Bad Boss Winner #3: A Dying Mother Is No Excuse

by Tula Connell, Jul 16, 2006

There’s something bosses just don’t seem to like about workers with ailing relatives. Over the past three weeks of Working America’s My Bad Boss Contest, many workers have submitted stories of egregiously cold-hearted employers—a good number of those involving bosses with a frightening lack of empathy for workers with sick or dying family members.

One such submission just became the third of the contest’s five weekly “winners,” scoring the highest number of votes this week by visitors to the site. The employee who submitted the winning entry will receive A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses: Dealing with Bullies, Idiots, Back-Stabbers and Other Managers from Hell, by Gini Graham Scott, from the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America. All weekly winners are automatically in the running for the grand prize—a one-week vacation getaway and $1,000 toward airfare, compliments of Union Privilege. (Hear an NPR report on the Bad Boss contest here.)

This week’s winner, who ironically dubs herself “Selfish Employee,” says she is a part-time worker who’s off on Fridays. When her mother was in the final months of a terminal illness, she spent three days each week caring for her, traveling 70 miles one way to her mother’s home. But then:

A colleague had resigned and my boss, ever eager to save a buck, decided to postpone hiring her replacement by having me pick up the extra workload….When I insisted I couldn’t get everything done in 32 hours she said she’d “authorize” me to work Fridays. I begged, “Please don’t ask me to work Fridays! You know I spend them with my mother and I don’t know how much longer she has. Please don’t ask me to do that!” She then said in a very nasty and intimidating tone, “Well, I can make that part of your job description and then you’ll HAVE to do it.”

When I asked if I could have some time to think it over she got huffy and ended up making other arrangements….When my mother died she didn’t send a card, flowers, or attend the memorial service.

While the Bad Boss contest offers us all a chance to jawbone over the latest employer antic, it also helps illuminate why, in the 21st century, in the world’s most industrialized nation, the phenomenon of bad bosses is not an anomaly.

Each week, the Bad Boss site includes commentary from distinguished panelists, such as Dr. Julianne Malveaux, an economist, author, commentator and president of Last Word Productions Inc., a multimedia production company.

Malveaux, whose books include Wall Street, Main Street and the Side Street: A Mad Economist Takes a Stroll, notes the blatant discrepancy between the rosy picture painted by the 2006 Economic Report of the President—which she calls “one of the most intriguing pieces of fiction that I’ve ever read”—and the reality of a tight employment market that engenders such fear in workers they are willing to play with the Devil, Prada shoes or not.   

When people talk about their bosses, they are really talking about imbalances of power, the absence of civility, and a disrespect for working people that is reflected in the fact that the average CEO makes more than 800 times as much as a minimum wage worker. Lots of folks have good jobs with good pay, but an increasing number have good jobs with good pay and poor working conditions. 

The imbalance of power means:

Too many workers are afraid to speak up, and even when they speak up, many know their protests will have few consequences or even spark retaliation. 

As a result, the Devil wins:

…some workers feel they have no choice but to tolerate the devil’s evil ways. But that doesn’t improve the terms and conditions of work for the people who have to report to the devil or dance to the tune of the corporate piper that requires long and uncompensated hours, rude and callous treatment, and just plain incivility.

Read Malveaux’s full commentary on Working America here, and click here to read more Bad Boss stories.

And just in case…click here to nominate your current or former boss.

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