Archives for August 2017 | Working Stiffed

There is a deep state coup in the works right now that stands to destroy the Trump-driven economic recovery we are currently experiencing, as well as our constitutional republic. This is a most frightening development for the millions of Americans who are finally starting to get back on their feet after suffering economic destitution during Obama’s divisive, un-American eight-year reign. Lies and misery will be that clown’s legacy.

I make this observation from personal experience, not force-fed, regurgitated talking points from MSM or alternative media outlets. During Obama’s last five years in office, I came close to losing everything I had worked hard to attain throughout my 35-year career, including my home.

I enjoyed a moderately successfully career in middle management until the company I worked for was acquired by a competitor in 2011. That’s when my nightmare began. I was one of many casualties of the merger & acquisition (M&A) craze that has infested our economy in the 21st century, antitrust laws be damned. Monopoly is not only a board game, it’s the new normal for Corporate America.

I wasn’t immediately concerned when I was displaced, because I was very good at my job and had excellent references. I wasn’t prepared for the radical changes that had taken place under Obama’s then two-year tenure as president.

I soon discovered that the gig economy was being peddled as the new norm and full-time jobs had disappeared. Obamacare made employers resistant to hiring full-timers and I found myself competing against a flood of H1-B Visa employees or cheap offshore labor. I was stuck in a transient employment hell world. Since I live alone and support myself, this was a disastrous situation.

As the years ticked by, I found myself lurching from one short-term “gig” to the next, sometimes going months between assignments. While I waiting for Obama’s “hope” and “change” to kick in, I nibbled away at my modest nest egg until it was almost depleted. And when I needed to withdraw money from my 401(k) to pay my bills and eat, I was penalized, despite being just a few years short of the being eligible to withdraw these funds without penalty.

Obama never waived these penalties or offered any assistance to the middle class workers who were sliding into impoverishment; in fact, he worked overtime to hasten our demise by pushing for the job-killing, globalist screw job known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He had fundamentally transformed America, all right, but not in the way he led most of us to believe he would when he bullshitted us into voting for him (twice, in my case).

Because of Obamacare, I went without insurance for two years. I couldn’t afford it and, to add insult to injury, I was subjected to penalties, which, duh!, I couldn’t afford, either. Medicaid wasn’t an option, because I managed to keep a couple of thousand in the bank.

For the first time in my life, I was uninsured and I was over 50. The blows kept coming and, like millions of other middle class U.S. citizens, I was sliding into the abyss. When I hear people say now that they wish Obama was still president, I’m sorry, but I want to hit them in the face with a shovel.

The day that Trump was elected, I had not had a single job prospect in five months and my home (which I love so much) had been on the market for a month. As hard as it was to have real estate agents show my beloved home, I prayed I could sell it before I ran out of money. I knew that if Hillary Clinton won, it would be game over for me.

I’m not surprised there’s an opioid epidemic; millions of Americans like me were made punch drunk with despair during Obama’s presidency. I never succumbed to the need to numb my pain or disengage from my hideous reality, but I can certainly understand why some people chose that dark road.

I was on my knees praying to God for an answer; a way out. Days later, Trump won the election and my life was transformed almost overnight.

Four days after Trump’s election, I got an offer for a full-time job. The pay wasn’t great, but it allowed me to pay my bills and take my home off the market. It was a real job with benefits. My phone started ringing and my email was filling up with job prospects (they still are). It was unreal! Four months later, I got another job making twice as much money. There is no question that Trump made all of this happen.

It didn’t surprise me to hear this week that during the first six months of Trump’s presidency, a million jobs were created and that investors in the stock market have made $4 trillion! And now that Trump has deep-sixed the Obamacare penalty and is tightening up immigration and work visa policies, wage growth is starting to become a reality after decades of stagnation!

The deep state doesn’t want to let Trump “Make America Great Again.” They are censoring or downplaying reports of the Trump recovery and they are openly calling for a coup.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, along with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, went on Wolf Blitzer’s show a couple of weeks ago and called for a bipartisan Congressional coalition to remove Trump from office if he fired special prosecutor Mueller (the Clinton operative who was appointed to investigate Trump-Russian collusion, despite no evidence that any crime was committed).

A few days later, former Vice President Al Gore went on James Corden’s show and said that a “challenging event” is imminent regarding Trump. Really? What? An assassination, maybe? Why these treasonous piles of excrement haven’t been arrested, thrown in a dungeon and charged with sedition and/or treason is beyond me. Clearly, these traitors, minions of the deep state, are planning a coup.

Let me tell you something: the millions of Americans who are just starting to crawl out of Obama’s economic destitution pit are not going to take this lying down.

The elites and snowflakes who flipped out when Crooked Hillary lost, insist on calling us homophobic, misogynists and/or racists. They refuse to acknowledge that we voted for Trump, because we were being suffocated into nonexistence as a result of Obama’s policies…the same policies that Hillary Clinton was committed to maintaining and expanding.

These accusations were particularly hurtful to me as a lesbian who fought for LGBT rights in the 80s and 90s. I lost a lot of friends, as a matter of fact: people who have known me for decades unfriended me on Facebook and no longer speak to me. I thought these people knew and cared about me, but the mass mental illness that has resulted from the constant stream of hate and lies MSM and Hollywood are vomiting every minute has distorted their sense of reality.

Millions of friendships, marriages and family relationships all of over the country have been destroyed by this massive, collective manipulation. What the globalist, deep state propagandists are doing is positively diabolical.

As hurtful as these losses have been, I know they won’t compare to the devastation we will experience if we let these treasonous, un-elected members of the globalist deep state “eliminate” our president. It will mean the end of our country and dark days for all Americans.

You just started a new job and you discovered that your manager is too busy to manage; they’re not available to provide you with any sort of orientation, thorough understanding of the expectations they have of you or the resources you need to achieve those expectations. Sound familiar?

We hear it in every job interview: hiring managers say they’re looking for a “self-starter” who can “jump in” and “run with the ball.” We should run… for the nearest exit, but how many of us can afford to these days? “Self-starter” terminology is the calling card of a “drive-by” manager who will have zero time for you from day one, but who’ll expect you to hit it out of the park while blindfolded.

You’ll spend too much time hunting them down to get clarity or direction on a project; sometimes you’ll need to catch them on the way to the bathroom, and they’ll wave you off by telling you to look for stuff on a network drive filled with hundreds of mysteriously labeled folders or the company’s poorly designed intranet site, which has limited search capabilities.

Sometimes, they’ll tell you to reach out to “Jack” or “Cindy”…and neglect to tell you their last name or function. This is how EVERY major company in the U.S. runs these days.

Often, there isn’t even someone on your “team” who can provide you with any guidance in your manager’s absence. I remember when companies filled departments with people who served a specific function. Today’s masters of the universe assign one person to handle the workload of three or more people. That’s why the corridors of Corporate America are filled with bleary-eyed zombies who frequently miss lunch and subsist on 10 hours of sleep a week. It’s a wonder any organization can run at all.

Limited or non-existent support personnel are not the byproduct of the wonders of technology; they’re the result of bipolar leadership enamored with achieving “economies of scale;” translation: if they hire fewer people, they get to keep most of the money. And they do.

Data from annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) found that in 2014, senior executives made 949 times more money than the average worker; a far greater margin than the 271:1 ratio the Economic Policy Institute reported last month. How far have we fallen? Fifty years ago, the ratio was only 50:1.

Dis-organization Structure

You may have noticed that your company has a boatload of executives who make fat salaries and either do nothing at all, or they spend their days behind closed doors with other senior management/executive colleagues reviewing PowerPoints of plans or strategies that will never be implemented (either because of lack of funds or because other priorities emerged to make that priority obsolete before they broke for lunch).

Sometimes, they’ll forget to tell the minions putting in late nights and weekends working on the now-obsolete priority project that it’s been scrapped until days (and many work hours) later.

Most mid-sized or large organizations have a C-suite Chief “Something-or-other” Officer who reports to the CEO. The unpopular member or idiot of the C-suite bunch is undermined with a “non-C” title of executive vice president; reporting into the ruling classless are too many senior vice presidents, vice presidents, assistant vice presidents and directors—this is where all the “Game of Thrones”-like activity takes place.

While the execs indulge in leadership turf wars and useless, daylong meetings, the managers, specialists or coordinators (who are excluded from the Big Dog huddles) handle the day-to-day activities that keep the lights on, despite not being involved in any key decision-making discussions.

This would all be laugh-out-loud funny if wasn’t so physically, emotionally and, yes, fiscally detrimental to the well-being of all employees. C-suite wannabees are so caught up in the politics of managing up and jockeying for position that they don’t lead their employee(s) or keep them up to speed on important company- or industry-related issues; often, worker bees get their company information from external media sources.

But somehow, they are expected to know all and to deliver on a moment’s notice. Sometimes, you’ll get a call or email at some ungodly hour of the night or on the weekend with an “urgent” request to handle something in an hour that would ordinarily take a week.

The odds are good that your boss received the information or request more than a week earlier, but they just got around to opening the email…or they knew about it, but were so busy with other “priorities” that it fell through the cracks and now they’ve made it your monkey at (literally) the eleventh hour. Obviously, you should have been included in the meetings on the issue.

Dysfunction Junction

At some point after a couple of months on the job, your drive-by manager may become inpatient with having to “micromanage” you, because you run everything past them before sharing it with high level stakeholders. Because of their lack of sleep, they forget that the week before they told you to run everything past them. How do you manage sleep-deprived, malnourished, overwork-related psychosis? And how can you not be paranoid that your contributions might be off the mark?

Should you point out to your boss that they are habitually unavailable to provide appropriate guidance to help you get to the level where you can feel comfortable with your output, or do you shut up, wing it and hope you get it right? Lose-lose. If you miss the mark too often, you’re out of a job. And if you tell your boss he or she is a lousy manager, you’re out of a job.

What happened to “working smarter?” It seemed to begin its slide into oblivion around the 2008 financial collapse, and now it looks like they finally slapped the toe tag on it. That’s too bad.

I recall when a well-staffed team led by a capable director got things done quickly and efficiently. Companies that are top-heavy with low- or unproductive executives, drive-by managers and one or two disconnected worker bees are spending a whole lot of money to yield little or nothing in return. We’re not overachieving; we’re just overworked…and overdue for smarter, focused and attentive leadership.

Month: August 2017

The Deep State Coup of Trump Will Kill Economic Recovery

When Your Manager is too Busy to Manage