welcome to america
i've had to start turning away workers who show up late at dell. five minutes is understandable, especially if we're under our needed headcount for ideal production. but ten, fifteen minutes, if we've already hit the brim of our staffing needs? i shut the parking lot door, which stays locked until business hours, accessible only by an access card -- which i dole out at the start of shift.
we (staff management) moved into this existing operation, which had been installing motherboards for dell months before sydcor opted out of their contract and forced dell's hand into buying the whole damn thing themselves; brought in a small crew of our own, expanded production, roped in sydcor's existing workers to our agency, and have now decided we only need so many of them to get the most bang for dell's buck. thus, five minutes late or more means you don't really want to work and, in the eyes of big money, you're wasting our time and here's the (locked) door.
one woman, yanelys guerrero, asked me the other day if it would be all right for her to come at 6:00 instead of 4:30, as she's needed at home with her children in the morning. i know we're only on this overtime schedule because of holiday demand, and that in a few short weeks we'll return to a normal, 8-hour day. so i said yeah, that'd be fine, for now. we'll run one head short for a couple hours until she can show up, not a big deal. but then dell decided to cut down on the total number of workers needed to run each line; whereas sydcor's been staffing eight per line, dell says we can produce just as much and only have to pay for seven. so now, someone like yanelys, who needs more than that five-minute grace so early in the morning, is, frankly, shit out of luck. when she showed up smiling, just shy of 6:00 yesterday, i displaced my shame and, in very broken spanish, tried explaining to her that i couldn't let her work. i asked, was it at all possible that she stick out our 4:30 start time, at least for a couple more weeks. i said, earnestly, that i'd help with sweet-talking the big bosses into letting it slide if she couldn't, but that at least for today, my hands were tied. she kept smiling through all of this, and said that, yes, she could. but even i knew.
i let her borrow my phone to call her husband to come pick her up. i couldn't understand fully what was said, but i could see she was explaining why he had to turn around, why the job she'd had for so long and done so well at was all of a sudden pitted against them. "recepcion a america..."
i wanted to tell her so many things, like how beautiful she was in her anger. but i just stood there, lips pursed, and let my eyes glaze with a thin layer of salt. "te amo mucho," he said over the phone speaker. "si," she replied, not meeting my gaze. "yo tambien."
click.
we (staff management) moved into this existing operation, which had been installing motherboards for dell months before sydcor opted out of their contract and forced dell's hand into buying the whole damn thing themselves; brought in a small crew of our own, expanded production, roped in sydcor's existing workers to our agency, and have now decided we only need so many of them to get the most bang for dell's buck. thus, five minutes late or more means you don't really want to work and, in the eyes of big money, you're wasting our time and here's the (locked) door.
one woman, yanelys guerrero, asked me the other day if it would be all right for her to come at 6:00 instead of 4:30, as she's needed at home with her children in the morning. i know we're only on this overtime schedule because of holiday demand, and that in a few short weeks we'll return to a normal, 8-hour day. so i said yeah, that'd be fine, for now. we'll run one head short for a couple hours until she can show up, not a big deal. but then dell decided to cut down on the total number of workers needed to run each line; whereas sydcor's been staffing eight per line, dell says we can produce just as much and only have to pay for seven. so now, someone like yanelys, who needs more than that five-minute grace so early in the morning, is, frankly, shit out of luck. when she showed up smiling, just shy of 6:00 yesterday, i displaced my shame and, in very broken spanish, tried explaining to her that i couldn't let her work. i asked, was it at all possible that she stick out our 4:30 start time, at least for a couple more weeks. i said, earnestly, that i'd help with sweet-talking the big bosses into letting it slide if she couldn't, but that at least for today, my hands were tied. she kept smiling through all of this, and said that, yes, she could. but even i knew.
i let her borrow my phone to call her husband to come pick her up. i couldn't understand fully what was said, but i could see she was explaining why he had to turn around, why the job she'd had for so long and done so well at was all of a sudden pitted against them. "recepcion a america..."
i wanted to tell her so many things, like how beautiful she was in her anger. but i just stood there, lips pursed, and let my eyes glaze with a thin layer of salt. "te amo mucho," he said over the phone speaker. "si," she replied, not meeting my gaze. "yo tambien."
click.
<3 ryan at 10:56 PM
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