If You're UNABLE to Work ... It's Not Your Bosses' Problem

[DHBirr]

"Adding insult to injury" barely begins to touch this item from the hellish place euphemistically known as Texas.

Big corporations there – and the City of Dallas – are demanding that their employees who could neither get in to work nor work remotely due to the recent weather should either count that as vacation time or forfeit the pay.

“Employees who are unable to fully dedicate their time and attention to company business due to current conditions should use available PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time if they wish to be paid for today. Otherwise, employees who do not have any remaining PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time or do not wish to use their unused PTO, vacation, or holiday flex time will not be paid for today,” read an email sent last week from Bell executive management.

The worker told The Daily Beast that Bell facilities were closed the entire week, but that at one point they were unable to access the VPN–a “virtual private network” that allows them to access company systems—meaning many employees at Bell couldn’t work from home even when they had electricity.

Not every company has been an unrepentant Scrooge.

...it’s been entirely up to employers to decide how to handle the fallout. Some, like Cisco, not only paid their employees for the lost days, but also offered offices as a shelter and sent resources for mental-health support.

But it appears they are in the minority.

[robkelk]

One would expect that the City of Dallas has a responsibility to ensure that everyone in the city - not just their employees - would be able to get to work. It's part of making sure that the police can get where they're needed.

[Bob Schroeck]

Don't you understand if the government does anything that helps an average citizen -- or worse, citizens in aggregate -- that's <gasp> socialism?

[robkelk]

You folks keep saying that as if it's a bad thing...

[Mamorien]

You folks keep saying that as if it's a bad thing...

If Rajvik were still here, you could ask him, and he'd gladly tell you that SOCIALISM (always in all-caps when he's typing it) not only inevitably leads, but is intended to lead no matter what its promoters tell you, to bread-lines, five year plans, the government deciding where you will work and when you will die, the thousand-year reign of the Antichrist, dogs and cats living together, and (worst of all) fluoridated water!

(I'm exaggerating, of course; his actual "thoughts" were never anywhere near that nuanced and coherent.)

[classicdrogn]

Let's not flanderize Raj when he's no longer around to defend himself, even if he does have different politics in most respects than most of us.

[Norgarth]

Actually Raj has popped in at least long enough to complain about Silverfang's reaction to Limbaugh's death in the Cursed thread.
http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/s...#pid200600

[SilverFang01]

Didn’t even notice since I have had him muted fo quite a while.
And as for speaking ill of the dead: he used his gifts to hurt a lot of people and he himself celebrated the death of people with AIDS.

He wanted people to speak well of him after he was gone? He should have been a better person. That is on him, no one else.

And who knows, maybe someone who is considering following his road will have a chance to reconsider if that is the way he or she wants to be remembered.

Fred Clark puts it better here:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivis...-the-dead/

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivis...ter-place/

*ahem* Regarding the original post: without worker protections, companies will always eat their employees, and Americans are so wedded to the whole Protestan work ethic that we blame ourselves and fail to build alternate support systems.