The toxicity of the Anglosaxon business model trickles downwards. The dude likely gets yelled at in the same way by his slightly superior in similar unfair ways of blaming the underlings for problems the superior caused. It is unavoidable in a culture where 'do what the boss tells you no matter what' is normative.
Lol too right unfortunately. Luckily my boss is amazing, but even if he is fantastic we have a work culture of unnecessary matyrdom and general structural dysfunction. The top leadership posts where actual budgetary power & authority to hire and fire resides is treated like a member's only club where friends of the club and family of the club keep getting promoted up, and any consequences of their actions get forwarded on to ground level employees.
It also ends up creating the paradox of the self-valuation ouroboros. No one is assessed on their achievements of research, contributions of funds or qualifications. Rather, they are assessed on how senior they are and how much they are paid. The more seniority you have, the more you are promoted up. For the rest, they will never get promoted, because they never get promoted. If they got promoted, they would get promoted. But they won't, because they won't. This is enforced by the state too, since the state is the largest employer of healthcare workers and the baseline wage-setter that even the private sector uses as a guideline. So it gets very grim if the state decides nurses are unskilled workers, because their productivity is assessed by their salary. According to the government, a nurse does £27,000 worth of productivity, because they are paid £27,000. Therefore they shouldn't be paid well, because they aren't paid well.
I remember during covid they stiffed me out of the starting pay grade I was promised, and kept verbally (but not in writing) promising I'd eventually be brought up to grade 4 - what I was promised to start at. Instead I started grade 2. I was actually struggling to afford to come to work and my health was declining to the point where I told them I would not even be usable to them anymore, and after keeping me on 14 months of rolling contracts temp contracts (the statuatory limit here was 6, and several times they contacted me asking me to come to work only to be surprised when I told them I was no longer employed there & as such no longer allowed to work there), offered me a permanent grade 2. I refused and they offered me grade 3, which I accepted, but immediately kept pushing for grade 4. Around this time, I joined with one lady and two male philippino nurses. The woman was expecting child soon and needed a permanent contract for maternity leave, and couldn't afford to risk fighting them and having her contract delayed / not renewed. So they kept her on grade 2. The two philippino nurses were promised grade 4 as well, but were kept on grade 3. After another year, my health got bricked catching covid, with a month of coughing up blood and phlegm, losing 15% of my muscle mass in that month.
But at least I could actually afford to live decently on pay grade 3. To save on travel fare I just walked 7 miles a day lol. But my philippino colleagues were struggling with travelling costs + the costs of supporting their families, whilst my female colleague was depending on government subsidies (as her pay was so low she still qualified for them - these subsidies being given to people unable to support themselves) and her husband. I kept arguing with leadership, upper leadership started avoiding me, but going through my director I kept arguing that we were structurally discriminating against people based off their race & visa status or gender status, and it was only a matter of time before we got sued and deserved it (we are being sued twice now. They didn't listen to me). I complained about the actual corruption going on at the top and told him I don't care what they're doing, I can't stop them, but we need to look after our own before we let them loot our coffers.
I said it was ridiculous everyone being told that we can't increase their salary by £2,000 when the C-suiters were hiring their neices and nephews on £70,000 salaries despite being unusable for any job. My boss kept trying to assuage me by stressing our collective financial difficulties, the COO told me were were all in the same boat, and my boss stressed that during the pandemic when people were losing their jobs & getting pay cuts I was the only one who got a pay raise. My second boss reminded me how much I costed, to which I replied to both that I was still yet to reach the starting line of what they promised, and I hoped they would view me as an asset not a liability when I cost £28,000 a year but brought in three quarters of a million pounds. This didn't go very far, until at a big Christmas conference event, where all the top research professors were all just mingling together, my boss bumped into another research director and asked him how things were going. This other research director started describing this new technician they were looking to hire, and to my boss's horror he recognised the description as me
So yeah he put his nose to the grind to "correct historical wrongs," and one of the philippino nurses and I basically ended up spearheading a winter of discontent until our wages got bumped up a grade. What surprised me at this stage, was that after successful negotiations with the bossmen, the greatest resistance we had was not with the leadership, but with the middle-management and doctors. A lot of the nurse managers and the sub-investigator doctors kept trying to convince me to stop organising with other staff, kept arguing to leadership that I and my colleagues did not deserve the pay, kept making very patronising comments to us and behind our backs. A lot of them had been stuck on pay grade 4 for 15 years and were adamant that we were not worth the same as them. When upper leadership brought this to my attention I pointed out that they were correct; they should probably be on grade 7+ lol. So why get mad if I ask for my worth. They tried to convince me to settle for grade 3 in order to avoid pissing off all the long time veterans (pissing them off is a fatal career ender and I like them all, even if they didn't like me). I made it clear everyone would just quit, and sure enough everyone started quitting. I expected they'd only give us all grade 4, so I asked for grade 5 and then we compromised on grade 4. For the long time old guard my boss managed to get them moved up to grade 5, after which they changed their mind about me and apologised!!! LOL!
But I kept on going on, which again ruffled feathers and upper leadership kept distancing themselves from me more and more until they started avoiding me completely. Which was a shame but not much I can do about it. I continued lobbying through my boss to grow our team but they couldn't get any money from the upper leadership released, which was ludicrous considering how much surplus my team was bringing in. But it always felt like one step forwards two steps back. E.g. I accidentally discovered high level corruption & medical fraud in the leadership, which was fortunately being investigated by an outside professor so my NHS boss said keep your head down.
But it disturbed me to find that the fraud was being shielded by the 2nd most powerful person in our organisation and the woman they put in charge of conducting the internal investigation was a former PhD student of the guy accused of fraud, and has a long known history of bullying junior employees. I remember speaking to my boss about a shady cabal trying to build up a case to fire our pharmacist, who had suffered a stroke. My team wanted him put on medical leave so he could claim his pension early, but if he was fired with cause, it would just look like he was incompetent. Upper leadership feigned ignorance, wondering why everyone believed they were coming after our pharmacist, even though they were the only ones with the authority to initiate such proceedings. After industrial action from unions (our research unit has no union representation or activity), they withheld the pay rises of everyone, except themselves, as their pay is set by a separate renumation committee (they are on the committee).
A large number of people continued to have their pay withheld, including me, in what I suspect was retribution for digging too deep into the aforementioned shady corruption. I sent a very threatening email to HR pointing out they are just breaking the law lol and they gave me my money back, but my nurse colleague who had fought with me all the way to grade 4 said he couldn't be asked to fight and fight and fight and just quit to go work at King's College Hospital. When I raised that it was very likely other employees had "mistakenly" had their pay rises withheld, management and leadership both kept telling me they would arrange a meeting with everyone affected, and asked me not to contact people directly to avoid causing an unnecessary scare (they of course, never did conduct any such meetings). Ended up losing a lot of good people who brought in loads of money and helped so many patients because HR wanted to screw them out of pennies. We lost a cardiovascular nurse who brought in a surplus of £600,000 because HR wanted to stiff him out of £1,000. Breh. They kept trying to bring in new hires on grade 2 but eventually me and my dwindling roster of allies managed to get it so new hires would start on a middling grade 3. We stressed this was the bare minimum a skilled graduate with no work experience
needed just to afford living in London. Truthfully, they should start on more, but politically speaking we are only allowed so many grade 4s and above. I kept arguing that was stupid and people should be paid what they're worth, not paid what we can bully them into accepting, but such is life.
I've been gone on jury service for 4 months now. I briefly visited work to check on my boss, and tell HR not to terminate my contract whilst I'm still on jury service lololol. I asked him how things were in my absence. He said "things don't improve unless we're all around." In that time I was gone they reverted new hires back to grade 2.
Coincidentally, whilst working there I never recovered from covid, even after 4 years. Being stuck away from work for 4 months, I made a full recovery. Work was fucking me up that badly lmao. It's just a constant kafka-esque circus "oh we all have to make sacrifices, that's why we drove this world class nurse away. We just don't have money to spare for an expectant mother who is great at her job and exceeded all targets. But then they give six figs to people who nearly bankrupted us, are nakedly corrupt, we even had one manager who was so bad she got fired - and after we fixed the deficit she left behind, they brought her back and used our surplus to promote her. Alas, I constantly run into the never-ending emotional whiplash of being praised for good results and saving the unit from bankruptcy only to be told there's no money and I haven't done enough.
I remember having a very hilarious deadpan interview with two directors and one of the nepotism-hire managers. The nepotism manager asked me why I thought I could do the job when I applied for a higher grade job posting. I gave a very eloquent description of why I could do the job, because I was doing the job every day. For them. LOLOLOL. One of the co-directors literally told me it wouldn't have been possible to get our unit solvent again without the efforts of people like me, only to follow it up with a disparaging comment about how I did not do enough to justify grade 4. I commented that grade 4 is given to a graduate with
no work experience, according to our own pay scale. So I asked what I would need to do to justify grade 4, writing down everything they said, after pointing out that in multiple trials I was #1 in the country for patient randomisation & recruitment. He just gave this deflating sigh like "yes I know this is stupid but I don't control the purse strings." You can literally be the best in the country and be told you need to get better. But you can literally be unusable and never stop getting promoted. I have managers attached to my work who go to conferences talking about the great strategic leadership they gave me, and I have never seen them once in my life >_<
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 15507752 times)