Employment contracts: What are they good for?

Dear Bloggers,

The company I work for decided to place all the temps under one temps office instead of three also the ones on payroll are swapped. It is all about money of course So guess who will be ....... We’re on a simplification kick at this moment as our dear managers want to have a better overview. As they grow, they’re trying to simplify their jobs even more. (earn the same money with doing less.) Growth generally brings complexity, but let us see if we can go in the other direction with this bunch. There are more clowns at this circus as I thought.

Questioning assumptions

Simplification usually starts with questioning assumptions. Why do they do this? Why do we need this? Is this really necessary? Is it just inertia? Are they doing it because that’s how they’ve always done it or are they doing it because it’s better? Are they just following conventional wisdom or is there newer wisdom and we should be considering?

Why do we need employment contracts?

One of the things I am beginning to question are employment contracts. When a new employee starts with a temps office, they will make them sign a employment contract. The contract was drawn up by a bunch of bloodsucking lawyers and is corrected every so many years by them, so there are no incremental costs each time they bring on a new employee, but is that good enough reason to keep this going?

The contract itself is about five pages. It outlines some basic responsibilities they have to the employee and the employee has to the company. Starting salary, an overview of benefits, vacation time, confidentiality, and general expectations on both sides. But that’s really only a paragraph or two. Everything else is legal-cover-your-ass-speak. 

Like most contracts, it’s basically a big “I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me” document. What a terrible way to welcome someone to the team isn’t it?
How often are these things actually enforced in a business like the one I am working for? And if people aren’t really enforcing them, why are we writing/signing them anyway? “Just in case” feels like a pretty weak argument to go through all the cost, trouble, and rigamarole. Is “Imagine if someone…” enough reason to have the first step we take with a new team member covered in legal mud? 

No it is this bloody law that we have that was only made to protect the employee. But now they are abusing this law by kicking you out after 3½ years. And after half a year you can return and start a t scratch. Hooray for the Dutch law it is far too complicated even for lawyers.

What if it would become a handshake company?

So I’ve been thinking… What if we could kick away all these employment contracts entirely? What if they became a handshake company? Plenty of small companies work this way, why can’t we? Aside from each person’s salary, we could post all our responsibilities and their responsibilities on the web. So everyone has the same work conditions and only a minimum of hours is stated and of course you agree to at least half a year of employment with them. 

Maybe it is time to change the law and let the unions make up the agreement so for both parties things will be square and fair. They could make a ”/workinghere” page at their own website that clearly lays out what employees can expect from the company and what the company expects from the employees. So if you cannot live up to the standards there is no need to send in your application or to work here at all. It could be build on a easy to hire, easy to fire base. It could be a living document too. Things change, benefits change, rules change. That’s just how it goes. Especially in these hard times of economic downturn we need to be creative. 

You read it, we shake hands, and we start working together. In the event that it doesn’t work out, we ask you to leave or you quit. Of course there should be terms of conditions about it. (Something like 7 or 14 days to resign or being signed off for both parties in the first year, a month after two years and so on.) There should be a maximum on it of three months. 

And the company has to help you to find something else if they need to lay you off  due to economical hard times or retrenchments made by third parties that need to cut back. That’s how it is anyway employment in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe is at-will. Every employment contract I’ve seen includes a line about at-will employment. So what are the dozens of other paragraphs really for?

In this day and age it seems crazy to even consider ditching employment contracts, but why? Why have we become so dependent on lawyers to control every relationship inside our companies? Why is “just in case” the default answer when asking questions about contracts? It sounds more like insurance than legal counsel. 

And the hardly anyone is having a heart for the company anymore. The world of employers should be more transparant new innovative products should be more often used as the costs for sick personel are sky high.  Why carry cash when you can pay with your phone our buy a prepaid ticket there is no need anymore for physical tickets. If you are being mugged you are traumatized for the rest of your life.

What’s your experience?

What are your experiences with employment contracts? If you own a business, do you require employment contracts? If you are an employee somewhere, have you signed a contract? Has anyone here ever had to actually sue or litigate an issue specifically related to an employment contract? If you’re an employee, do you feel more or less comfortable joining a company that makes you sign a legal contract? Did you have your contract checked by a union. Does anyone feel good about signing these things? I don’t but what is your opninion?

                                                                      


I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts about this subject.

The Old Sailor,

The Christmas Carol Phone call

Dear Bloggers,


Unfortunately I am getting unemployed again and I really start to think that it is a fetish to bosses to lay off staff just before or during Christmas. As this is not the first time that it happens and yes I can handle it, but some of my fellow drivers can’t. One of them ran straight up to the office and told them that he would leave straight away, another driver said that he will leave just before Christmas. Hmmm.......these are hard times to keep a job, as soon as the temps office called alarmbells started ringing and the applying machine was started up again. As Scrooge was on the television I twisted this into a hard feelings Christmas Story. Sit down by the fireplace and read and weep.

In a phone call from the temps office that I work for on Tuesday, the Christmas Spirit of the Past from the company had announced the plans to lay me off by the first of Januari. F**cking great but I am the choosen one together with the Ghost of Christmas Present along with his entire Department of Concurrent Events. This restructuring will result in the reduction of the busdrivers the ones that made some mistakes are chucked out.

Despite being able to provide instantaneous hi-def visualizations of events happening simultaneously anywhere around the world, the Ghost of Christmas Present’s capabilities have been largely superseded by the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, making his offerings redundant and too expensive to maintain.

Spirit reminded he will still retain the services of the Ghosts of Christmas Future and Past, along with their entire staffs. He announced that that the remaining departments will continue to provide a valuable function in the Christmas Spirit’s operations by continuing to leverage the blissful memories of Christmases of long ago as well as demonstrate the pain and despair that will occur if the target doesn’t reform his ways.

Average Boss
“Nostalgia and dread have always been what ends up redeeming the scrooges anyway,” The temps office Spirit said on the call.

These organizational changes were necessary to reduce costs and recover from three straight holiday seasons of stagnant growth in Spirit’s mission to restore hope to humanity and bring together estranged family members.

The Ghost of Christmas Present never saw the layoffs coming.

The Christmas Spirit expects to reduce operating expenses by a unknown percentage and is confident he will still be able to meet his business objectives of turning grouches, grinches and scrooges into tolerable timetable for the traveling by bus human beings.

A look into the future

 

The life-like imagery and special effects produced by the three Ghosts have always looked impressive but was expensive, forcing Spirit to do a full cost benefits analysis for each department. Unfortunately for the Ghost of Christmas Present, Spirit’s review made the outcome all too clear.

The Christmas Spirit’s analysis confirmed his suspicions that the Ghost of Christmas Present was too expensive to keep on the payroll and was not nearly as effective as Past and Future in making holiday grouches reconsider their anti-social ways.

“With mixed emotions, we regret to announce that the Ghost of Christmas Present has to be seeking for opportunities outside the company,” said Spirit. “He built a strong foundation in allowing us to see how our target accounts were ruining the lives of their family or demoralizing their employees.”

Spirit says that if his account managers need to know what was going on in some house across town,”now, we can just check their Facebook status updates or read their tweets.”

The Spirit of Christmas says it simply does not make sense to carry the expense of a six-figure executive salary when these capabilities can be provided at little to no cost. He then demonstrated on the webcast what social network applications can do by revealing a Facebook post about one of his targeted accounts.







  

” Spirit said. “It really is a beautiful thing.”

Additionally, a Facebook status update can reveal how holiday-impaired grouches can negatively affect the quality of life of their employees during the Christmas season. He showed this screenshot as evidence.

Spirit said that prior to the announcement, the Ghosts had visited him in his bedroom, each over the course of three nights to plead their case.

“The Ghost of Christmas Present really disappointed me and didn’t show me very much,” Spirit said. “All I saw were other people sleeping. Although I now have an interesting story about our director to tell at this year’s holiday party.”

He could have become a good man

 Spirit revealed that the Ghost of Christmas Past showed him as a young upstart corporate director and how much joy he experienced in restoring hope and faith in Christmas, saying “I was reminded of how much I love what we do, how we make a difference in people’s lives, and how hot that one girl from accounting was.”

“Christmas Future had a great presentation,” Spirit explained to the hotshots and the blokes from the provence of Friesland. “Once he showed me that the decision to drop Christmas Present and make some changes in our tax liabilities and investing in new systems will give us a double digit growth over the next five years,. . .well that sealed it.”

The Ghost of Christmas Present was understandably distraught with the news that his lifelong career had recently come to an end, saying “I only wish I had seen this coming.”

What happened to the Merry days of Christmas

Because his only skill is quickly being replaced by another driver after the first of Januari, the Ghost of Christmas Present is worried about what will come next, especially considering that his former colleague Christmas Future kept giving him knowing glances of pity as he left the building.

When reached for comment, the Ghost of Christmas Present still maintained that his services are invaluable.

“You won’t get that on a ‘what are you doing now’ status update,” Present said.

Have a better Christmas than me.

The Old Sailor,



Hire an older unemployed person

Dear Bloggers,


During one of my breaks I was reading the newspaper and suddenly a article about unemployment drew my attention. I am one of these people I have a job for a certain period and all the rest is based on insecurity. Maybe I will be unemployed soon again. And it is pretty hard too find a suitable job if you are over 40 as you are too young not to work and too old for a lot of employers. This idiotic theory should come to a halt as an older guy or girl can be as good as young one. The young generation is normally there only to earn some money and is furthermore not interrested in the goal of the company. Employers should use their brain as in certain jobs there are young people that do not give a ......

Last week, thousands of Dutch who have exhausted their unemployment benefits. The forty plus group, named after the maximum number of living years are living on state and federal benefits This group has kids that study, high mortgage bills and hardly any money left to spent. They sent letters and petitions to The Hague as part of a futile campaign to convince the government to pass a bolstered version of the jobs bill, now stalled and being snowed under by the formation of a cabinet. There were many common themes in their stories, but one of the more surprising was age.

One woman from Haarlem, wrote: “I am (or was) a legal secretary with several years of experience (30+ years). … I have applied to jobs that are more than one-half less than what I was earning. I search for a job each and every day. … Where do people in my age bracket go? Too young not to work but too old to work?”

Such stories of older workers too young for retirement but struggling for months if not years to find jobs have policy experts concerned as the recession drags on and long-term unemployment continues to rise. Experts say that age discrimination is illegal and severely compounding the jobs crisis for older workers, although the phenomenon is difficult to quantify or to prove, and remains under-examined by the government. This time, it is not just making it more likely that these workers will be laid off. It is also making it much harder for them to gain new positions.

Last week, a hearing called by the UWV examined the issue, attempting to determine whether part of the reason older workers have such trouble finding work, on aggregate. The unemployment rate is a comparatively moderate 9.1 percent for workers over the age of 40 It’s 3.7 percent over 55 as older workers are more likely to retire early or leave the workforce if they lose their jobs. But that hides the troubling reality for those who can’t afford to leave the labor force. They should take action now as in a few years these people you will need the most but they will be used to staying at home and try to survive. Most of them have lost their faith in politicians already a long time ago. The ones that have failed the most have the biggest mouths or have been chosen to make a new cabinet.

The unemployment rate for over 40s is at the highest level since 1948. Since the recession started, both the number of older people seeking work and the rate of unemployment for over 40s have increased more sharply than for all other demographic groups. And older workers comprise a high share of the long-term unemployed. In May, the average duration of unemployment for older job-seekers climbed to 44.2 weeks, 11 more weeks than the national average. Nearly six in ten older job-seekers have been out of work for more than six months.

There are structural reasons that the unemployment crisis is hitting older Dutch so hard. Older workers are more likely to be underwater homeowners, unable to sell their house and move away. They often have highly specific marketable skills, and seek positions more selectively. They also often have skills that have been taken out or being combined due to the recession. But too often, employers illegally presume that older workers will be harder to train, more likely to leave for other positions, less productive, less technologically able or less willing to move and so they do not hire them for those reasons. In my opinion the government should help out with this by tax profits if you hire an over 40 worker. As it is all about money anyway.

Incidences of age discrimination in firing are much clearer to see, and have risen along with the recession. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says age discrimination cases have jumped 17 percent since the start of the recession, and climbed 30 percent between 2007 and 2008. But virtually all of those cases involve layoffs, rather than the lack of job offers.

Unfortunately, policy experts fear that age discrimination in hiring, compounded by the recession, is a problem without a solution. Individuals can bring cases against individual companies, but discrimination is virtually impossible to prove, even if it is easy to see as an aggregate phenomenon. Plus, the phenomenon is so prevalent that discrimination simply seems like reality. “As a society, we’re willing to tolerate age discrimination, more so than other kinds of discrimination,” “People sense that, and it gives older job-seekers a sense of futility. Why even bother applying for jobs, or bringing a discrimination case? I won’t win.”

The Old Sailor,