Which goes back to the leadership/management point Stepsongrapes brought up. Good practice starts at the top; clearly, this is a company where the top has zero clue about how to actually manage personnel.
I’ve worked for enough to say, this is more normal than not. Despite management teaching, degrees, books, seminars, and any number of instructions, managers tend to do some really stupid shit sometimes. Giving certain people that title seems to be a litmus test for severe personality issues.
Yes, I’m bitter. I witnessed firsthand the greatest of the great, and the worst of the worst, all packaged up neatly in what we refer to as the U.S. Military.
Uber could have actually had the best documented rules and frequent meetings on how to handle those situations. Then you get a manager A who is friends (or enemies) with manager B. All that shit goes out the window. It sucks.
Oh, I hear you. Knowledgable, intelligent, and humane approaches to employees have been the exception in my job history as well. And usually it’s ignorance plus short-sightedness at work.
Summed up beautifully.
Will Uber get through this storm or is this a foothold for another service like Lyft to pick up more of the market?
Well, I finally deleted my Uber account based on this.
Another similar account from an anonymous former Uber employee.
Completely believable. And horrifying. What a broken culture.
Yeah, this is what got me to delete Uber, finally.
“Hold my beer,” Sterling Jewelers said.
[quote]
Declarations from roughly 250 women and men who worked at Sterling, filed as part of a private class-action arbitration case, allege that female employees at the company throughout the late 1990s and 2000s were routinely groped, demeaned and urged to sexually cater to their bosses to stay employed. Sterling disputes the allegations.[/quote]
[quote]
Many of the most striking allegations stem from the company’s annual managers meetings, which former employees described as a boozy, no-spouses-allowed “sex-fest” where attendance was mandatory and women were aggressively pursued, grabbed and harassed.[/quote]
[quote]
Routine sexual “preying” at company events “was done out in the open and appeared to be encouraged, or at least condoned, by the company,” Melissa Corey, a manager of Sterling stores in Massachusetts and Florida between 2002 and 2008, said in her declaration.
Ellen Contaldi, a Sterling manager in Massachusetts between 1994 and 2008, said in her declaration that male executives “prowled around the (resort) like dogs that were let out of their cage and there was no one to protect the female managers from them.”
“I didn’t like being alone, anywhere. I used to dread going” to the meetings, Contaldi told The Post in an interview. “If you were even remotely attractive or outgoing, which most salespeople are, you were meat, being shopped.”
“It was like nobody knew right from wrong, and there was nobody trying to show anybody right from wrong,” Contaldi added. “There was no discipline. There was no consequence. You were on your own.”
Former employees who sought help or reported abuse through an internal hotline alleged in their declarations that they were verbally attacked or terminated. Kristin Henry, a five-year Sterling employee who said she was 22 when an older district manager tried to kiss and touch her at a managers event, told The Post she was falsely accused of theft and quickly fired after reporting his advances to superiors at Sterling.[/quote]
It’s certainly made for an interesting morning around here.
Truly amazing that sort of thing still thrives in corporate culture.
I know low-grade sexism definitely exists-- women with power are seen as bitchy while men are assertive, men tend to make more money, the general feeling that women are weak/thin-skinned, etc. I see that all the time, and it’s disgusting, and I try to fight it whenever I can. But there’s a huge difference between that sort of thing and literally grabbing a woman’s ass, calling her sweetheart, or trying to get her in on a threesome. That I haven’t seen.
But then maybe I haven’t been paying attention, because it doesn’t affect me and I don’t do it myself.
My initial reaction to that is that (probably unfairly) I’m not surprised that such an atmosphere exists in a jewelry company, if it were to exist anywhere. A lot of the basic assumptions by a lot of the jewelry business are fairly sexist and based around “traditional gender roles”.
@stusser: I’ve been surprised at what my wife has described w/r/t baseline sexism in terms of just catcalls, etc, which she’s described as a pretty universal experience among other women she knows, but which I’ve simply never personally witnessed. There’s definitely an entirely different, but shared experience that women endure throughout society that men are largely unaware of. This case is extreme of course, but the idea that there are things like this happening that I happen to have never heard about doesn’t surprise me.
Old-fashioned sales organizations like jewelry, cars, appliances, investments, etc are very prone to the “boys club” shenanigans. For decades, it was the norm for these organizations to hold annual or quarterly sales parties that turn into hotel-smashing orgies in off-hours. These folks go to Vegas, Miami, or Oahu and go nuts with free booze, comped dinners, and the encouragement of their bosses to be the alpha dog salespeople they need to be to hit their numbers and you get this.
I live in NYC and see that sort of thing on the street all the time, asking women to smile, talking loudly about their ass, etc. I’ve never seen anything like that at work, not overtly-- and I work in IT which is very male-dominated.
Back to Uber:
[quote]
“I don’t know if you remember me, but it’s fine,” Kamel says. The pair begin talking shop, and Kalanick explains that they’re going to cut down on the number of black cars, which will reduce competition and should be good for Kamel.
Then Kamel says what every driver has been dying to tell Kalanick: “You’re raising the standards, and you’re dropping the prices.”
Kalanick: “We’re not dropping the prices on black.”
Kamel: “But in general the whole price is—”
Kalanick: “We have to; we have competitors; otherwise, we’d go out of business.”
Kamel: “Competitors? Man, you had the business model in your hands. You could have the prices you want, but you choose to buy everybody a ride.”
Kalanick: “No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business.”
Kamel: “What? Lyft? It’s a piece of cake right there.”
Kalanick: “It seems like a piece of cake because I’ve beaten them. But if I didn’t do the things I did, we would have been beaten, I promise.”
The two bat that idea around, and Kamel brings the conversation back to his losses.
Kamel: “But people are not trusting you anymore. … I lost $97,000 because of you. I’m bankrupt because of you. Yes, yes, yes. You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day.”
Kalanick: “Hold on a second, what have I changed about Black? What have I changed?”
Kamel: “You changed the whole business. You dropped the prices.”
Kalanick: “On black?”
Kamel: “Yes, you did.”
Kalanick begins to lose his temper. “Bullshit,” he says.
Kamel: “We started with $20.”
Kalanick: “Bullshit.”
Kamel: “We started with $20. How much is the mile now, $2.75?”
Kalanick: “You know what?”
Kamel: “What?”
Kalanick: “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”
Kamel: “Good luck to you, but I know [you’re not] going to go far.”
The door slams. Kamel drives away. Later, the Uber driver app prompts him to rate Kalanick, as he does all his riders. Kamel gives him one star.[/quote]
From the article:
"One of his companions appears to say, somewhat inaudibly, that she’s heard that Uber is having a hard year. Kalanick retorts, “I make sure every year is a hard year.”
Yes, it does seem that way.
It is almost like people throwing millions of dollars at you and calling you a god kinda turns you into an a-hole. If you weren’t one already, that is.
It really is funny how a lot of these Silicon Valley startups get their CEO’s. It is some young guy or coder or financial guy without much experience. The company goes HUGE, and for some reason they don’t decide to hire a real CEO who actually knows how to handle themselves as the head of a gigantic business.
Like, if I was a shareholder, I would want to put it to a vote to oust him as a CEO, he has done nothing but harm the business lately.
Personally, I think the reverse is more often the case. That being an a-hole (or more specifically the drive, self-regard and willingness to bulldoze everyone who gets in your way that is often associated with a-holes) makes you well-suited to be a CEO.