Successful resolution of labor-management dispute get.
To abridge a long story, the guy responsible for scheduling for our department screwed the pooch and just flat-out didn't have anyone on for the evening shift today. The schedule had been up for a week, but this was only noticed about three hours before that shift was due to start (and, as an aside, the nature of our operation is such that five people is the minimum safe number of crew, and that's if you have the supervisor working alongside everyone else). Myself and the two other older people on the morning shift quickly caught which way the wind was blowing, so it wasn't terribly surprising when, an hour later, we were bluntly informed that we were all going to be working a double -- note that this is before anyone made any effort to contact the dozen other men who were off that day.
Thankfully, the three of us had already agreed on solidarity (though the two younger guys folded -- fair enough, I tended to do that too when I was younger); I had a prior obligation, one of the others had to drive 100+ miles to spend his days off harvesting a large crop, and the third one was just plump tired. Of the three I'd been working there the longest, so I had a pretty good idea of how it'd go over, and talked the other two into a soft-touch approach; let the chief mate's rant run down, apologize and calmly inform him about our existing plans, point out that even being notified the night before would have been enough, &c.
We'd also managed to dig up a copy of the employee handbook, which was the only documentation discussing discipline and overtime; all it had was a two-sentence paragraph stating that workers who refused reasonable overtime requests (or who worked overtime without approval, obviously) could be written up. It didn't matter anyways, neither of the other two had ever seen or signed a copy, and the last time I'd signed one was the first time they hired me back in 2011 -- I'd quit and been rehired each summer subsequently.
So the long and the short of it was that the chief mate ranted and grumbled, made us spend the last hour or so doing shit work (literally, one of the other guys got sprayed with sewage), and flat-out said that nobody was allowed to ever make plans while working there, even for their days off (*snerk*), which is pretty much the same all-bark-no-bite crap he pulls whenever someone resists unreasonable demands.
All in all, it went better than the last time someone seriously challenged him (over his flat refusal to allow anyone to swap shifts because he didn't want to have to spend time talking to crewmen about it), which ended with him screaming and swearing at our senior-most crewman in front of two shifts of people and a couple customers.
Yay, work.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16285061 times)