askchapo

I notice in my slice of the world that around the beginning of every year the local management team gets pressured by their bosses to peddle more paperwork of them enforcing corporate laws on their workers as a part of a drive to fire people for whatever infraction they can get. It usually lasts for a month or two until they can satisfy whatever arbitrary quota their bosses set or the workers start getting pissed off enough they start doing shit to cut into company profits and timetables noticeably enough for the local managers to figure out they should ease off the toe-stepping before they really piss the people that makes the company materially function.

No. I kind of feel weird because I spend most of my day goofing off and managing/spamming my of, then for the 5th time in a row I get commended in my yearly reviews as one of the most valuable employees...

I think it's the downward effects of interest rates no longer making money essentially free for companies, which makes management pay even more attention to opportunities to optimize (read: exploit). Add that to the fact that outside of AI and tech companies exchanging briefcases full of money back and forth, global north economies barely grew, makes the pressures on margins even tighter.

That, and the labor market being fucked, means that the threat of someone jumping ship because of mistreatment has way less weight than it did a few years ago. What are you gonna do, quit and look for a job along with the other hundreds of unemployed people?

I work in a machine shop and they're firing people over increasingly petty bullshit. Work is genuinely slowing down due to a combination of increased raw material costs and our clients cutting orders as a negotiation tactic. I think management broadly (beyond this company) is cannibalizing their institutional knowledge as a cost cutting measure. There are few "old heads" left who know the operations and typical defects and failure modes inside and out.

It sounds like you’re suffering from management bloat. When you fuck up juuuuust enough to report the issue, bad number go up. When bad number go up people you’ve never met are saying “we must do something about this!” So they do a meeting about it, record the fact that they scolded you, send out a memo, etc etc whatever they can do to prove they did “something” aka superfluous managers trying to justify their existence.

Anecdotally, we do safety meetings first thing every morning. I think it’s a good concept even if it’s often an AI voice over video or a quiz on slips and falls. A few weeks ago I was coming into work closer to lunch time since I was only needed out there for lab work which wouldn’t be available to do until the afternoon. My field manager got pretty upset with me for missing the daily meetings. He straight up told me he was worried that if something happens while working out here someone will ask “well what was the morning safety meeting about??” 😑. At the end of the day most safety culture is about avoiding accountability 100 times over before it’s about keeping people safe. That’s capitalism for ya 🤗

They're being more strict about rules, like coming to team meetings/back from break on time and such.

I think it's just because we've had a bunch of layoffs, so the team is smaller. Easier to squeeze.

I'm doing well at work and it's happening with me too, which feels super weird. I'm getting compliments about my last big win in completely unrelated email chains, getting nice spot bonuses and invited to thank you lunches. But at the same time, I'm being asked to do a lot more paper work that's mostly just copy-paste and other general busy work that feels like huge wastes of time related to like new SOPs and task tracking.

Not really more aggressive but the leash is definitely getting shorter. Labor's slashed, rules are getting enforced, problematic people are being fired. Welcome to the recession.

As a matter of fact they have been pressing me lately

Shit, my ass got laid off months ago because way-up managers decided to shove the stick farther up their own ass to make line go up. The contradictions are increasingly apparent.

At any rate, your actual job requirements & duties always amount to "do the bare minimum that doesn't get me fired"; sounds like you're nailing it so far.

My old boss retired like 2 months ago and the new guy is just one of my former coworkers. He's pretty chill but seems to be under a lot of stress himself.