Obama Slams Staples

Writer’s note:  I am postponing the post on RadioShack until a future date as I believe this is certainly more important and interesting at the current time.  Hopefully, you will feel the same.

 

First let me point of reference to the following link:  http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/staples-threatens-to-fire#.ytlLb8j3L.

 

I am in 100% agreement with Obama on this one.  Unlike his other thoughts on issues, he is dead on correct with this.

 

As I mentioned way back in 2011, Staples was reducing the hours of full-timers as well as part-timers in a way of cutting costs despite that the company was still doing fairly well at that time.  Along with that, the company later changed how vacation time was issued as well, again to cut costs of operation.

 

However, the big issue of this article is how managers tell their employees that they are responsible for their own hours.  At the time that I worked for them, there was absolutely NO way to do this unless the employee kept track of their hours on a spreadsheet like I did and highly doubt that anybody except me would be that anal to do that.

 

What I find most interesting about this article is the notice sent out to employees from one store manager about managing their own time.  The interesting part is that the manager’s name was cut off the notice before being posted to this site.  My thought would have been to embarrass this manager by posting his name and location as to show everybody just what an idiot that this person really is.

 

I have always believed that it is the responsibility of managers to watch the hours of employees and keep them or send them home accordingly depending on where they stand hour wise.  However, nobody can anticipate sickness or if a store gets busy and is needed for extra help.  I have never seen a clean-cut answer to how to manage hours.

 

That is except for cutting hours to a threshold lower than the maximum number of hours.  For full-timers, this meant not scheduling for more than 37 ½ hours per week and for part-timers to no more than about 20 hours per week.  At least that was the way that it was when I left the company in 2009; I don’t know how that has changed since then.  I would certainly be interested in hearing any comments as to the situation at any Staples store now as to the maximum scheduled hours and if employees are highly restricted with them.

 

The biggest issue of course with all these hour changes all rotate around the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which I have never supported.  I have always believed in a fair insurance system with free enterprise and no health restrictions.  Of course, full-timers always had this, but only a couple of years before I got terminated did the part-timers get insurance benefits.

 

Maybe this is part of the problem at Staples.

 

Having to insure both full-timers and part-timers is not a cheap venture, which is the reason why I and others were terminated because we were using more than our fair share of the health insurance program.  In fact, the day I was terminated I went to the doctor to have new bandage wraps placed on my leg.  In the future, I will discuss my downhill health all courtesy of Staples and their ignorance.

 

What makes me madder than anything is how Fox News is portraying this.  Last week on Fox Business Network, former Office Depot CEO Steve Odland blasted Obama for his comments regarding Staples.  Apparently, Odland still has shares in his former company and certainly don’t want to say anything bad about his future stock gains.

 

This leads me to what Melissa Francis said on the Fox News program, “The O’Reilly Factor” last week.  Her comment was that Staples is only doing this because it has to be accountable to shareholders only.  Of course,  as I pointed out in my last post that the only real winners in the proposed merger are the shareholders.  The employees of both companies are the real losers and more will lose their jobs if the proposed merger happens.   Like Odland, Ms. Francis is a cheerleader for Staples and a hater of Obama by calling Obama spreading of lies.

 

If only she read this blog, she would know that the real lies are being spread by Staples.  Maybe Obama reads this blog and knows that Staples are liars and finally calling them out.  Highly doubt that but certainly would make this blog special if that was true.

 

One last point, I want to make about all this is that the reason why Obama discussed this in the first place is that he wants to put the final nail in Mitt Romney, a significant shareholder of Staples.  I don’t know if he still owns stock with the company, but if he does he will certainly receive a huge windfall if the merger happens.

 

For those people who don’t realize everything, Fox News is skewed toward Republican support (anti-Obama) and pro-Staples.  Unfortunately, I see a lot of spinning here in the “No Spin Zone” of “The O’Reilly Factor”.

 

Thankfully you will never get spinning on this blog.

 

Not today

 

Not tomorrow.

 

Never here at all.

 

 

 

Calculating Your Weekly Hours – Not So Simple

One would think that adding 2 & 2 would be an easy thing to do, but it really isn’t that simple, not by a longshot.  At least not with the companies I have worked for.  Possible scams..maybe..

Back in the days of Woolworth, they had an interesting way of paying employees.  It was called the 7-8 minute rule.  If you punched out on the 7 minute mark on any 15 minute interval, you get nothing for that time.  If you punched at the 8 to 15 minute mark of any quarter hour, then you got paid for the entire 15 minutes.  Lousy deal or great deal depending on how close one was to that 8 minute mark.  Many times I missed it by just a few seconds and no you could not cheat if a manager was standing around especially at closing time.  Sometimes, I did slow my pace down just to make that 8 minute mark just to get revenge.  To make matters worse, if an employee had multiple 7 minute periods, they could not be combined to give a full 15 minute session.  So naturally Woolworth got a LOT of free time with its employees.  Certainly this screamed “SCAM”, but one just needed to know how to play the clock to fully benefit from their rules.

All was pretty well until one summer week about my fourth year with them when my timecard was added wrong.  Not just a little wrong, but 11½ hours of overtime off.  Certainly the management was a little embarrassed by this “mistake”, but it seemed more like a purposeful oversight just so they didn’t have to pay me so much overtime.  Woolworth and overtime never mixed well together and they always tried to keep their regular full-timers under the 40 hour mark.   It was at this point I decided to keep careful track of EVERY MINUTE I worked just so I knew I was paid properly.  This would continue right through my last minutes at Staples.

When the company went to an electronic credit card sized punch card, it was much harder to keep track of punches, but  I had marked in my little memo pad every punch in, lunch punch and punch out.  Certainly this was a lot of work, but it let the managers know they couldn’t get away with anything!!

As far as I can remember with HQ, for every minute I worked I got paid for despite the fact that the company most days would send me home before my shift ended.  I really never worried about what they paid me as anything below 40 hours was made up by my unemployment.  One of the blessings of unemployment!

Then there is Staples.  Besides of the break punch scam previously mentioned, Staples made keeping track of hours very difficult when I was first employed with the company, but when they changed to a web-based time clock application it became very easy.  Too easy.  All I had to do was hit Control-Print and my lovely punch indicator printed on the store’s laser printer in living color.  Of course, I don’t think the management liked what I did, but I NEVER trusted them at all.  This was especially true when I was once told during a night that I came in to a store meeting and the manager said “I will punch you in later”, however being the person I was I wanted to make sure that I got all the time in which I was entitled to.  Their reasoning was they didn’t want to overflow the time clock and create time-outs to the system since everyone would be punching in at once.

I learned not to trust management to input my time once after I discovered that one of my punches were altered by the on-duty manager, because they thought I was late when I was actually helping a customer on the sales floor.  I didn’t realize this “change” until later in the week when I asked another manager to check my punches and discovered that one of them was altered.  The real question here is :  Did they have the right to change my punch without asking me about it?  My answer is DEFINITELY NO!  They took it upon themselves to alter my punch without any authorization by me at all.  Certainly this creates distrust with Staples and that distrust remained until my last day with the company.  The interesting point to be made in all of this is that other employees also began keeping track of their times after I told them of their shenanigans with me.  If there was one thing I was proud of it was getting some employees to be more aware of their hours.

The only good news for the company now is that they have probably saved a lot of paper because I no longer am there, but whoever said I was a conservative person.

NOTICE TO ALL:  I am taking a short break over the holidays from writing this blog.  It doesn’t mean that the scams end during that time, but I will be reporting back again in early January.  My next thing on the topic highway:  the mandatory year in review posting.  However, if you need your fix of me while I am gone, you can connect with me through the following ways (I will still be active on these throughout the holiday season):

• Twitter – https://twitter.com/#!/louisbrown
• Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/louisbrownusa
• MySpace – http://www.myspace.com/louis_brown
• e-mail  – louisbrown24@hotmail.com
• Formspring – http://www.formspring.me/louisbrownusa
• Google+ –  https://plus.google.com/u/0/117653374122289495721

Back In January!!

Do You Want a Break? DON’T TOUCH THAT CLOCK!!

Every now and then, everybody could use a break even if it is just to go use the potty.  Sometimes this easier said than done as I will explain.

Way back in the Woolworth days, if you wanted a break all you had to do was just ask.  Normally the manager just had to find someone to cover for you and you were all set.  The manager would just write down the time you left and if the manager was nice gave you some leeway to your time so that 15 minutes could be up to 20 minutes if someone gets stopped along the way.  It was a wonderful way of handling the situation and was basically fool-proof.  No complaints from me on this one.

HQ had a similar approach but the difference was that somebody only had 10 minutes (not really enough time in my book) and that included the time of getting back and forth.  I never really liked their handling of breaks, but I never had to worry about that too often.

Staples, as would be expected, is a totally different animal.  Let me start from the beginning.

Way back when I was hired back in 1996, the Human Resource person (yes, they REALLY HAD Human Resources in the store back then) Nikki told us new hires to NEVER use the BREAK punch on the time clock.  I always wondered why, but just took her word that it was bad.  About 4 years later and long after Nikki and the Human Resources left the store, one of the newly transferred Assistant Managers absolutely INSISTED that the BREAK punch be used on the time clock.  So like I fool, I decided to do it to see what happens.  The following is EXACTLY what happened and the end result.

First I was very careful to make sure that I took EXACTLY 15 minute breaks (the company’s allowable break time), carefully punching in at EXACT TIMES.  Something I noticed that was VERY strange was that when I punched out, the time clock stopped accumulating hours worked.  Yes, you heard that right:  TIME STOPPED!!  This worried me as to why this was happening.  It didn’t restart until I punched back in and then it only started accumulating time after the next minute after punching in.  So, honestly what happened here?  I also kept track of when I punched in at the beginning of the day, my lunch break (more on that in next posting), and when I left for the day.  I fed all this information into an Excel spreadsheet used to keep track of time and the surprise happened when I got my paycheck.

Nikki’s warning had become a reality.  When I received my check, I noticed that it was EXACTLY 20 MINUTES SHORTER of time than I had calculated.  When I approached the Assistant Manager that originally told me to use the BREAK punch and told her of “my check problem”.  She said “If you have a problem with the BREAK punch just don’t use it, just DON’T TELL ANYONE WHAT YOU ARE DOING!!”  My first thought was “HUH?!?”.  Apparently, something was VERY WRONG and a little research got me figuring out the problem.  To make matters worse was when I asked this manager if she would make an adjustment and give me 20 minutes added on to my current check to compensate for the “error”, her answer was a flat-out “NO!”.  So much for EVER using that AGAIN!!  I also let any manager know about my problem with it whenever they wanted me to use it.  When I mentioned it, they backed off quickly like as if I knew the SCAM…YES I SAID SCAM!!

Here is what happens:

When anybody hits BREAK OUT, the clock stops.at the point of clock out retreating to the minute BEFORE YOU PUNCHED.  When they clock back in the clock takes a minute to set itself to track again.  So effectively, you lose 1 minute punching out and 1 minute punching back in.

Now you may be saying “Larry, It is only 2 minutes what’s the big deal?!?”

Well, first I am not Larry. AND the 2 MINUTES IS A HUGE DEAL ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU MULTIPLY 2 MINUTES TIMES THE NUMBER OF BREAKS PER WEEK!!  For a full-timer, with 2 15 minute breaks a day, 5 days a week, it results in the 20 minutes I lost.  For part-timers, if they worked 5 days a week, its 10 minutes lost a week.  Consider this money that should be IN YOUR POCKET, but instead goes to the company as FREE WORK TIME!!  SLAVE LABOR ANYONE?!?

I am now going to introduce something called a self-interview.  This is where I will interview myself on topics that we have discussed or have been in the news lately of related (or not related) interest.  It will be in a different color and be preceded by the words “Interview Section”.  Enjoy..

Interview Section:

Why do you think that nobody has reported this “SCAM” yet to the Department of Labor?

Fear…fear of becoming a whistleblower to something that should not be happening.  After all, chances are that someone could get fired for reporting them.  They are that kind of company.

Why do you feel this way?

Honestly, I would NOT have been surprised if this wasn’t part of the reason I was fired even though I knew about it for years.  It just took an ass* manager to do it.

Don’t you think anybody else has ever noticed their shortage in their paychecks?

This is the funny thing. Since way back at Woolworth’s, I noticed how many employees NEVER looked at their paystubs.  They just took their check and sometimes threw away the stub without even ripping it up.  They don’t have any idea how many hours they got paid for.  It is sad to realize how many employees are SO stupid and are so ignorant on what they are getting paid or the consequences of their tossing of paystubs. 

So, Staples is praying on the logical stupidity of their employees…

Exactly.  The more stupid employees they have, the happier they are..which is probably why I am no longer with them..They couldn’t take my “intelligence”.  Sadly, this will continue until the company goes out of business or somebody finally has the guts to speak up against this abuse.

They must cheat their employees in other time ways as well don’t they?

Oh yes, and that starts my next posting topic when I discuss lunch..always a yummy topic..well usually…

 

Next Up:  Lunch Time –  Another Chance to Lose Time!!

Punching Out – Run, Louis, Run (Or Take Your Sweet Old Time It Don’t Matter Anymore!)

One would think that punching out would be as easy as punching in.  Depending on the company, it was.

Back in the Woolworth days, punching out was as simple as the person (usually at the mall entrance) calling “Punch Out” on the store’s intercom.  Since customers and employees were given both a 10-minute and 5-minute warning when the store closed, everybody was usually out by 10 minutes after the store closed.  What was hilarious is that one older female employee slowly made her way to the time clock as the time got closer, then ran like a train when the call was made.

At HQ, it was just a matter of someone (usually the supervisor or manager on-duty) coming up to you and telling you to go home, even when sometimes it may be hours before your shift ended.  They really didn’t care what you had worked that day before sending you home.  In fact, I had only been on duty for 1 hour when they told me to go home.  And yes they only paid me for 1 hour even though they legally should have paid me for a minimum of 4 hours.

At Staples, as usual, was much different.  It was a matter of begging sometimes to ask to go home or dying or doing some other desperate action.  In fact, one day I stayed a mind-numbing 2 11/2 hours longer than I should have after being there already nearly 10 hours.  Certainly, this was during back-to-school season, but still is uncalled for especially for a front-end associate.  I always wondered why everybody had to stay especially since the floor people weren’t doing the job they should have been doing all day long.  But then again, Staples has never been fair anyway, which is what this whole blog is about.

Of course between punching in and punching out, you want breaks and a lunch probably.  I discuss those next couple of posts.

Next Up:  Do You Want a Break?  DON’T TOUCH THAT CLOCK!!

Punching In…Not As Easy As You Would Think!!

Through the years, I have lived with many ways of doing the very simple task of punching in to work.  It may seem like that, but over time the process has been mucked up by the technology behind the scenes.

Way back in the Woolworth days, it was a mechanical time clock.  You took your card, dropped it in the slot and the card would punch with the time and day of the week on it.  The card was good for 2 weeks—it was turned to the backside for the second week.  Thus one card was used for one pay period as we were paid every 2 weeks.  The only problem was when somebody punched the wrong card or for some stupid reason punched the wrong side.  In a future post, I will explain how time is calculated, a more hilarious approach the different companies took.

About 6 years into my employment with Woolworth, they finally updated their technology to use small magnetic cards kept in a rack similar to where the punch time cards were kept.  The problem with these cards is that it was much more difficult to tell if someone used your card by mistake.  It was also harder to keep track of whether you punched in or out with these cards.  If ever there was a time to keep track of hours, this was it.

I don’t really remember the system HQ used, but I believe it was similar to Woolworth’s system.  It is hard to remember what I did for just 7 weeks!

Staples, on the other hand, was a nightmare right from the beginning (SURPRISE!!!).  During the first couple years, the clock was located in the breakroom and was a push-button interface unit  After the first couple of years, the store remodeled and the time clock was moved to outside the offices in the front of the store.

So, here is my beef up to this point.  At both Woolworth and HQ, you punched in and then hit the sales floor.  No problem if you happen to run into that customer who needs help for 20 minutes finding something that doesn’t exist.  When Staples moved the time clock to the front of the store, it became a race to make the time clock and not be late while at the same time avoiding helping any customers to be slowed down.  But wishfully it wasn’t always that easy. At one point I was held up over 15 minutes by a customer, then I was chewed out by a manager for being late.  If they knew that I was with a customer (look down the aisle dumbass), then they would never have said a word to me.  Sadly it took me an entire pay period to get my time adjusted because the manager that chewed me out would not alter my time even though I was helping a customer.

Punching in with the Staples time clock was not overly difficult as long as you remember if you are punching in, punching out, or taking a break.  At around the 5th year with the company, our punch-in code was changed from our social security number to a randomly assigned 7 digit number.  At around my 10th year, the other shoe dropped and the time clock was changed to a web-based time clock.

The biggest difference between this clock and the original one was that not only did you have to input your employee number, but you had to enter a user-defined password into the sign-in (punch-in) screen.  There was 2 obvious problems with this system.  It was extremely slow and sometimes would time-out (no log-in for you) if too many people from various locations were trying to sign-in at the same time.  I sometimes saw a wait of up to 3 minutes to log-in because of all the system traffic.  What made this system worse is that the log-in system was back-ended into Staples.com (a high traffic site anyway at the time).  To make matters worse was that about every 6 months, the log-in password had to be changed.  Adding insult to injury, no repeats of previous passwords could be reused and it was difficult to keep thinking up new passwords.  But here is the real rub, according to the company’s privacy policy (ha ha), the company does NOT store employees’ passwords.  If this was true, why could I NOT reuse my old passwords again?  I will be discussing Staples’ double talk privacy policies in a later post.

What really ticked off the managers most about the new punch-in system had more to do with me than with the system.  From the first day of this new system, I decided to keep track of my punches by getting a printout of the time punch screen.  Certainly the managers didn’t like the idea that I was keeping track of my punches for a reason I will discuss later.  Maybe, this was just the beginning of the hatred toward me.  I eventually talked about 3 other employees to do same thing as they realized how much it helped in keeping track of their hours.

Next Up:  Punching Out – Run, Louis, Run (Or Take Your Sweet Old Time It Don’t Matter Anymore!)