|
Edited on Tue Jun-13-06 02:10 PM by Lib Grrrrl
I, too, have been unemployed long-term. And I refuse to be a greeter at Wallyworld, or to ask people if they want fucking fries with that. I won't do it.
I did not work in a professional office for 15 years to wind up doing that sort of shit. All's I need is to put THAT on my resume, and every potential future employer will know that I'm willing to take less than I worth, and that they can screw me over with impunity. No thanks!
My job went bye-bye in 2004. I was working with a company that had a contract with the State of Texas to process Medicaid claims. This company, in fact, was Ross Perot's company, EDS.
They lost the contract in late 2002, and a different company, ACS, won it. I was among the company's top producers and was awarded a special award for going an entire year error-free.
The new company recruited a lot of us to come work for them, when the old contract expired. They told us that they paid on a piece-rate, rather than on an hourly wage...and promised we would not see our pay decline as a result. In fact, they said, they expected the company-wide average to be equivalent to 11-13 bucks an hour, and the potential was there to earn about 16 bucks an hour.
At the time, I was making 10.50 an hour. I got screwed out of my annual raise, because the old company put on a wage freeze in April, 2003. So all those with early anniversary dates GOT THEIR RAISES, but, being as mine was in August, I got fucked.
Then, they raised the amount of employee contribution to our health insurance. Double-whammy. Meanwhile, gas prices were just beginning to skyrocket. At that time, they were about $1.80 a gallon.
Well, I, among others, secured jobs with the new company. to start with, they paid us a "training wage" of $9.50 an hour (already a dollar an hour less than I had been making) until they could determine what the piece-rates should be. I accepted it because we were assured that when the piece-rates came out, the company average would be between 11 and 13 bucks an hour.
Considering that I was one of the top producers, and ahead of the company curve, I was okay with the temporary lower wage. Then the piece rates came out. The company average ended up nearly eight bucks an hour, mine ended up around 8.77 an hour. so we all screamed about it, and they said they would adjust the rates. Then they did...THEY CUT THE RATES, and claimed that, with new efficiencies they had built into the system, we would see higher wages.
The company average then proved to be nearly seven dollars an hour, and my own were just under 8 bucks an hour...$7.97 a hour. so, it was certainly not due to any incompetence on my part...yet, here I was swallowing a $2.50 an hour wage cut, after we'd been promised our wages would not go down.
then, the kicker...the company required us to attend classes in business ethics! And the classes were, of course, taught by executives of the company! I mean, here's people claiming we would not see wage cuts, making promises unkept...and THEY were gonna teach US about fucking business ethics??
When confronted again, they told me...prove it, prove it...prove we ever said the wages would be that high...prove it, prove it.
so I resigned my position in April 2004, having held out longer than a lot of the other employees who'd come over.
I haven't had a decent job since. I hung on for another year in Texas, doing temp work...and then that dried up. I had to move back home to Pennsylvania, and live with Mommy, at the age of 35. My only other option was a cardboard box!
I got a temp job up here that lasted 3 months, and then, nothing since. Fucking great economy, right?
so, what do I do with myself these days? I contract myself out for mystery shopping, earning close to $200 a month for those efforts (it's only a couple-three days a month) and I'm on partial disability for depression, for which the County gives me a stipend of $130 a month. My SSI Disability case is still pending. I'm working with our State's Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, trying to get gainfully employed again....and I'm taking an online course for Medical Transcription, which offers one year of job placement assistance after graduation.
I'm seeing a therapist and I'm on Zoloft, because of my depression over this fucking wonderful economy. I live in The Land Of Zero Opportunity, unless I wanna wear a fucking clown suit, and, for 6 bucks an hour, ask people if they want fucking fries. and I don't get out of BED for 6 bucks an hour! Won't do it. I did not put together good clerical/office/computer skills to be reduced to that. I did not put together 15 years of excellent experience, so that I could flush it all down the toilet.
Of course, one reason, I think, I have been unemployed so long is the fact that I am a transsexual, and people just won't hire transsexuals.
So I say can we PLEASE have another recession?? You know, like when Clinton was Prez?? :sarcasm:
Anyway, for those interesed, below appears a copy of the letter I sent to the CEO of the company that screwed me over, ACS...which stands for Affiliated Computer Services (#447 on Fortune 500's list, last time I checked.) You'd think a Fortune 500 company could do better by it's employees!
---------Letter to Jeff Rich, CEO of ACS follows (names redacted to protect the guily and unthical!!) ---------
Mr. Jeff Rich, CEO
ACS, Incorporated
Delivery VIA UPS Next Day Air
Delivery Confirmation Requested
Dear Mr. Rich,
I am writing you as an ACS employee to bring some grievances I have to your attention. I have, in good faith, attempted to resolve these grievances through the normal chain of command; my grievances have fallen on deaf ears, and nothing has been resolved.
I am an employee of TMHP, in Austin, Texas, in the BPS data entry department. My immediate supervisor is Christina F., the department head is Michael W., and Michael’s boss is Charles T. I have addressed my grievances to all three of these individuals, as well as the on-site Human Resources personnel, in particular, Michelle N.
My concerns center on the Incentive Compensation program. I feel that the per-item rates have been set so low as to make it impossible for me to earn what I had earned previously, with Mediclaim/NHIC, before ACS was awarded the Texas Medicaid contract. This is not, however, the way the job was presented to us at the initial (and subsequent) recruitment efforts of ACS. Though I have nothing in writing, every co-worker I have spoken with all remembers the same thing. We were told that we had the potential to earn up to 16 dollars an hour, and that the average wage would be between eleven and thirteen dollars an hour.
I feel ACS has negotiated in bad faith, because when rates were initially rolled out, my average over a pay period was $8.77 an hour. I have a memo from Charles T, dated 12 February 2004, which states that the average wage for that same pay period just past was close to eight dollars an hour, meaning I was above the average. What happened to eleven to thirteen dollars an hour?
Recently, new Incentive Compensation rates were set, and they were universally dropped across the board. The claim type I most commonly do had its rate nearly cut in half! Bear in mind that the old rates, which were higher, resulted in an average wage “close to eight dollars an hour.”
I am sure that you will agree that it is not in keeping with ethical business practices for a company to make a profit at the expense of, and to the detriment of its employees. Nor is it in keeping with ethical business practices to mislead job candidates about what the compensation would be when recruiting them. Furthermore, such practices are not conducive to attracting and retaining quality, skilled people such as this job requires.
I had a meeting on Wednesday, April 7 2004, with Mr. Charles T, to whom I expressed these concerns. He apparently believes, and stated, that the rates are sufficiently high enough, and I disagreed. So we agreed on a challenge. For the next two days, Thursday and Friday, we artificially created the absolute best of circumstances in my work. What this entailed was insuring that I process only one type of claim, all day, for eight hours. Previously, I had been constantly switching between applications, making it impossible to establish a rhythm. It was my assertion that, even in the best of circumstances, it was impossible to make the eleven to thirteen dollars an hour we were led to believe we would be earning. In fact, it was my assertion to Charles that with the rates set where they were, I would not be able to match (or even come close to) my salary at the previous company, which was ten dollars an hour.
For the purposes of this experiment, though I truly believe that making a decent wage is impossible, I did my level best to disprove my own assertion. I worked solidly through the day, talking with no one around me. I was very conscientious of my break and lunch times, being sure I took no more than the allotted time. I also keyed as fast, and as accurately as I could during the entire eight-hour day, both days.
The results of this two-day experiment are as follows:
Bear in mind that, while I am not the fastest data entry operator, I would certainly rank myself in the top quarter. I recently took a data entry test that showed I keyed 12,500 keystrokes per hour. Not many people could match or beat that. If the best I can earn, with that skill set, is seven dollars an hour, what does that say about what anyone else may be able to earn? As a comparison, I recently discovered that my local H-E-B grocery store starts out grocery sackers at eight dollars an hour!
For your perusal I am enclosing several documents (including my resume) which show what my skills, abilities, and previous experience are. I would like to point out that, while I was with Mediclaim/NHIC for two and a half years, I was always above the standards set for the work I did, both in terms of production, and quality. In fact, I had perfect quality for the entire year of 2003, and an overall quality rating of 99.94% gauged from the time I began my employment with Mediclaim. During this time, I was making, as I stated, ten dollars an hour.
I would like some justification on why, just because I had the misfortune to be with a company that lost the contract I was working on, I am suddenly no longer worth that ten dollars an hour, for doing the same work? I do not believe my desires are at all unreasonable; all I have ever asked for is an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, and for my employer to be honest and up-front in its dealings with me. Alas, this has not been my experience, thus far, with ACS.
Among other things, I was shorted 12 hours on my first paycheck (it took a week to resolve that discrepancy.) It took a month and a half for ACS to get my benefits cards to me; in the meantime, I was unable to visit my doctor, since I had no proof of current insurance coverage. Furthermore, I have been on a maintenance medication for over eight years, and I had no problem getting my prescription filled when I worked for Mediclaim. However, just the other day, I received a letter in the mail from our prescription vendor, Caremark, which states I am not eligible to receive that medication, and gives no explanation as to why…nor any phone number I can call to get an explanation! We have also, due to severe backlog, been in a state of working mandatory overtime since Christmas, with no let up in sight. I do not mind working occasional overtime, but I’d like to have some semblance of a normal life.
Yet, for all that I have given this company…for all the times I have gone above and beyond for this company, this is how I am thanked? By being forced to take a three-dollar per hour pay cut? By being misled or outright lied to about what the compensation for my job would be? I would not have accepted an employment offer with ACS had I known, going in, that this would be the result. I accepted a job offer, because I was led to believe, by your recruiters, that the average salary would be between eleven and thirteen dollars per hour on the Incentive Compensation plan. Had I known the reality that I would be making three dollars an hour less than I had previously, I would have used the ten months advance notice we had to locate another job. Lacking that, I would have gotten a nice, safe layoff from the old company, and collected unemployment. There is no way I would have applied for, or willingly accepted, a job knowing I would be paid three dollars an hour less than I had been making! It may interest you to know that some of your employees, working full-time for TMHP, would themselves qualify for Medicaid!
In my opinion, ACS management is being penny smart and dollar foolish with these policies. It would behoove the company, in my opinion, to attract and retain the best employees, because this job requires a high degree of skill. I have invested three years of my life into this job, and I feel that my three-year investment should be taken into consideration.
In no way should this be taken as a letter of resignation, but I have to say that, if the salary structure is not radically improved to be more equitable to employees, I shall have no choice but to look elsewhere for employment. This means my three years of experience, and my skills, which ACS could take advantage of, will be lost. This would have, I believe, a deleterious effect upon ACS’s contract compliance, since my data entry accuracy is top-notch.
Among other enclosures, I am enclosing documentation of several obvious errors on claims that were missed by other employees. I came across these in my job function as a Verify operator. The Entry operator should have fixed these errors before the claims got to Verify. They are glaring errors that the system would have flagged the Entry operator to fix. In all of these cases, the Entry operator blatantly ignored the system flags, and chose not to fix the errors. Thus the errors were passed on to me. And as a Verify operator, you get paid even less per claim than an Entry operator gets paid.
It is unfair that my income should be impacted in a negative way as a result of the carelessness of Entry operators. The reason why they are ignoring the errors is obvious. They don’t want to have to slow down to fix them! This presents a Verify operator with a Hobson’s choice: fix the error and thus be slowed down, or don’t fix the error, and then it get counted against you as well, thus lowering your salary due to a lack of quality. Either way, it is a lose/lose proposition. And it can also cause an error to get all the way through the system if no one bothers to fix it, and they don’t, because the rates are so low. This can have a deleterious effect upon ACS’s contract compliance.
I look forward to any reply you may have. I am also willing to meet with you in person or over the telephone at any time convenient to you, to discuss these concerns, should you desire. I may be reached in a number of ways:
Home Phone: 512-redacted
Cell 512-redacted
Work (message only – supervisor line) 512-redacted
Email REDACTED@earthlink.net
Mail: REDACTED Austin, TX 78741
In closing, I would like to thank you for your time and consideration in reading this letter, and in looking into addressing the concerns I have raised. I am sure that you would want to do the ethical thing and deliver to your employees what they were led to believe they would receive when they were being recruited.
Sincerely,
A. REDACTED
cc: Michael W, hand delivered
Charles T, hand delivered
Michelle N, hand delivered
enclosures
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
