I used to shop at a kroger that had a UFCW sticker on the sliding doors out front. They represent 835,000 grocery workers. Unions have a strong foothold in American Grocery stores. Sounds like TJ’s needs em.
Not all locations, such as my local one, are unionized. Hopefully there is some good progress soon since some lawsuits against the unions were tossed out of court late last year.
Edit: Just want to clarify that the existence of unions doesn’t justify their anti-union rhetoric, I do believe that corporate is shitty. I recently learned about their union struggle and wanted to share the story
A TJ’s in my area unionized last year. I went there and congratulated as many staff as I could find. You could tell which way they voted by their response to my good tidings. Most seemed to really appreciate the support.
The employees, all of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, described ending their shifts exhausted after spending hours juggling dozens of tasks around the pharmacy without enough extra hands to support them.
Isn’t it weird that companies say they can’t hire anyone, but people also can’t find any jobs that are hiring?
Almost like CEOs want to hire the absolute minimum amount of people they need to and are just pretending to have openings they’ll never really try to fill.
The “no one wants to work” mantra is just simply a strategy to feed into conservative talking points on a wide variety of work policy issues. It’s just simply bullshit; somewhere there’s a meme that shows people using that quote for the last century and a half in American newspapers.
Personally, my theory is that the advent of “hiring algorithms” caused this. The widespread use of AI for weeding out candidates has gone way too far. These softwares are purging resumes of perfectly qualified candidates without the human hiring managers ever knowing about it.
That’s why every company right now is bitching that they can’t find anyone to hire while every unemployed person I know saying that jobs are impossible to get.
Anecdotally, that’s also why you get ghosted by companies instead of rejected. They have no idea you ever applied.
Fuck resume scanners and the horse they rode in on. It is exhausting tailoring every resume to the job posting because you might get dinged if you don’t use exactly the same words as what the job description says.
I get some of the issues (not talking about pharmacies here) because if you hire remotely you get swamped with resumes, if you don’t you only get the nearest people, not the best people.
Everyone loves to shit on HR in comment threads but if they have a series of processes that are well thought out they can be a benefit to employer and employee.
Fuck HR, for real. You guys can try to justify your existence all you want. The only benefit you have, and it’s a very small one at that, is to the employer.
Sure, but I’ve yet to see a profession as reviled as HR. That would include drug dealing. Maybe dentists? That’s all I can think of, top of my mind anyways.
Literally their entire profession consists of being a professional snitch and a gatekeeper.
These softwares are purging resumes of perfectly qualified candidates without the human hiring managers ever knowing about it.
I was watching an astronomer's channel the other day and she brought up how automated much of the initial processes are for telescopes now. She said a similar thing, wondering if there is good information in that filtering that is never seen by the humans who view the "sanitized" end product. Any tool is useful as long as you understand its limitations and don't have blind trust. I fear that somehow most people are using AI with a blind trust of the "intelligence" part, not understanding that it's hardly perfect and often times very bad if misused. Or overused for everything.
Meanwhile, back in reality, my company isn't upside down on commercial real estate & likes making more money so we are getting a smaller office to house our servers & equipment.
My company did the same. We had a six week assessment period where everyone was required to come in two days per week. Once that data showed no major difference in output, we got a smaller office (for receiving and such) and everyone was told the office is optional. Smart business that kept people happy.
Mine was a bit hesitant but they are now talking seriously about getting rid of more offices and they had done one pass on that before. I would sorta like them to have an office subscription
Find me a company deeply invested in office real estate (in particular, expecting a return on that real estate), and I’ll show you a company against remote work.
The real detriments don’t exist. True, I have met workers that don’t like remote work: companies have latched on to those people as an excuse to continue what is otherwise an entirely transparent narrative.
If anything I gain productivity by working from home. I see companies that don’t support that kind of work as entirely being behind the curve.
Quiet quitting has always referred to the extra bullshit that employers pressure employees into doing.
In America we've fallen into this work culture that implies you aren't really part of a team unless you are constantly putting forth more than what the employer is paying you for.
The undertone of this headline is that managers feel uneasy because so-called "quiet quitters" won't take on extra work or unpaid hours or exhibit overwhelming enthusiasm, but just do literally what they have to at a passable or high quality.
The gaslighting part is that those workers aren't doing anything wrong, but they aren't bending over backwards for their employers, so corporate America wants to paint the picture that those workers are awful time thieves instead of just burnt out wage slaves.
Oh absolutely. In Japan for example if you are unable to work or you get removed from your career, it is socially understandable for you to consider suicide. Lots of Japanese citizens put their job before even their families or the potential of having a family.
It's actually pretty fuckin crazy what Japanese work culture does to their citizens.
I've been reading Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and evidently they don't fire people in Japan. If they want rid of you, they just give you less and less to do until you're sitting in the office all day getting paid to do nothing, and the cultural expectation is that you quit out of shame rather than just accepting money for nothing.
Heh. I already am that, but I do have to work. It's not as hard as when I was digging ditches for a living, but it's definitely still work. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes there's a million things to do.
I'll be honest, I don't know if I have to work. I do, because I like the work and I like the company I work for a lot, but I'm fairly confident that I could just show up to meetings twice a week and fudge paperwork for quite a while before anyone caught on that I'm just a hole they're dumping money into.
I wonder if this also has something to do with the company itself avoiding shame too. Like firing an employee is a sign of weakness, that you hired someone like that in the first place? Or potentially a difference in benefits or a pension that they have to pay?
That's a thought I had as well, and based on my extremely limited knowledge and research I think it's the conflict that's being avoided. Rather than dealing with the person directly, you use indirect actions that signal the expected result when taken in that social context and then let the pressure of those expectations generate the result you need without you ever directly doing anything. My understanding is that the pressure is pretty enormous, your coworkers will basically shun you out of fear of being targeted themselves and resentment for all the work you're not doing that they have to pick up instead.
Look up China's 669 practice. South Korea is also known for having an especially brutal work culture. The two manage to make even Japan's work culture look almost reasonable by comparison (Japan famously requiring long hours and lifelong dedication to your employer).
The idea is that they complete tasks ahead of schedule and then slow play results to the predetermined deadlines. It's hilarious to me that people are saying this is a genZ thing, since this shit has been going on in tech fields forever. Literally everyone I have ever known has taken "working vacations" by pretending some work is taking longer than it really is.
Bonus points if you are smart enough to still turn it in a day early to keep the heat low.
Yep just me doing extra work for no salary... well. I dunno. Company just implemented a new bonus structure based on the hours you record per project. I know it's just so they can see who's underperformed to fire, but I might get quarterly bonuses now for working longer hours.
It’ll be on the 20th consecutive time they get caught, with each catch having to be in a new time period. And if they go a year month without offending getting caught their counter resets. Also, if they get a lawyer there’s an arcane legal process to instead jail the employee.
Almost like working remote makes sense if people can complete their whole job at home.
I’m doing one day a week in the office right now and I loathe that one day. Literally all of the servers and services I’m responsible for are hosted at Azure so it doesn’t matter where I’m at.
Yup, and anyone that complies but complains is automatically put under suspicion of "quiet quitting". It's all a huge fucking game, and you only learn the rules as you play and only if you pay close attention. Best to keep your head down and just comply quietly...until you can find something better before the next round of layoffs.
This. I've struggled to explain the general malaise, especially to older people, but you are completely right here. There is simply no point to anything anymore. Things used to operate such that hard work = reward. Now, the reward has been almost universally removed. The system itself is failing, and any hard work just makes some other rich person richer.
I’m a millennial too, and I see some of this but it only seems to be some industries. I’m a programmer and my coworkers are like 90% about “the grindset”, but people I meet who are in health and wellness are 90% the other way. I also feel like cities and large metros tend to be more focused on work, and less urban areas are more focused on living.
I would say a lot of millenials are this way too, and it’s not fair to say it’s just a gem z thing, but it’s far from the majority… At least around me. There seem to at least be pockets of it, but overall I feel like it’s closer to 20%.
With gen z, I feel like the people are way more heavily skewed the other way. I’ve had gen z general contractors and such just cut the bullshit, tell it like it is, and show that they value ME more than THEIR BOSS. It seems much more universal in their generation.
But that’s just my experience. I dunno which is more universal.
I feel like millennials have a “It is what it is, guess ill work til I die” attitude whereas Gen Z have more of a Bartleby the Scrivener “I’d rather not” energy.
Gen x here and we seen it coming as well but no options for us at the time. I don’t blame any of you. Corporate greed and the great 401k lie is bullshit. They want us to work till we’re dead. Screw them.
Can't speak for OP, but I don't look at the 401k as a stable retirement vehicle. It's a vehicle to pump "dumb money" (read: casino chips) into the stock market. If the stock market downturns just before you retire, if the firm managing your 401k makes bad investments, if another 2008-style real estate collapse happens, your retirement fund suddenly has less money in it than you hoped, so you're gonna have to work longer.
if the firm managing your 401k makes a bad investment
The administrator of your accounts has zero control over most of the funds available in them, their rise or fall, and your funds are separate from any investments that financial institution may or may not have made.
If you have a 401k with fidelity, or ADP or Schwab or Trowe Price or whoever, some of those are banks, soke finance companies, some payroll, anyway, the point is for each, the money in your account is yours to allot and invest as you wish based on yhe invesrment options your company chose or negotiating with them to administer your company’s plan. The admin makes money by admin fees, not by taking your money and reinvesting it in something you don’t know about. Granted, yes if there is a stock market crash, most financial companies will similarly overall struggle, but they have lots of arms and operations (mortgage loans, commercial, consumer banking, investment banking, etc.) and they are 100% all disconnected from the money in your 401k.
That said, 401ks are awful and a sham that were pushed on an uninformed public and we’ve only just begun to see the effects as the first generation reaches end of work age…and can’t stop working. It’ll continue. Props to anyone fighting and organizing against it or trying to avoid as much as possible. System fully bought and broken by greed.
What’s the point of your first two paragraphs? The person you responded to is 100% right. The point is to pump money in to the fuckin stock market so the wealthiest people can profit off that “investment”
The point was is the plan administrator has no control over whether the value of his account goes up and down, which Op said they did. I agree with everything else Op said but think it’s important since most people don’t understand the mechanics to learn about them so added the correct info.
When the plan administrator is picking the stocks in their “Target Retirement 2055” account, I’d say they have a large amount of control.
Now the S&P 500? Probably no control. But is it truly the S&P 500 or some bull shirt index fund from the 401k provider that’s not 100% following the S&P 500?
The portion of the comment I replied to, which I highlighted at the top of my response was that Op had said that “if the company managing your 4401k makes a bad investment”, concerned that (among Ops other accurate concerns) your 401k funds could be used elsewhere without your knowledge or permission by the plan administrator, which they can’t. So I corrected it.
Lazy people immediately REEE when someone doesn’t immediately jump on the tribal circle jerk and agree even when parts of a statement are incorrect. Ops point was overall correct and a good one and correcting something that was wrong doesn’t mean I disagree with the rest of it. Lookup false dichotomy.
the money in your account is yours to allot and invest as you wish
While true, I'm not an investor, I'm a software engineer. I don't know good investments from bad, so if I tried to invest myself as an uninformed person, odds are good I will lose a lot of money very quickly. And becoming an informed investor is a lot of time and effort I don't have. I rely on the managed plan because I know there are professionals handling it.
based on the investment options your company chose or negotiating with them to administer your company’s plan.
My employer actually switched our 401k's from ML to John Hancock. I had no say in this, I don't know if JH is more or less competent as a firm than ML. So if I have fewer choices because I don't know how to invest and would prefer someone to manage it, I have even fewer choices because I don't even get to choose who manages it.
That said, 401ks are awful and a sham that were pushed on an uninformed public
This is where we most agree. Most people don't know how to invest, so they either let the retirement funds handle it, or they try it themselves. If they try it themselves, they either have to learn how to invest, or they have to get lucky. If the funds handle it, they can be lured in by "stable, lucrative" investments that turn out to be bad, like Mortgage-Backed Securities. Even informed investors can lose money. No matter which path we follow, it all becomes gambling in the end. It's unacceptable that retirement funds are treated as such.
The 401k replaced the pension. It used to be that a company would pay for your retirement, now you pay for your own by being forced to pay into the stock market, and it doesn’t go nearly as far as the pensions used to. People are working well into their 60s or older, because 401k’s often don’t pay out enough to live on. It’s another way that companies have figured out to avoid having to pay their employees while pumping up the value of the stock market at the same time.
In the late 80s and early 90s, all the badly managed companies went bankrupt and convinced business friendly judges to delete pensions, too expensive, you see. This left a lot of boomers and their parents with nothing all of a sudden.
The 401k problem is that you are now responsible for managing things and all the liability that brings. Pensions were managed by professionals.
As a millennial: I think it’s the dichotomy between “I play the game even though I hate it because it genuinely feels like the only viable option to have a remotely satisfying life” and “fuck the game”.
As an older Gen Z I concur. Even those of us who aren’t completely fucked are extremely anti-corporate with little loyalty to any job. There’s a guy named Jordan Howlett who I feel sums up the average Gen Z attitude towards all the bullshit in the world really well.
Don’t get me wrong I still work hard and try to do well at my job, but the second I hit my time for the day I’m gone. Work is strictly transactional. No one expects their employer to give them money for time they didn’t work, so I ain’t about to give my employer time for money they didn’t give me. They’ll also fire my ass the second they need a stock bump, so I’ll be damned if I’m gonna stick around if I find something better.
Actually the biggest difference I’ve seen isn’t in effort but ability. I work with everyone from Boomers to Gen Z and by far my Gen Z coworkers have the hardest time with being given a general task and completing it without detailed instructions. Even with detailed instructions, I often have to repeat the instructions due to mistakes and check my younger colleagues’ work more closely.
I think this is, in part, because Gen Z grew up with things that just worked or that they needed to go to a third party to fix if there were issues. Boomers fixed their own cars and did a lot of DIY home repair, Gen X and Millenials both learned to navigate computers and the internet before there were any real instructional guides or helpful UIs. Shit, we used to program games on our calculators for fun. I think many in Gen Z just never had that because many of those DIY elements require proprietary tools now. A smartphone just works and is designed to be so intuitive a baby can figure it out. It’s not their fault, but it does mean that some critical thinking skills are absent because they’re used to outsourcing the solutions to those problems.
But, again, I have never perceived that they’re not hard workers. On the contrary, I’d argue my Gen Z coworkers, when they’re on their game, are way more efficient than everyone else and definitely work smarter, not harder, which I try to learn from them.
I manage teams at a university. Gen Z types tend to be very motivated but won’t easily do useless busy work just cuz you think they should. You need to motivate them. That’s the boss’ job, though.
The real problem was the previous generations who happily devoted themselves to their bosses getting richer.
That’s pretty true of every generation. If you give anyone a seemingly boring task with no explanation why it matters, they’re going to suck at it. What I’m saying is I can’t give my Gen Z coworkers an open ended task without detailed instructions, even when I explain why it’s important.
Man, I barely graduated from high school because I saw the entire thing as busy work.
My grade in any class was dependant on how much the tests were weighed versus any class or homework. Sleeping or reading through class was my usual.
Now that I’m older I see the value in building the discipline needed to do that sort of busy work because if I don’t my house falls apart and such, so there’s that.
I wish it didn’t take me so long to learn it though.
The other half that a lot of kids (me included when I was younger) miss is the stuff that seems useless is still building a base of knowledge and shaping how you think critically. Just knowing more stuff allows you to connect more things in your head, enabling you to problem solve in completely unrelated areas better. It’s not obvious how helpful that knowledge foundation is until you have more life experience.
“Jassey deflected questions on what data or information led him to make this decision. Jassey, seemingly losing patience, eventually warned employees that if they don’t return to the office, they may have to find employment elsewhere.”
So he doesn’t have a good reason, and when asked about it he started to “lose patience”? How dare anyone question the all mighty CEOs plans /s
we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so.
I really wish they'd give a real reason for it. Just say "When we built our offices we negotiated with the city to have lower taxes and if you don't come back we'll lose that." Or "We don't want the value of our commercial real estate holdings to go down."
At the very least the workers could be mad at the right thing. Instead Amazon is going to lose its best folks to fully remote jobs first, then backfill with people who aren't able to get a WFH job or have to pay people a huge premium to attract remote workers back to the office.
That will hurt them worse than the taxes or real estate devaluation, but that will happen over years instead of by next quarter, so they don't care.
I work at Amazon, and for many people this is what annoys people the most.
Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people like Amazon because it pushes the narrative that data is king. If you want to do something, you need the right data and figures to justify it.
Since Jassy took over, Amazon mimicked other tech companies by becoming a belief-driven company, instead of a data-driven company. The reason he’s losing patience is because his belief is being questioned, at a time where his leadership is either being questioned or being followed right to the top.
Data at Amazon has never been king, it was lip service at best and in most case it was only ever to be used to attack someone else’s position, never to support your own.
FWIW, I fully agree, and I’ve seen countless examples of managers using LP’s as a weapon to fuel URA or to promote their own views.
The view is distorted in that the people that Jassy is pissing off are those that benefited and thrived under the reign of Bezos. IMO, he would’ve done the exact same thing, but that doesn’t stop the Amazon cult from remembering “the good old days”.
I always upvote Noodle. This specific video led me to leave my workplace abuse as a dev, and just about just about everyone else I worked with left as well once they saw people leaving. We’re all much happier for it. I wish we had a union, because I loved those people and wanted to work with them forever, but we all had to move on.
Agreed. I think he got kinda uppity about people putting animations through AI that increased the frame rate, but other than that he’s chill, and one of the less cringe tubers.
I think I read that this is mainly for the VFX people who need to be on-set (since they need to make sure that what is being shot will then be usable for compositing and adding VFX, etc. Those are the people who can’t be offshored. Can they be contractors? Maybe, but maybe the other unions for the other people on the set might refuse to work with non-union contractors.
So I’m not sure how this will affect the VFX contractors who do the VFX work that comes after principal photography.
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