders don’t think it is a good use to funding. Imagine how much more productive government employees would be if they got free coffee…

  56. Nesprin*

    My boss had a desk in a massively overcrowded lab (lab was an orthopedics research lab- think combination machine shop and cadaver lab). He was assigned an office but still used his lab desk to the consternation of me and everyone else in the lab who wanted that space.

    When he went on his honeymoon, we moved all his stuff to his office, then took apart his desk and repurposed it as the new cadaver table.

  57. PandaCat*

    This doesn’t completely align with the prompt but I still think it’s so cool:

    At every single place I’ve worked, people have asked for pay transparency and leadership has always declined. Well one day I was in a meeting with everyone who had the same title as me, and someone asked if we would all feel comfortable sharing our salaries with each other. An anonymous poll revealed that everyone was fine with it. So we all around, round robin style, and shared our salaries with each other.

    It is the first and last time anything in my life has happened like that. It also revealed that women were grossly underpaid, and we actually did take that to leadership. The women in the team were given hefty market adjustments that brought their compensation on the same level of the men, along with apologies and some flimsy excuse about for why it happened.

    I guess maybe this fits more with the prompt more than I originally thought, because had just one woman gone to leadership and asked if they were paid fairly, I don’t know that any change would have come from that. But when the whole group went and said “wtf” (the men in the group were also outraged and demanded more equal pay) then there was change.

  58. Fluff*

    This has not happened yet – The revolt is in process and I hear it is building.

    We are a big health care system and one major project is getting everyone on the same type of communications software for messaging. This is like texting, only secure for PHI through the medical record. This software would be on your cell phone. With the mixing of personal and work boundaries, one proposal is to require staff to buy their own phones and use this software. Luckily our system is years away from doing this.

    Another big hospital system did something similar a few months ago. They required all their staff to buy phones (if they had a hospital supplied one) and have the software on their personal phones. If they had a hospital supplied phone, that was taken away with the new policy. I guess the premise is that in the 2020s everyone should have a cell phone that works for the medical app and all the stuff that comes with it.

    Here is the kicker – they set the software so the messaging app would break through a phone’s do not disturb setting. The only way to not get a message is to turn off the phone. People are annoyed about losing their work supplied cell phones, and also ticked at having the app break through their own do not disturb.

    What many folks do not realize is how often medical people use group messaging. Imagine those going off at night when you are not on call, or you ARE on call and the messages do not matter for you. I heard one guy was reprimanded by a stranger (at a concert) when his messaging app did too many beeps before he turned it off. Their docs are getting mad.

    Currently, the angry docs are being presented as on “the change struggle bus.” My contact tells me her revolt is building with phones being left behind. Their docs are starting to buy flip phones with big buttons and are willing to pay for two phones just to annoy the administrators.

    I am getting the snacks ready for watching the revolt.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      Did I read that right? Are they requiring people to use personal phones for work? That’s a hard No from me (luckily backed up by my employer, for government records purposes).

      1. H3llifIknow*

        I know right? I work for DoD. Not only am I not required, I am not PERMITTED to have official stuff on my phone. You want to put invasive software on a phone for me to work? Then you provide the phone and oh by the way unless I am ON CALL and need it with me, it’s going to be turned off and I best get pay if I AM on call. Like WTAF is this company thinking???

    3. Disappointed Australien*

      The one tech company I worked for that suggested they might bring in a policy like that was met with unanimous “but I don’t want to have to buy a second phone just for your stupid app”. We were all paid enough that $100 for the cheapest new phone that would run the app and $8/mo for the cheapest prepay plan anyone could find wouldn’t hurt us financially.

      Management were not amused that we had got together and come up with such a cheap way to render their idea pointless. The tried yelling at us but programmers change jobs a lot over things more trivial than this. And we all know about the hidden benefits of employer-provided apps (remote wipe of everything on the phone! scanning your cloud data for interesting things! checking up on who you communicate with! anything else an overzealous manager can think of!)

      I don’t remember the official excuse but that plan died within a week of the software teams finding out about it.

    4. Zimmel*

      I know exactly what you’re talking about and we went through this at our large hospital system a year ago. We did push back in my department and the chair agreed to purchase phones to be used in house when on call. Unfortunately, that means people are still using their own phones when on outpatient duties and even worse, it requires our cell phone number to be listed. Granted the number is listed on a password protected area, but as this is a huge health system that basically means that thousands of people have access. We were told to get Google phone numbers if we objected. This isn’t the only reason that I’m planning to leave.

  59. MistakesWereMade*

    My company had significant issues with communication between upper management and the rest of the company, and a lot of concerns about one middle manager in particular, who had a habit of lying and hiding work information to make his own life easier.

    Enough complaining happened about this to the other middle managers, and to top manager at our site, that it got escalated to the highest echelons of the company. This resulted in a team building event with consultants where staff and leadership were interviewed individually and in separated groups. One thing that came out of this was the desire for monthly all-hands meetings. The site manager suggested we form a staff group to gather our concerns and bring them to him, which we did. I volunteered to be the first staff group leader, so I sent the emails with questions/concerns we had come up with as a group and moderated the all-hands meetings for the first quarter and a half.

    While I thought it was clear that I was just passing on concerns from the whole staff group, and the staff group leadership rotated every quarter, the site manager decided that I personally was the problem.

    Due to this, he decided I wasn’t eligible to be promoted, had the “wrong personality” to move into management, and said that I didn’t prioritize work correctly but was unable to give me any examples of work that didn’t get done or was delayed. He also told me that I would have to take a 2 hour personality test in-person with a psychologist in order to determine what jobs I would be suitable for; it was “not optional”. I heard more specifically from one of the middle managers who had left the company that he spoke extremely poorly of me in relation to the all-hands meetings, which he hated, and also that he was apparently pretty sexist in the closed-doors all-male manager meetings. The sexism thing was apparent to all of us staff already, but hearing how blatant it was privately was of course very upsetting (I’m a woman).

    I think if the staff and I had strategized with who would speak up and say what lines, like I’ve seen in other comments, and if I had been vocal in meetings but not the staff leader/email sender (or vice versa), this could have gone differently for me. There were some positive changes (improved communication, more group lunches to encourage team cohesion, having a place to strategize as a group, group pushback on getting HR to pay out vacation day balances as legally required, etc) but it came at the expense of my career future at that company. So I would say that when pushing back as a group, an important part of that strategy is to make it as difficult as possible to classify any single person (or small group of people) as the leader/instigator.

  60. Not Your Librarian*

    I work in an academic library. Several years ago, the head librarian left, and one of the associate head librarians (so, one of three directly below the head librarian) was the interim head. We had had a lot of turnover in library administration, and many of us in the library wanted the interim head to be direct appointed to the head librarian position. They had been in the library for years and were well-respected, and we didn’t want to go through the upheaval of yet another search for another new head and get another external hire. The provost had originally planned to do a full national search (as is the standard practice). One of my colleagues instead drafted a letter to the provost outlining an excellent case to direct appoint the interim head to the head librarian position (the interim head knew about this but for sure was not leading it, not at all). My colleague was quite savvy about it. She waited to shop around the idea until a cranky librarian retired, and then she got several senior librarians to sign on and we sent the letter to the provost. The provost came and met with the whole library. She heard us, and we had an internal search of one candidate, so the interim head did go through a formal interview process similar to a regular interview process. They were appointed and started a handful of months after our letter (meaning, in the standard time for academic job searches). I’m so glad we wrote the letter.

  61. Union Strong*

    When I interviewed for a tiny startup, they lured me in with unlimited PTO as part of their benefits package. Then I arrived for onboarding and guess what: they had just changed our policy to 2 weeks. Multiple other people had started at the same time, so we decided to organize the whole staff to get unlimited PTO (yes I know the issues with unlimited PTO, but given financial constraints that was more likely to be won than more actual weeks). After we all delivered a letter to the CEO with everyone’s signatures and forced him to address it in a meeting, they capitulated. Unfortunately, they then laid several of my coworkers off a week later – they hadn’t told us how rough the financial situation was.
    I moved on to a government job, where I now get to be an organizing member of our extremely powerful union, which has a whole process for PTO and layoffs voted on by the members. I will stay here forever.

  62. Procedure Publisher*

    When our procedure groups were being pulled into a bigger for the whole division, the style guide was changed and had made a change a lot of people on my team unhappy. We complained about the change so much that our manager asked if any of us wanted to write a business case that explains why the previous style should be used. I and another coworker volunteered to write it.

    The business case was accepted and caused that style change to be changed back. The coworker and I emphasized in the business case how the new style caused extra work that needed to be done and how it negatively impacted the appearance of procedures. I don’t think the people involved with choosing the new style even knew that style would cause extra work.

  63. Llama mama*

    Mine is a ‘success story” in the sense that a group pushed back about a policy and got it changed, but a major crust-up since their success mostly just screwed over several classmates. I was in an intense training program, of let’s say Llama care. One of the hardest classes is grooming, which has both a lecture and a lab section. The policy in the syllabus was that anyone with an ‘A’ average going into the final exam did not have to take the lab portion of the final. About 6 weeks before the finals the major instructor let us know which students had grades high enough to avoid taking the final lab test, and because of the math for the grades and the clear division in the class, this included anyone with an B+ average and above. Well, one group of students who didn’t qualify (and had apparently not read the syllabus) felt this was an outrage, and it was unfair that some students didn’t have to study for this lab final (which again, mathematically, was unlikely to move the A and B student grades in either direction). They took their complaints to administration. Administration felt a compromise was sticking with the ‘A’ average listed in the syllabus, and without discussing it with the students affected, reinstated the requirement to take the lab exam for about 6 people just days before the exam was scheduled. Being one of the students affected, I was livid. I did at least go and point out that I could score a 0 on my llama-puffs and alpaca trim techniques and still pass the class with a C. I never did have much respect for the administrators involved after that, though.

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      That reminds me of a class I took in autumn of 1999. It was network programming or something like that; I remember the 1st assignment, with a 2 week due date, was “learn Java” and coming out of the course with a burning hatred of Emacs. Scuttlebutt was that the teacher wasn’t actually a teacher, but rather a Y2k consultant who had been conscripted due to staff shortages.

      Anyway, the final project was “reimplement the TCP network layer from scratch in Java.” I had already resigned myself to failing the class, so I took my best shot at it and submitted my code; it compiled and ran but was not feature complete. I ended up getting a B+ (64%) on the final and B- (59%) overall in the course, each the 3rd highest of the grades earned.

      The next semester, the teacher didn’t return to finish the year. Eventually, my class was reconveined voluntarily for one session to address the rumors going around; about 80% of his students had banded together during the final project, gone to the Dean with their list of complaints, gotten the teacher fired, and the Dean himself had graded our projects and set the final and overall grading curves.

      Yes, I still use vi.

      1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        To be clear, I wasn’t part of the 80%. It never occurred to me; I was too busy trying to hold down my refereeing job, struggling to keep up with the pace of the class, and struggling to think in Java. Neither C nor Basic gave me the fits Java did.

  64. Wendy Darling*

    A very silly pushback:

    After a solid two years of WFH due to COVID, my company started to require employees to come back to the office 3 days a week, but it did not go well. So they bribed us by setting up free lunch delivery to the office. You’d get the menu at the beginning of each week and you could order meals for free for days you were going to be on-site. The area the office is in was hit hard by COVID so a lot of lunch spots shut down, limiting options, and also food is notoriously expensive in the area, so free lunch was a big perk.

    After six months or so they announced that the lunch perk would be discontinued, and it basically resulted in rioting in the company slack. We got free lunch for another solid year. They finally took it away when the economy got bad, and the announcement was basically “No one’s getting laid off but we are taking your free lunches,” and everyone accepted it quietly this time.

  65. 1000Oysters*

    This happened many years ago at summer job I had while in college. I had worked this job every summer for a few years and had gotten a raise every year I came back. One summer, the organization raised the base wage. What this meant was that new employees and people who had returned after one summer got raises of $1.25 – $2.00 an hour. This was not a high wage job and this was a SIGNIFICANT raise, especially at that time. For me and a couple of others who had returned for several summers, our raise was… $.05. That’s right, a whole nickel. In what I now recognize as my first instance of rabble-rousing, I gathered the few of us who were affected and went directly to the director of the organization and laid out our demands. I was probably 19 or 20 and the oldest of the group so I can only imagine what he was thinking. Anyway, we got our $1.25/hour raise.

  66. Canadian Narwhal*

    About 15 years ago I was working for a startup tech company that was growing pretty well. Since we were B2B and starting to get some big name clients who were also fairly conservative (think banks), leadership made the decision to institute a business casual dress code for the client meetings we occasionally had in our office.

    The tech group pushed back HARD. We basically explained that it was cultural in tech to dress casually, and if we told people they could no longer wear Bermuda shorts, ripped jeans, and band t-shirts, they would probably leave and we’d also have difficulty recruiting new developers.

    The dress code was quickly changed to only being required when a client meeting was happening, which they would announce ahead of time, and people could continue to dress as they had been every other day.

  67. Zradradradcek*

    Most folks in my work group were contract employees, most employed by a large (hundreds of employees sitewide) contracting company A. It was decided that the contract for our group would be split and about 30 of us would be moved to a new, very small, contractor B, new to our site and state — but we needn’t worry, as our salary and benefits at B would be equivalent to those we enjoyed at A.

    Turns out the 401(k) retirement plan that B intended to offer was dismal: high fees, few (and inappropriate) investment options, run by a couple of oily leisure suit stockbrokers as a side gig; while A’s was relatively standard with normal mutual funds, nominal fees, and comprehensive, professional reporting. I brought these concerns up in the first all-hands, arguing that this was hardly “equivalent,” only to have the broker-dealers try to gaslight me, and then to privately apply pressure on me to get on board.

    My college buddy who works for a major mutual fund provider informed me of the provision of ERISA that says that higher-paid employees (e.g., the owner of B) can only participate in the retirement plan to the degree that lower-paid ones (say, the 30 of us) participate — this is to keep employers from creating benefit packages that only benefit the executive suite. Aha.

    So nearly 30 of us said, “you know, maybe we’ll skip participating in the retirement plan for now.” Not long after, presumably after the owner of B was told how little he would be allowed to contribute toward his own retirement, the broker-dealers became a lot more solicitous.

    We held out until the owner of B agreed to drop them and bring in a regular 401(k) vendor. I’m sure it cost him a little more to offer, but equivalent is equivalent.

  68. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

    Not organized, but…

    I used to work for a company that was a major teapot contractor to the government. This company, simply by nature of its size, had many different projects. I worked in a group that had a great manager, and projects that ran smoothly. Many of us in our group were fairly senior and had good reputations throughout the company.

    Unfortunately, the Ginormous New Teapot Project From Heck (GNTPFH) was running behind schedule (big shock here). So GNTPFH management requisitioned senior level teapot developers from throughout the company… by name! When our manager individually informed the three people in our group who had been requisitioned (including myself), he received three reponses of “I quit”. This was not organized by the three of us, but GNTPFH had such a horrible reputation throughout the company.

    Needless to say, upper management was shocked, SHOCKED! by this development. There wound up being discussions about this at the VP level within the company, and the three of us were allowed to remain in our current positions. There wasn’t even any retaliation or repercussions (again, did I say that we had a great manager?)!

  69. Ousted a Terrible Boss*

    A previous boss was a Terrible Boss — classic textbook narcissist who couldn’t do their job, which included getting funding and managing staff of a nonprofit. They just seemed to enjoy the prestige of their title and hated doing the busy work, but it wasn’t a big enough NPO to have a huge staff that could cover for an inept Executive Director.

    Thankfully, even though our team was small, we worked well together and did quality work, often fixing Terrible Boss’s mistakes. After months of baffling management decisions, the staff eventually reached a breaking point where we were all ready to just walk out. Instead, we wrote a letter to the Board of Directors with a detailed description of all the questionable (possibly illegal?) ways the boss had been treating the staff and the company.

    To our surprise, not only did the Board take us seriously, they actually launched an investigation where they discovered that, in addition to everything else we had said, our Terrible Boss also vastly sugar-coated their ability to fundraise and the NPO was seriously hemorrhaging cash. I think that’s that true reason why they were let go (lying to the Board about budgets is a big no-no!), but also it probably helped our case that a couple years prior, the previous staff basically had the same grievances but weren’t taken seriously, so that staff walked out (to be eventually replaced by us).

    The main difference between the prior staff that walked out and the way we handled it, is the previous staff told the Board that “it’s Terrible Boss or us,” making it a battle of personalities. Instead, we framed it as concern for the integrity and reputation of the NPO. Yes, we had personal grievances, but our stack of documentation was more focused on specific occurrences that would harm the NPO in general.

    I don’t think any of us really thought our letter to the Board would do anything, much less launch an investigation that would reveal so much evidence against Terrible Boss. I’m pretty sure to this day Terrible Boss doesn’t fully understand know why they were let go because in their mind they could do no wrong. Thankfully we managed to right the ship, get back on a realistic budget, and keep the NPO going. It was stressful cleaning up the mess Terrible Boss had made, but not as stressful as walking on eggshells around a temperamental boss who actively undermined everything you did.

  70. 15 Pieces of Flair*

    This story took place at a small “bootstrapped” (founder funded and controlled) tech startup in the US during the first year of the pandemic. I led post-sales functions for this employer. The company previously had “unlimited” PTO, and the CEO decided to move to an accrual policy because one employee was taking “too much” leave for a family health situation.

    In the second week of July, the CEO directed HR to rollout the new policy that would apply retroactively to July 1st. Under the new policy we would accrue 2 weeks of leave annually, which would serve as both PTO and sick time. Since this policy took effect in the middle of the year, we would all be granted one week of PTO for the remainder of the year.

    Employees in the US were outraged but afraid to speak up because the CEO had total control of the business. I immediately connected with the head of sales (the only other US based function) to plan a joint response.

    We consolidated feedback from our teams without attaching the coworkers’ names and agreed on a talk track about this policy’s impact to the business. I also researched applicable state law to confirm that sections of the new policy (for example, not paying out PTO on separation) were illegal in some locations.

    The sales leader and I scheduled a joint meeting with the CEO to share our concerns. While the CEO acknowledged then that the policy needed revised, he didn’t officially rescind it and return to “unlimited” PTO until one of my direct reports and I left for a competitor (that offered 23 days of paid leave) at the end of September.

  71. 15 Pieces of Flair*

    This story took place at a small “bootstrapped” (founder funded and controlled) tech startup in the US during the first year of the pandemic. I led post-sales functions for this employer. The company previously had “unlimited” PTO, and the CEO decided to move to an accrual policy because one employee was taking “too much” leave for a family health situation.

    In the second week of July, the CEO directed HR to rollout the new policy that would apply retroactively to July 1st. Under the new policy we would accrue 2 weeks of leave annually, which would serve as both PTO and sick time. Since this policy took effect in the middle of the year, we would all be granted one week of PTO for the remainder of the year.

    Employees in the US were outraged but afraid to speak up because the CEO had total control of the business. I immediately connected with the head of sales (the only other US based function) to plan a joint response.

    We consolidated feedback from our teams without attaching the coworkers’ names and agreed on a talk track about this policy’s impact to the business. I also researched applicable state law to confirm that sections of the new policy (for example, not paying out PTO on separation) were illegal in some locations.

    The sales leader and I scheduled a joint meeting with the CEO to share our concerns. While the CEO acknowledged then that the policy needed revised, he didn’t officially rescind it and return to “unlimited” PTO until one of my direct reports and I left for a competitor (that offered 23 days of paid leave) at the end of September. When we submitted our resignations, the CEO claimed that he already intended to return to unlimited PTO, despite having taken no action in 2 months.

  72. Juan Vaina*

    I worked in a regional office that had a specific country office that was nearly impossible to staff (think: poor living conditions, language barriers, you couldn’t bring your family, etc.). The country office would bring on temporary support—sometimes for as little as 1 month—that was often more work than it was help. Everyone knew it was an impossible situation, but it meant that the people working in the country office were often doing 2-4 people’s jobs at once. Understandably, they were all out of sympathy. During a high-level person’s visit, the country office team decided to change everyone’s name tags so they said their name but also their status (i.e. permanent staff, temporary travel for 1 month, vacant desk with a position title, etc.). So this high-level person visited, walked around the office, and directly saw how few permanent staff there were and exactly how many vacancies existed. Shortly after, the regional office’s #1 priority was staffing that country’s office, including changing some of the benefits that were included.

    I watched from the sidelines and cheered those folks on, as I had been denied a request to spend 3 months at that country office to help out; I knew exactly how thinly stretched they were.

  73. avalanches*

    i was working full-time at a mid-size company in a customer-facing Customer Success-type role, one of many (40+ people). the starting salary for this particular role was 38K in the bay area in 2017. for those of us on a single income, it was common/pretty much necessary to have a second gig. the company had been recently acquired when i started but the salaries didn’t grow significantly after my first year. the company that acquired us started a “culture club” to encourage … group activities? camaraderie? ?? i was part of the club and ran a few extra-curricular events to escape the Big Meh that was my actual job- think newsletter, intramural sports team.
    one day, the CEO joined a culture club meeting, and one colleague, sick of having to maintain a side hustle while working full-time, mentioned how sad it was that so many of us had to work a second job. i, having shown that i could coordinate office-wide events and participation, said “if unionizing is the only way to get a pay increase, we’ll have to explore that”. he ran to another department head’s office and we got 20K salary increases within two months. i still regret not unionizing, but that was before the delightful pro-labor vibez of 2024.

  74. j*

    My very small company decided it was time to professionalize itself and bring in a COO. (We all hated her for various reasons – mainly that she was a solution in search of a problem). She published the company handbook giving us ONE DAY for bereavement for the loss of a parent, spouse or child, a 1/2 day for a sibling or in-law or grandparent. To make things even worse, a coworker lost her little boy a few years prior – as you can imagine, she needed more than one day off. In previous instances, this was handled on an ad hoc basis since there were only 8 of us. We all pushed back hard on this, in meetings, in emails, to the board which had to approve major changes in personnel procedure to get it changed to three days. Still not great, but not downright ridiculous.

  75. froodle*

    Our department manager was a notorious bully who had never once in the course of a long and ignominious life met a goal post she didn’t fancy moving, a subordinate she didn’t feel like bullying, or a bus she didn’t want to throw someone under.

    So, one day she struts into our team’s office, prating loudly about a change she wants us to make in how we do one of our daily processes. Nothing in an email,nothing documented, of course, because then how can she lie about it later?

    A few days later, we’re using the new process. A customer complains. Dipshit manager storms into our office, braying acrimony at the quietest and most timid member of the team about how she was explicitly instructed to do the exact opposite of the process she’s carried out.

    Co-worker One: When you came in on Wednesday, I understood you told us to (carry out process as Timid CW had done)

    Me: I also understood you wanted us to (carry out process as Timid CW had done)

    Timid CW: That was how I took the conversation on Wednesday as well

    Braying Bellend blusters and farts her noxious mouth-noise all over the place at length, but does eventually conceed that perhaps we were confused and she could have been clearer*

    She then instructs us to do (process we were originally doing before she stuck her big stupid oar in) and leaves

    A couple of minutes later, an email pops up from Co-worker A, to Worthless Manager, copying me and Timid CW in, confirming the conversation we’d just had and that we were now to follow Original Process

    Timid CW and I both follow up with emails of our own, confirming our understanding of things

    That manager and the grotesque homunculus she created in her own image to be our
    direct supervisor continued to be unadulterated nightmares, because that workplace was a clown show, but I treasure the memory of the look on her face when all three of us quietly, calmly, unemotionally and in public told her she’d said B when she tried to pretend she’d said A.

    *because if all three people who heard you think you said A, but you think you said B, that’s *clearly* miscommunication on both sides and not you being a fucking idiot and also a liar

  76. Flower necklace*

    I’m a high school teacher. A few years ago, our district decided to implement new testing. This wasn’t mandated by the state or the federal government. It was a new idea proposed by the head office, who hadn’t given any consideration to the massive amount of time and effort it would take teachers to give this assessment, score it, and then input the scores into the system (by hand, for no extra pay), in addition to the time it was taking away from teaching our actual content.

    We were pulled out of class for an entire day for training. During lunch, I was so frustrated that I started writing an email to the school board. My coworkers were there and shared their input. We all agreed that we would send this email to the school board individually, and get as many people as we could to send their own version of the email.

    They gave up after that year. There were many issues with testing that made it impossible to implement like the district wanted, but I like to think that the awareness generated by the email writing campaign helped.

  77. Blog post idea*

    Alison, have you considered doing a thread about unions? It seems to me that unions are gathering popularity. I’d love to hear stories about successful unionization and changes that came with it, especially in the private business sector (less interested in government, education, manufacturing that are known to have unions).
    On the other hand, it could be also interesting to hear about unions and unionization not being helpful.
    Just food for thought.
    Thanks.

  78. JustaTech*

    I went to a very small college, so the numbers of people involved in this story are small, but the percentages are large.
    In my department (A) there was one professor who was terrible. He didn’t sleep with students, or shout and make students cry. No, Professor B did … nothing. I mean, he went to class and he recited the exact same lectures he’d been doing for years, but he didn’t teach (not like any other professor in any department). And he did no research and took on no research students.
    This had been an issue for years, but one year it suddenly became a serious issue because it looked like a bunch of seniors weren’t going to graduate because they couldn’t pass his class – because he wouldn’t teach and he wouldn’t provide feedback. (Like, he would wait until after the next test before returning the previous one, and the marking was often “vague, -5”.)
    This was, understandably, making a bunch of over-achieving people incredibly anxious.
    And then I caught him in a flat out lie. He told my classmate that he didn’t have time to talk to her about our next exam (in three days). Except that I watched him come into the library every morning and read the newspaper (not relevant to his field of study) for an hour.
    So I told my friend, who told the rest of our class, and the next thing we knew we’d marched to the Dean’s office (and then to his lab because he was teaching) and raised a royal ruckus that we were not paying [ungodly sum] for Professor B to *not* teach us!
    The dean listened very intently, we went back to the dorms, the year finished, everyone passed.

    But oh the next year!
    New Dean asks me to come to his office “Professor B has left the college, and I don’t want you to feel you had anything to do with it.” Wink wink, nudge nudge.
    It was glorious.

  79. Eva Luated*

    My team got a new manager. He cut-and-pasted the same general career advice into everyone’s written, quarterly reviews. He didn’t tell us he was doing this. We all complained it on the manager review form. He gathered us and told us that it was the same, general suggestions and not intended to be criticism of our performance. He thought that just explaining it addressed our concerns. We continued to push back, because 1) if it was general advice and not individualized suggestions, it didn’t belong on our reviews and 2) because of the sheer amount of what he pasted compared to the small amount individualized praise (or other individualized evaluatory comments), the overall balance of our reviews was negative. He stopped doing that and just emailed us the general suggestions after that.

  80. Kat*

    I was in college studying accounting. In third year we started taking taxation. The professor created her own notes and problem sets which didn’t jive with the problems in the (very expensive) text book. She had a very confusing way of explaining things and when we tried to ask why her way of solving problems didn’t jive with the text book, she got snarky with us. Since this was a new subject matter we hadn’t previously studied, many of us would’ve just taught ourselves using the textbook but she barely even referenced it, and trying to study one method when the prof used another did our heads in.

    She was the ONLY professor that taught both personal tax and advanced financial accounting (which we’d be taking the following couple of terms).

    I spearheaded a group of students, and set up a meeting with the dean of the faculty. All of us that attended the meeting were top of our class, and you wouldn’t have been able to find another professor that found fault with us.

    We explained our frustrations and when the Dean said they couldn’t do anything to replace her mid-term, we said we totally understood. All we were asking for was that the faculty have another professor to teach the same courses as she did, so that she wasn’t the only option and we could choose another professor if we wanted.

    I’m pretty sure we met up before the meeting and ironed out what we’d say, and that we wanted another professor as an alternate option going forward as we had anticipated being told nothing could be done mid-semester as I highly doubt we came up with that in the spur of the moment.

    It worked! We got a new prof the next term who started off temp and then got made full time (yay for him!) and he was great! I ended up taking two classes with him and always found his lectures enjoyable and he had a dry sense of humour which I got a kick out of too.

    He even helped me land my first “real” job at one of the big firms after I graduated by giving me a contact to reach out to!

  81. betsyohs*

    We went through a major transition where the founder of our company stepped down from leading the company and went back to doing just technical work. The person he put in as president was really not cut out for the job, but morale at the company had been extremely high under the founder, so it took several years for it to drop far enough for anyone to start talking to each other. Then we had nearly half of our female staff leave in one year – each for different reasons, but it was enough of a pattern that the rest of the women got together and started talking. After several months of weekly meetings, we wrote a letter to the founder (who was still a partner at the firm) laying out our concerns and emphasizing that one of the biggest missing pieces was that we did not feel like we could give feedback to the current president because he got defensive, ignored it, or otherwise wouldn’t listen to it. The founder took it under consideration, convened a working committee that involved 3 of our most senior women staffers and the no-good president, and it took many months, but we got a new president who is doing a much better job; we implemented a formal annual 360-review process for all senior leadership; we have women at every level of upper management; and we’ve implemented all sorts of policies/procedures/controls to make it much harder get into a similar situation again. Also the “ousted” president has returned to doing a great job with his technical work.

    Essie up thread said “I think this worked because the department was very organized, high-functioning, professional, and friendly *before* the issue. We all really, genuinely enjoyed working together, we trusted each other, and we were willing to organize to heal our department.”
    And that’s spot on for how I feel about our push. Our founder lead with trust in everything for 25+ years, and people responded in kind. We trusted that he would listen to us when we sent the letter, and we trusted that he would handle this very critical feedback without retaliation. Also, we all like working here, and we generally trust each other to want the right thing – for our clients, for our company, for each other. We all wanted things to get better.

    We also had several senior staff women who were willing to take on the risk of sending the letter to the founder, myself included. We do highly technical work in a booming field, and I knew that I would be able to find another job easily if I was pushed out over this, or if things didn’t improve enough to make me happy to go to work again. I was willing to use my accumulated political capital to protect my more junior and less confident colleagues. Ultimately, I actually think the experience increased my political capital – much credit to the founder and our other senior leadership that they were able to hear the feedback and incorporate our suggested improvements gracefully.

  82. Texas Teacher*

    Another teacher here. My district bought another classroom management program. This one “required” a weekend retreat/lock-in to be trained. You were not allowed to leave their center. To make it worse the people that came back were acting like they had joined a cult. One of them told me I needed to drink the kool-aide. I had to explain the Jonestown massacre to her.

    I submitted ADA paperwork that due to allergies, I couldn’t be restricted from going to get safe food for me to eat. Other people had religious objections to being forced to spend time overnight away from their husbands (Texas), and others had people depended on them for care (small children, elderly parents, or family members with disabilities that required a caretaker). So they arranged for a week-long workshop in the district where people could go home at night.

    I had done my research on the “founder”. He claimed to be a psychiatrist but wasn’t licensed to practice in Texas where he was based and had his retreat center. I asked why when the class started. The leader of the workshop didn’t have an answer. Then he tried to get us to take a personality test about the quality of the ones in Seventeen Magazine in the late 70s and early 80s. So another teacher asked for the leader’s qualifications for his qualifications as a mental health professional. His answer he was a Football (bow to the God of Texas) Coach. She and I refused to fill out the form or participate in the group therapy session.

    By the end of the day everyone that had objected because of the creepy cult feeling was taking their restroom breaks in mass every time he tried to have us take a test or do “group therapy”. During one of the group bathroom breaks we came up with an answer if he threatened to report us to the district for refusing to participate. “If the district feels I am mentally unfit to be a teacher they can submit a list 5 of qualified and licensed psychiatrists to me and my doctor. We will evaluate them and choose one to do a workup on me -with all expenses paid by the district.

    He threatened and did not like that answer. Then he showed a video “Testimonial” of a student who explained how a teacher using this method go her to go off drugs using it. I and a couple of other teachers asked questions – were the parents informed of their child going cold turkey off drugs, was there any medical supervision or support? To be clear this wasn’t weed it was stuff that could have serious medical consequences. When he said no, we pointed out we aren’t allowed to say “I think Johnny might have ADHD or Dyslexia because we are not doctors or qualified to test a student for an LD, but now we were supposed to be experts in addiction recovery with no support. That is how Day 3 or 5 ended.

    We got a call that night days 4 and 5 were cancelled. I wish it was because of our rebellion. But they also canceled summer 2 a days for the football teams (4 high schools, 4 JH, 4 middle schools) for the rest of the week. So people could prepare for Hurricane Ike (it hit Saturday but Friday we had feeder bans and flooding.) A good portion of the district had been rice fields before subdivisions were built on them. The next year that program was out and they were paying $10,000s to some new geru.

  83. Brit*

    A group of anonymous employees wrote a list of demands to address racial inequity in our school district, including changing biased hiring practices (leadership was overwhelming white people who’d been brought in via networks, even though we’re a low-income district serving predominantly students of color), using more culturally responsive materials, supporting ERGs, and doing org-wide ABAR training.

    Iirc, the letter and demands went to every employee in the organization at the same time, with a link to sign. By the end of the year a ton of leadership turned over and was replaced by a markedly more diverse team, all of whom went through a revamped, formal process, and several of the other demands were also met.

  84. fluffy*

    I worked at a web publishing company, in a very liberal city. It came to light that the company was hosting a vehemently right-wing website that was supporting the Blue Lives Matter movement, and that the website (especially the comments section) was full of extreme levels of anti-trans rhetoric. Being the only openly trans member of staff, you can be damned sure I spoke up about it, and the amount of support I got from everyone else on staff was also super great.

    We did have to break through a bunch of “both sides”-isms from the higher-ups who thought this was an okay thing for them to be doing, but eventually we got the company to cut ties with the Blue Lives Matter website, specifically on the basis that their unmoderated comments section was out of control and in violation of all of our community guidelines.

  85. Azure Jane Lunatic*

    Honestly, the company was probably right that the old issue tracker that the company used for every internal problem from “emails I send only go 500 miles*” to “there is a leak in the roof of the big blue room” was on its last legs and was about to fall over from the collected weight of more than 1,000,000 tickets stacked up in there. It was an ancient Bugzilla install, managed by a single senior person, and a million tickets is A Lot.

    Where the company was not right, not in the slightest, was that putting a custom front end on a Software as a Service issue tracker and hiding the complex features from the employees (of a software company!) was a good idea. Nor was the amount of money they spent on it a good idea.

    There were rumbles in the depths of the company that the new thing had Major Issues, and then they unleashed it on us, complete with promises about the capabilities of the shiny new thing, leaflets on desks, and I think there may have even been a mascot.

    As assistant to my team, my manager took me aside and told me that I should (as with all new things that got dumped on us from on high) see what the real story was with the thing, and make sure that it could be used smoothly by us all. (Oh lord.)

    The in-company gossip email list exploded. It was a distinct downgrade, from a system that had been transparent to pretty much everyone, to a completely opaque system. You couldn’t search ‘zilla to see whether there was currently some kind of known network issue, you had to file a ticket no matter if there was a known issue; it was a huge downgrade in terms of internal problem knowledge.

    My job as Team Assistant gave me a bias towards taking complaints and doing things with them. I confirmed a number of technical complaints made on the gossip list, and tested some of their edges. I’d already made a habit of filing tickets for other little problems, like burned-out lights and that weird shriek coming from the ventilation system. I started filing tickets, in the new issue tracker, against the new issue tracker. The only way to see a ticket in the system was if the person who filed the ticket cc’ed you on the ticket? I started cc-ing folks with wild abandon.

    Someone started a page in the internal wiki, to track the progress of various tickets against the new system. Various engineers started sharing their tips and tricks for making the new system work, for how to not get your ticket dropped on the floor. I discovered, almost by accident, that when someone left the company there was no system to reassign the tickets to other employees. That was a fun one.

    The second team in charge of the new helldesk system (the first team having gone over budget and also been sacked) asked for a delegation from Engineering, to “talk” about the new system. It was a fiasco. The delegation from Engineering lined up in rough order of reasonableness (I was at the sweet end, the guy whose specialty is rhetoric and bullying was at the far end) and Helldesk tried to tell us that we four were literally the only people who had a problem with the system. So we knew we had to keep going.

    The old CIO with the financial relationship to the SaaS company went out, having failed upwards; unfortunately the new CIO had relationships that suggested they might not be that much better. We knew we had to keep going.

    I knew when my end date with the company was by this point. So I was the one nominated to speak up at the all-hands. We workshopped the question and got it pared down. We knew a lot of people had worked very hard on all this! But when, dear Mr. CEO, would the new thing be at least as functional as the old one?

    He was starting some platitudes when he spotted a latecomer in the crowd, way at the back. The guy with the microphone who’d quietly patted my shoulder and told me it was a good question handed the microphone off to the new CIO, who was clearly uncomfortable at being put on the spot. (I came up to him afterward and by way of “coals of fire”, as Anne of Green Gables would have it, told him that I imagined he was getting a lot of strongly worded questions from a lot of people, and I know that could feel a little like he was under attack, it’s just that this is such an important piece of software to keep the company running smoothly, and they’re all so passionately invested in having it work.) We knew we had to keep going.

    Eventually the company brought in the team they use for post-incident analysis when a customer’s install has gone completely sour. “So, if you were to wake up tomorrow, and everything was better, how would you know it?” the lady with the iPhone asked.

    My top two were easily copyable links to tickets which would Just Work, and of course obliteration of the lack of horizontal scrollbars (which I’d just learned could not be easily done, as someone had hard-coded the terrible front end into thousands of unique pages, proving that they didn’t understand why CSS exists and never will). The IT guy’s were somewhat similar.

    The imported expert put his pen down. “You mean to tell me that after all these things that you’ve told me about how stuff here works, what would make the most difference to your lives is basically cosmetic??!!??!?!”

    I shrugged. “Well, we can work around everything else.”

    He stared at us. “Endlessly resilient,” he said. “[Company] employees are endlessly, singlemindedly resilient.”

    Shortly before I left, the expensively customized “simplified” front end had been scraped off, and we were using the stock SaaS portal. It still had significant shortcomings, but the worst was finally gone.

    * “The Case of the 500 Mile Email” wasn’t us, but it’s a great technical detective tale.

    2. Jamoche*

      I was one of the software engineers there, working mostly on UI. I once asked Az to file this ticket for me: “UI expert spent 10 minutes searching the website for the UI element that would allow her to start filing a ticket.”

      It turned out to be under a popup menu item under some text that gave no indication, either visually or in the contents of the text, that it was a popup menu, much less that it was the one I wanted. I don’t think it even changed the cursor when you rolled over it.

  86. Oscar the Grouchy Nurse*

    My mom’s old OR coordinator was called the Panty Police because if anyone bent over and she saw any exposed underwear (which included panty lines. PANTY LINES.), she would write you up, even if you were wearing full-coverage granny panties or boxers! (This was back in the early 00s when exposed thongs were fashionable, so her write ups tended to be more for the less full-coverage side of things.) So some of the more…fearless nurses (both men and women) stopped wearing underwear all together, and for about a month, the OR, PACU, and preop were butt-crack city. That did NOT go over well as one can imagine. At least there was no danger of panty lines.

  87. Data Nerd*

    At a prior company I was on the HR team and we hired a new HR leader. We actually hired a couple during my time there who weren’t great, but there was one in particular who was really awful. She was manipulative and unpredictable, and was approving violations of our company policies, putting us at risk.
    I scheduled a meeting with the rest of the team to discuss our concerns. There were lots of general complaints, but I kept returning us to the issues that could cause problems for the company. Once we had a list together, I got buy-in from most of the team to participate in an escalated meeting. One person wouldn’t participate in that meeting, but the rest were willing. At the time HR was reporting up through Finance so I got a meeting scheduled with our CFO (the HR leader’s boss). He took us all out to breakfast and we laid out the issues. He went back to the office that afternoon and fired the HR leader.
    I don’t think that was a card we could have played more than once, but the issues were so egregious, and we were very factual rather than emotional in laying them out. It was a perfect example of how a group can make a difference.

  88. i have no name*

    I work as 1 out of 6 managers at a non-profit who went through a director transition. The incoming director was…not great. She refused to do the actual work of the department that she was hired for, opting instead to shift all her duties to us managers and go around doing other tasks. She was absent in the department to the point that staff would ask if she still worked there, even as she piled pointless projects and requests on us managers (I’ve never had a micromanager who somehow was also completely absent so much, but she pulled it off). She was obsessed with making herself look good to her bosses (and on LinkedIn), and pleas for support with our increased workload only met with her complaining about how full her calendar was. One of our most overworked managers started having crying spells at work and all the managers started quietly interviewing elsewhere.

    Previously, us managers had never really interacted outside work or talked much. We’re all introverted sorts, and while we got along at work, we all had our own lives outside of it. About 2 months after this new director arrived, though, we met for drinks outside of work for the first time. First just to find out we were all on the same page (none of us were sure at first if the other managers also were having issues with her), then to try to work out what (if anything) to do, especially after some group push-back directly to her didn’t go anywhere.

    We decided to raise our concerns with our director’s boss first, about 3 months into her tenure. We sent our grand-boss an email signed from all of us, and we took turns replying to it so no one person looked like “the leader”. At the meeting, each of us made a point to take a turn speaking. Again, so none of us came across as a particular trouble-maker.

    Nothing really happened. The grand-boss seemed sympathetic, and I assume she talked to our director. But nothing really changed and things got worse. We went to our grand-boss again around 6 months into our boss’s tenure, asking for a meeting with both of them. At that meeting, we got the grand-boss’s agreement that the director should absolutely be doing the work of the department (our director had been claiming that’s not what she was hired for and that her bosses agreed with her, so this was a big deal). We hoped that would resolve things.

    It did not. Our director had about a week where she seemed to try to learn something about the department work before she reverted to form. After nine months of this director, we were getting to the point of manager mental breakdowns in the small conference room. The performance of the entire department was stumbling because the managers were not able to keep things on track without our director’s support. Two of the managers were particularly in conflict with the director, but all the managers backed them so as to present a united front. At the end of a department leadership meeting, we notified the director that we were escalating our issues with her to HR and then we refused to discuss it further until HR had investigated.

    We were all nervous about this. Our HR department is 2 people, one of whom is only 1 level below the ED and who has a reputation of being a hard-ass. We had no idea what to expect. But we sent an email, cced the grand-boss, requesting an immediate meeting to discuss what was happening in the department.

    We got the meeting. Same strategy. We each took turns replying to emails and speaking. We backed each other up. By the end, the HR head looked a little overwhelmed by it all, and the grand-boss just looked very tired.

    The director went on administrative leave for “reflection” for a week while the grand-boss followed up with individual meetings with each of us managers wherein it became apparent that she was fed up with our director and had regretted giving her so many chances. Our director did not return after her week off. We are now searching for a new director, which isn’t ideal because things have deteriorated in our department, but the main cause of the deterioration–that director–is gone so hopefully we can all get things back on track.

  89. That's a Choice*

    I had an experience where this did not go as well as hoped, although eventually many of the changes did happen. In a specialized education setting, a large group of clinical staff came together and organized and wrote out a letter with a few key organizational changes we needed to make our jobs feel sustainable. We signed on together to the proposal and requested a meeting with the president. Unfortunately, the response was to take it pretty personally and kind of attack us for the way we went about raising the concerns. The meeting began “and this is why you never send an email on a Friday night.”. We were all pretty dispirited by the response and I think it hurt my relationship with leadership for awhile, but looking back, many of the things we advocated for did happen over time. I struggled a lot with doubting myself at the time… did we really do something wrong or did the leader fail to meet the moment?

  90. Tinkerbell*

    This wasn’t ORGANIZED exactly, but…

    About twenty years ago, I was a librarian at a tiny branch. Our library staff intranet page included a bunch of boilerplate announcements that nobody read and a link to the most recent Unshelved webcomic (https://www.unshelved.com). One day, the link to the webcomic broke. IT spent the next several hours inundated with calls and tickets from, I’m told, almost 2/3 of the total staff in the entire library system who were working that day. They fixed it ASAP.

  91. mayflower*

    I worked at a nonprofit where we successfully organized and wrote a letter of no confidence in our executive director! This was in 2020; like a lot of other nonprofits, we heard a lot of promises around DEI initiatives, improving equity at our org, etc. Our ED (a white woman) hired a consultant founded and run by Black women to work with us, but last minute sent an email about how we weren’t able to partner with them anymore.

    People had a lot of questions about what happened, timeline, next steps, but our ED was very dodgy and also lied to throw the other organization under the bus. Our ED sent an email that was very tone police-y to the staff, and I replied all to it calling out and explaining the tone policing (in a nice way! there was a comic strip!). Things really snowballed after that – there was an all staff meeting where our ED cried and took no responsibility and then abruptly left the zoom call, senior leadership’s true colors started to show, and the only BIPOC senior leader decided to resign and was immediately told to leave. A Black woman was fired after refusing to stop bringing up the way racism was impacting her at work and our clients; they handled it so unprofessionally (they misspelled her very common name in her firing letter and told the volunteers she led before telling her).

    The firing was really the last straw. Managers started reaching out to each other on personal channels, and they worked out a draft of a no confidence letter. They shared it, discreetly and through private email, to as many of the staff as we felt we could trust and we organized an after work meeting. On that call we talked through a couple specifics of the no confidence letter and potential consequences for whoever signed. Somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the staff ended up signing it (and something like 90% of non-senior leadership staff). It asked for our ED to step down immediately, along with improving our DEI initiatives.

    The board allowed her to “retire,” but we were successful in removing our ED. We also unfortunately lost a lot of staff after that (including me – my boss was not on my side after sending my all staff email) and were even in a major local newspaper (think LA Times or Chicago Tribune).

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