wherein Liz is unemployed. again.
Dec. 10th, 2015 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI think I have enough emotional distance to talk about this now.
So.
On Monday morning, I received a call from the temp agency saying that my contract with the health garage had been terminated effective immediately. The agency supervisor did not know the reason for the termination. I had not received any impression that Underboss or the rest of the health garage staff were unhappy with me or my work.
I called Underboss to say that I'd received the message, and asked if I could come in to pick up the stuff I'd left in the office over the weekend. (That stuff was only two granola bars, but I wanted to see her in person and... I don't know... remind her that I am a human being, not a disposable tool.) I then dropped by around 2pm. At that point I discovered that the health garage had not decided to eliminate my position because of the new computer system, which had been my first potential explanation. Instead, they'd simply hired somebody else to do what I'd been doing for four months.
I know this because I saw my replacement sitting in what had been my chair, making appointment reminder calls off the same new system printout I'd learned how to make a couple weeks ago.
When I asked Underboss if I could use her as a reference, she said of course and that she had told the temp agency to tell me that, along with saying nice things about me. (Note: The agency supervisor did not tell me any such things. I don't know if she just forgot to do so, or if Underboss told me a polite lie because we were in public.)
...
I emailed my family that afternoon, explaining what had happened and asking them not to call me until I called them, because I was not in any emotional shape to talk about the situation. They respected that, but Vicky sent a reply email in which she raised the point that a lot of organizations have HR policies that say you can only hire a temp for up to four months, after which you have to actually hire them. In theory this is a kind of worker protection, because if you work for a company that long they really ought to pay you benefits. In practice it tends to make things worse, because a lot of companies just run temps up to that limit and then replace them -- presumably the bosses think this is cheaper, even if they constantly lose the institutional knowledge people build up after a few months and waste their actual employees' time in training up new temps.
I suspect that this is, in fact, what happened. I also suspect that if the health garage has such a policy, Underboss was not initially aware of it, since back in October she called the temp agency and extended my contract through January.
But she had to know about it by last week, because there was no coverage gap. She had my replacement already hired and on the job.
And nobody told me.
That's what really pisses me off (and hurts, too) -- that evidently my coworkers were either such cowards, or thought so little of me, that they couldn't take five minutes to say, "Hey, Liz, I have to give you some bad news. I know it sucks, but because of [reasons] we can't keep you on as a temp, and because of [other reasons] we're not going to hire you as a regular employee. So Friday will be your last day." It hardly even matters what the reasons in question were. The point is to show some basic human compassion and give me a heads-up the previous week instead of making the temp agency supervisor do their dirty work on Monday morning.
This is particularly egregious when you consider that the health garage is an organization whose entire raison d'être is to help people get their feet back under them when they've gotten into bad situations. And yet they were just fine pulling the rug out from under me.
Round of applause, health garage. Round of fucking applause.
So.
On Monday morning, I received a call from the temp agency saying that my contract with the health garage had been terminated effective immediately. The agency supervisor did not know the reason for the termination. I had not received any impression that Underboss or the rest of the health garage staff were unhappy with me or my work.
I called Underboss to say that I'd received the message, and asked if I could come in to pick up the stuff I'd left in the office over the weekend. (That stuff was only two granola bars, but I wanted to see her in person and... I don't know... remind her that I am a human being, not a disposable tool.) I then dropped by around 2pm. At that point I discovered that the health garage had not decided to eliminate my position because of the new computer system, which had been my first potential explanation. Instead, they'd simply hired somebody else to do what I'd been doing for four months.
I know this because I saw my replacement sitting in what had been my chair, making appointment reminder calls off the same new system printout I'd learned how to make a couple weeks ago.
When I asked Underboss if I could use her as a reference, she said of course and that she had told the temp agency to tell me that, along with saying nice things about me. (Note: The agency supervisor did not tell me any such things. I don't know if she just forgot to do so, or if Underboss told me a polite lie because we were in public.)
...
I emailed my family that afternoon, explaining what had happened and asking them not to call me until I called them, because I was not in any emotional shape to talk about the situation. They respected that, but Vicky sent a reply email in which she raised the point that a lot of organizations have HR policies that say you can only hire a temp for up to four months, after which you have to actually hire them. In theory this is a kind of worker protection, because if you work for a company that long they really ought to pay you benefits. In practice it tends to make things worse, because a lot of companies just run temps up to that limit and then replace them -- presumably the bosses think this is cheaper, even if they constantly lose the institutional knowledge people build up after a few months and waste their actual employees' time in training up new temps.
I suspect that this is, in fact, what happened. I also suspect that if the health garage has such a policy, Underboss was not initially aware of it, since back in October she called the temp agency and extended my contract through January.
But she had to know about it by last week, because there was no coverage gap. She had my replacement already hired and on the job.
And nobody told me.
That's what really pisses me off (and hurts, too) -- that evidently my coworkers were either such cowards, or thought so little of me, that they couldn't take five minutes to say, "Hey, Liz, I have to give you some bad news. I know it sucks, but because of [reasons] we can't keep you on as a temp, and because of [other reasons] we're not going to hire you as a regular employee. So Friday will be your last day." It hardly even matters what the reasons in question were. The point is to show some basic human compassion and give me a heads-up the previous week instead of making the temp agency supervisor do their dirty work on Monday morning.
This is particularly egregious when you consider that the health garage is an organization whose entire raison d'être is to help people get their feet back under them when they've gotten into bad situations. And yet they were just fine pulling the rug out from under me.
Round of applause, health garage. Round of fucking applause.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-12-12 01:31 am (UTC)