Employment Policies Enforced Wrongly

Contract Clauses I have been asked to tell a story about an instance in which I was treated unfairly in the workplace.

The details that will be provided and/or questions answered will include what happened with the instance in question, what type of supposed violation it was, what was done to address the unfair treatment, whether I used formal means to address the issue, why (if applicable) formal means were skipped, whether the matter was adequately addressed, whether some sort of dispute resolution would have worked better and what impact not resolving the issue may have had.

While there are many instances where disputes and miscues can be corrected, blind and sweeping policies that are enforced with no consideration of the context are not just and should never be in place. Analysis I will speak of a former job situation where there was a production quota. Per the parameters and advice of the assignment, I will not be specific about the employer's corporate name or industry. However, it was a job that involved the moving of pieces of product (boxes) and was not sales-related.

Anyhow, for a period of a few months, there was plenty of work and pieces to be moved. Indeed, the author worked for two to three months straight with only two days off. However, the volume slowly tapered off and eventually there was a dearth of work. Indeed, there were too many workers and not enough pieces to move. This made making quotas basically impossible in many instances because productive workers were teamed up with non-productive workers and the former got to share pieces 50/50 with the latter.

I found myself precisely in that situation and ended up not making quota for a given period. I was pulled into the office and was told of this and that there would be a warning associated with the missing of the quota. Quite striking was the fact that the supervisor who had to gave the warning knew full well that the lack of volume and sub-standard effort on the part of some people was the only reason the quota was missed.

This was true because I had never missed quota during the peak time. Even so, the supervisor was obligated to give the warning due to directives from higher management. As for whether this was a violation of the law or a contract, the answer would be no. Instead, it was a policy that was being enforced despite the fact that it was clearly not fair to at least some of the people punished.

There were intermittent layoffs going on at the time because the business was entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the time. They clearly did not send home enough people as there were too many people and not enough work to do. I, rather than raise a stink and lodge a formal complaint, just found a new job and quit the existing one. I did this because the employer was clearly acting in an unfair manner in regards to enforcing their policies but there was not a clear violation of the law.

Even if there was, it was just easier to get out of that situation and thus diffuse the issue, at least this.