Submitted 7 months ago by fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to workreform@lemmy.world
The absolute absurdity of work without pay becomes blatantly obvious when you reverse the situation.
Imagine you going to your boss and asking them if they could pay you for 10 hours of work even though you only worked 8 today.
It’d be considered ridiculous. But it’s the same thing.
In a employment relationship you got a contract stating the conditions in which you trade your time and skilled labor for money and benefits.
Neither side should feel entitled to free handouts on top.
The problem arises when one party of the contract has much more control over the other party in said contract.
How is PTO ridiculous, exactly?
That would be part of the benefits he is referring to.
PTO is a finite resource and the equivalent of being paid overtime. Demanding your employees work overtime without pay is an infinite resource, much like demanding your boss to pay you for an unscheduled day off or time you didn’t work that doesn’t get covered by PTO.
Jeez that site is awful. Article text:
October 10, 2024, 00:59 IST
A product designer called it quits on the first day of work after his boss expected him to work beyond normal working hours without compensation and dismissed the concept of work-life balance as a “fancy term” and a “Western behaviour”. The boss also pressured him to “burn the midnight oil” in a threatening manner, which the designer found to be “unreasonable, inhumane, and inconsiderate”. Additionally, he felt belittled when the boss scolded him and subjected him to treatment he deemed “unacceptable”. The man, named Shreyas, shared his experience on Reddit and even turned to the online community to refer him for UI/UX roles.
“At the end of my first day, October 7, my reporting manager made it clear that he expected unreasonable commitments—work beyond normal hours without any compensation,” Shreyas wrote on Reddit.
He added, “When I tried to establish boundaries, he mocked me for talking about ‘work-life balance’, calling it a ‘fancy term’ and ‘Western developed nation behaviour’. He also ridiculed my desire for time to read and exercise, dismissing it as an excuse.”
“Just to avoid any misunderstanding, it is not that I am unwilling to work for a minute post work hours, it’s about the personal attacks, belittling, ridiculing me for mentioning that I have a life outside of work and have hobbies like reading, underpaying, not having any overtime policy and still expecting to work over and beyond work hours every day. (12-14 hour workday every day). I am mature enough to understand there’s a difference between exploitation, toxic environment and those that aren’t,” he further explained.
Shreyas was offered the role of an Associate Product Designer with a package of Rs 7 LPA, which he considered “below fair median pay” given his two years of experience. He accepted the offer because it was fully remote, noting that he is open to working in an office, hybrid, or fully remote setup.
He also attached a screenshot of his resignation email in which he expressed serious concerns about his boss’s approach to work. “You’ve repeatedly made remarks about my activities outside of work hours, which I believe is highly inappropriate and unprofessional. What I choose to do in my personal time – whether it is exercising, spending time with my family, sleeping or reading books – is my prerogative and should not be subject to criticism,” Shreyas mentioned.
“Expecting work without fair compensation undermines both legal standards and the respect that every employee deserves,” he added and concluded the email with the words: “I believe it would be best for you to find another person who is willing to meet your expectations in the manner you desire. I hope you understand my decision, as I prioritise both professionalism and respect in my work relationships.”
Shreyas also shared the response he received from his boss over email. The boss acknowledged that both parties should find an employee and employer that align with their expectations. He noted, “Trying to close the gap between what was said and what was understood by both sides is not fruitful in this situation when there is a clear consensus on parting ways. There are definitely a few lessons that I have taken from this entire encounter, and I thank you for that.”
The boss also wished him luck in his “future endeavours” and confirmed that the payment for his one day of service would be processed by the accounts department.
Quit My Job on the 1st Day After Standing Up to a Toxic Boss. Email attached in the comments. byu/Old-Ad169 inindia
Earlier, a 42-year-old Bajaj Finance employee died by suicide after bosses allegedly forced him to pay for EMIs. Tarun Saxena, who had worked for Bajaj Finance for around eight years, left behind a suicide note addressed to his wife. In the note, Saxena revealed that he had been under immense stress due to pressure from his bosses, who were allegedly pushing him to either meet his targets or call it quits.
Responding to the incident, the company said in a statement that they are deeply saddened by the tragic loss of their employee and expressed their heartfelt condolences and full support to his family.
“Based on allegations, we have relieved the concerned employees of their current responsibilities and placed them on administrative leave, allowing for an unbiased and thorough investigation of the matter. We are also extending our full support to the authorities investigating the matter. We stand in support of Tarun’s family. Our thoughts and prayers are with them,” read a part of the statement issued by Bajaj Finance.
Work-life Balance is ‘Western Behaviour’
As a westerner, I rate this statement FALSE
Yeah, I quit one of my MSFT contract jobs a decade ago after 2 weeks. Team Lead verbatim told me he expected me to work overtime without pay, which is actually a breach of the contracting firm’s terms.
Applied as a DB admin and data analyst.
What this guy wanted me to do was make perfect little graphs in powerpoint for his slide deck meetings with superiors that were not actually possible to do with the visualization software provided.
So use paint! Use photoshop! Ok, follow his instructions verbatim. He comes back 2 hrs later, oh actually I think this minute detail should change and this color should be slightly less ‘bright’.
Ok, do that. 2 hrs later: No no no that’s too dark! That other change I asked you to make doesn’t look good, put it back!
The battle for work-life balance is in a far better state in most western economies (including the US) than it is in many developing economies like India. The middle class in India is like 2 generations old. The grandparents of the current middle class are still around and they remember how poor they were and how much has changed. Basically , for many Indian workers, hard work and perseverance on its own (from their perspective at least) had actually been a path to a better life. That social contract hasn’t yet broken the way it has in the west.
The problem with this is that it results in the workplace culture in the private sector in India being utterly abysmal. Somewhat comparable to western economies a century ago.
There is awareness of this of course, but change on this scale takes time.
The battle for work-life balance is in a far better state in most western economies (including the US) than it is in many developing economies like India.
Easy to say from an office suite in the downtown financial district than a slaughterhouse in Iowa or an Amazon Work Fulfillment Center or a prison farm in Alabama.
The problem with this is that it results in the workplace culture in the private sector in India being utterly abysmal.
Bosses will exploit their workforce as far as the workforce tolerates it (typically with the assistance of “business-friendly” state officials to compel obedience through debt or bondage). One of the major conflicts in India today is in the northern districts, where the Hindu nationalist state is trying to break the agricultural workers unions that date back to the 1950s when India was aligned with the USSR. If conditions are deteriorating abroad, it is largely because of the expansion of the police and military and the functional enslavement of working people under their domain. If they’re deteriorating at home… gestures towards the suppression of BLM street protests and the mass imprisonment of migrant workers… it’s the same picture.
change on this scale takes time
Conditions can change for the worse, and regularly do. But people quitting day one and making their outrage known is a good first step towards reversing the trend.
In my experience working in several countries in Europe and several industries (most of my career was as a Freelancer), it depends on the country an the industry.
thanks, that was a terrible experience this web page
That’s a really great way to sign off on obnoxious bosses tbh.
It’s fucked that this is even news. This should be the standard. Everyone should turn down scammers.
Is India ok?
India would be amy Libertarian’s wettest dream if only they weren’t incredibly racist. Worker’s rights are almost non-existent due to a neverending supply of fresh labor at any skill level, barely any environmental regulations enforced by the government, and is essentially just a capitalist free for all.
I’m gonna need someone to explain what libertarian is again.
This happens in america now in many states. In mine, if you are a salary employee who does not to the main thing that earns the company profit, so any support roles like HR, Accounting, Management, etc., then you are exempt from the provision that requires you be paid overtime.
In my state its also legal for an employer to fire someone who refuses to work overtime. There is only a requirement that hourly employees are paid for overtime.
My company tries to trick people into salary positions because they think its a better deal, and most of them end up making less than the hourly workers when averaged per hour.
Just looked at the chart of labor productivity per country, of the top 20, only found 1 non-western: Singapore ranked 19^th. Maybe western way is the better way
It’s not.
You think bosses demanding unpaid overtime is good?
Why are they bringing up INDIAN so many times, as if that makes any difference between a bad boss and a good one?
They’re bringing up Indians because the article is from an Indian news site. They mention the employer is Indian to show why some random Reddit thread is relevant to the Indian audience.
It’s completely devoid of any information. It reads like someone’s deranged aunt wrote it.
Gotta bring the racists in.
Also it is at least anecdotally known by a lot of people that Indian/Chinese and general Asian work culture is bad. A large supply of workers, caste systems, etc mean capitalism has been riding very high and very strong for a long time.
Brutal article. There’s exactly zero details of any of the involved parties.
Fuck you, and let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And I get paid.
But when you’re paid, do you always see the job through?
Certainly.
By the way: Nice hat.
Absolutelly the right decision - that kind of work environment is caustic and should be avoided like the plague.
I’ve made a career as a Software Developer, and as a Portuguese I started by working in Portugal, were that kind of shit is pretty common, and had a metal breakdown within 2 years (and we’re talking back when I was in my early 20s).
So after that I moved the The Netherlands which has a completelly different work environment, 100% respectful of employees’ work-life boundaries and of work-life balance. The funny bit is that my productivity working 8h/day in a Dutch management system was so vastly superior that I produced more in those 40h/week than I did before working 60h/week in Portugal and the product of my work was even higher quality.
You see, it’s not just that unpaid overwork is a fucking insult and that overworked people are more tired hence make more mistakes ending up wasting all those extra work hours and more fixing the mistakes they do from being overworked, it’s also that the kind of manager who thinks “more hours worked” = “more results” is invariably deeply incompetent at managing, at various levels: not just in their obvious inability to adequatelly balance the load on actual humans for maximum output (only an incompetent simpleton thinks more operating hours = more output for humans in a creative area), but also in things like operating in constant or near-constant reactive “firefighting” mode, doing little or no preparation and upfront analysis of what’s supposed to be done in a project, measuring all the wrong metrics (“bums on seats at late hours” rather than “requirement points implemented”), never accounting for unknown-unknowns and barelly for known-unknowns and hence always overrunning deadlines, generally causing massive wastage by having the wrong things done thus requiring and vastly inflating the costs of any issues because of, rather than having them spotted and prevented early one, only going after them when they’re turned into full massive problems at much later stages of a project when they cost many times more work to solve (and when fixing it generally leaves a trail of barelly-working hacked code prone to break and even outright bugs).
It’s the absolute total management incompetence of such managers than leads them to try to use the time of those employees put under their management way beyond what’s contractually agreed, always with no overtime pay so that their own extreme incompetence doesn’t stand out to upper management as massively inflated budgetary costs due to overtime pay.
Somebody at a news organization, being generous there probably, wrote an entire article about a Reddit post?
bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
Wow this site is cancer on mobile
itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
It’s a “news” article reporting on a Reddit post. My expectations were already low.
bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
I couldn’t even glean that info.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s literally unreadable to us. Thank you for the run down.
fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Unfortunately from my experience lots of Indian news websites are ad-infested hell-holes even with a good adblock. Nevertheless I felt this article was fit to post on this thread.
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 7 months ago
It does. I would have commented with the text of the article though. Considering the source. Live and learn.
tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I had to see for myself and I think my phone is infected.
bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
I’m so sorry :c
Kalkaline@leminal.space 7 months ago
Firefox+simple page mode+ uBlock Origin fixes most of the cancer.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I don’t care enough to read the article.
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 7 months ago
You ain’t kidding. FFox with ad blockers don’t even do anything to all the shit that popped up.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
interrobang@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
I’m using those and it still popped shit up, impressively cancerous site
bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
Pihole at home
RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m running Thunder on iOS. It automatically goes into reader mode.
No problem.
Pacmanlives@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I guess I missed it having mine on default to reader mode in Voyager