r/antiwork

I (40F) recently had a job interview for a director level position. I wore a black business jacket, black pants and a hunter green blouse. Interview was with their C-Suite hiring manager and HR VP.

I was later told that they liked me, but they didn't like that I wore a suit.

To clarify, this was at a very white collar, very finance oriented company. Everyone else was was also very formal.

The eff was I supposed to have worn?

Edit: I didn't get the job.

since management cares more about us being visible at our desks than our actual output, i just play the game.

i have a dummy python script running on my second monitor that just slowly prints out hundreds of lines of simulated server logs. if a manager walks by or checks my screen share, it looks like im deep in the matrix monitoring a massive data pipeline deployment. in reality im usually just reading or planning my weekend.

ive used it to buy myself at least 2 hours of peace every single friday. i call it acting my wage.

what is your most elaborate fake work routine to survive the corporate panopticon? i need to take notes.

I have been at my company for four years. I know my job. I am reasonably good at my job. Last month my manager sent a calendar invite titled Future of Work Integration Workshop, with no other context and I made the mistake of assuming this was going to be something useful.

There were twelve of us in a conference room at nine in the morning. The consultant was a man in a very confident blazer who opened by asking us to let go of our assumptions about what work means. It was nine fifteen. I had not finished my coffee. I was not prepared to let go of anything.

For the next three hours he walked us through a presentation about how AI was going to transform our workflows and how we needed to lean into the transition. Every slide had a stock photo of a person looking thoughtfully at a laptop. Every talking point was something I had already read in a LinkedIn post. At one point he said the phrase "human in the loop" four times in one paragraph and I wrote it down because I needed to do something with my hands.

The actual content of the training was this: he read our job descriptions back to us and then suggested we think about which parts of our jobs could theoretically be automated. That was it. That was the three hours. We were essentially asked to build the case for our own redundancy while a man in a blazer facilitated the conversation and charged the company what I can only assume was an extraordinary amount of money for the privilege.

At the break I went and sat in a bathroom stall for ten minutes just to be somewhere quiet. I was scrolling through my phone with the hollow energy of a person who has just been asked to dig their own professional grave and decorate it nicely and I ended up on some random website that I must have visited before because it was in my history, just sitting there reading it blankly, not even taking anything in, just needing to look at something that was not that presentation.

I went back in for the second half. The consultant asked us to share what tasks we thought AI could take over. My colleague David, who has worked there longer than any of us, said probably this meeting and nobody laughed harder than the people who had been there longest.

We got a follow up email the next day with a PDF summary of the workshop. The PDF was eleven pages. It contained nothing that was not already in the presentation. I have not opened it since.

The consultant's LinkedIn says he has helped over two hundred companies navigate the future of work. I think about David's comment a lot.

In a nearly unanimous vote, Nexteer Automotive workers in Saginaw, Michigan rejected a concessions-laden contract backed by the United Auto Workers. According to UAW Local 699, workers rejected the deal by 96.2 percent, with 98 percent of production workers and 82.8 percent of skilled trades workers voting down the UAW-backed deal.

The vote was a staggering rebuke to UAW President Shawn Fain and the Local 699 leadership, which attempted to ram through a contract that would pay $19 an hour to new hires, expand the hated two-tier wage and benefit system, and impose higher out-of-pocket health care expenses for workers hired after May 2021.  

I’m unfortunately in a leadership role at a large retail chain in the United States. Recently during one of our leadership meetings the topic of bathroom breaks was brought up, and we were told that team members are supposed to use the bathroom on their breaks, and that frequently using the bathroom outside of your breaks is not allowed unless you have an accommodation. I think this is ridiculous and I’m wondering if it’s even legal? I’m on a medication that requires me to drink a lot of water so I have to use the bathroom pretty frequently. I always try to go on my breaks but a lot of days that’s just not enough.

At my work we don't punch out for lunch, we just take it when we can and at the end of each pay period they deduct 2.5 hours of overtime from our time cards. Obviously, I'm not getting any of that overtime paid to me. At the end of every day my hours will read as 8.5, but when I get my paystub back it only shows that I worked 80 hours. I honestly wouldn't have an issue with this if I was actually getting to take my lunch, but the problem is I'm not. I have too many things to do and I've been told outright that I don't have time to take a lunch - not by my manager, who does tell me to take a lunch if she's around, but by a senior coworker who was supervising my training.

As far I know, in my state employers are not required to give employees lunches. We are SUPPOSED to take them, since we're scheduled for 8.5 hours and only getting paid for 8 of those. I don't think editing my punch card is legal but I don't know for sure what my grounds are if I were to approach them about this. I don't want to lose my job.