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Comment by Manu40 | Hacker News Reader

Tell that to some of my past prospective employers.

It's getting so bad, that some insist on being able to drive to work even if you live within 15 minutes walking distance.

"But what about bad weather?" They ask.

"I'll dress appropriately." I reply.

3 days later: Phone rings.

"We're sorry, but we decided to go with someone better suited for the job."

The job... was at a restaurant, as a cook. Cooks... don't need to be able to drive to work... usually. (There are maybe some jobs where driving would be ideal, or necessary, but let's be real here. Most don't need to be able to drive.)

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I’m guessing “the bus was late” is a common excuse used by those who are frequently late to work. The issue here is that they mindlessly apply a filter of if you drive to work you pass if you don’t you fail. Employees with attendance issues can still use plenty of dumb excuses. A car itself provides several: car broke down, traffic was bad, snowy roads. Those issues don’t apply to someone who can walk in. Unfortunately not being a driver is not a protected class in the US.

Is traffic not a thing? Or a full parking lot?

It's that, and more. It's also that they want to be able to rely on being able to call you in at any moments notice without any potential for excuses like "Well, it's going to take an hour to get there, because of the bus." or "I can't come in right now due to the weather on such short notice."

Quite frankly, I think the entire restaurant industry (in Canada) needs to be audited for multiple reasons. Tax evasion, disobeying the law in regards to discrimination, etc. (Canadian laws) There may be some innocent owners caught in the crossfire, but if they truly are innocent in this case; they should be fine and worry free. It's not a line of logic I like to use in many things, but in this case it really is true.

I think far more common (in the fast food & retail industry) is the manager calling you up: "X called out sick, we need you to come in to do their shift, starting in 45 minutes." If the person lacks a car, then "I can't, buses don't run today" or "it will take me 90 minutes to get in by bus today".

I once worked where I lacked a car. There were 3 buses going there in the morning. The next bus going there left downtown Denver at 4pm. Between 0545 and 1600 there was no bus service to that destination. Missing the 0430, 0505 or 0545 buses meant missing work that day. When I finally managed to get a car (legal problems), I got a new job within a month.

We can agree that “cancel all of your plans for your day off on 45 minute’s notice” might be considered an abuse of power, right?

Not the person you replied to, but yes.

But the problem is that most people are spineless and don't use the proper channels of authority that oversee these sorts of things to ensure that employers are held to proper standards. Heck, here in Canada we have a tribunal system to deal with human rights abuses, even in the workplace; not just societal. And it gets underfunded due to be under utilized due to the very lack of backbone I speak of. What I am saying right now is right from the horses mouth no less.

Yes, that means it's all our fault. People are afraid of losing their jobs, and so they do nothing; and so they get away with more than they should.

To be clear though for those on the other side of the fence.

I'm the employee who will usually say "yeah, sure boss. Just maybe give me some time to get down there, or cover my cab fare so I can get there faster."

Heck, one employer literally drove down to get me just to get the shift covered without any lost time.

But recently I've been getting flak from employers for even that sort of thing. (Getting a cab, or taking the bus I mean.)

So, I don't care anymore. We have rules for a reason, and you all can follow them, or uphold them. Which ever may be the case for whoever is reading this.

> But the problem is that most people are spineless and don't use the proper channels of authority that oversee these sorts of things to ensure that employers are held to proper standards.

In the US there is no authority that oversees these sorts of things. It's perfectly legal to make insane demands on an hourly employee's time. Hourly employees are lucky if they can get a set schedule and don't have to constantly check to see what days/hours they'll work because those hours can be changed at any time without notice. They can be expected to come in at any time to cover for other employees and fired if they aren't making themselves always available at the drop of a hat.

There are very few regulations preventing employers from abusing their staff and those only cover the most egregious abuses. Walmart (the largest private employer in the country) for example has been caught for things like refusing to pay workers for hours that they worked, for locking workers inside of buildings and refusing to let them leave, child-labor violations, knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, and serious OSHA violations that endangered the lives and safety of their employees. While they do get the occasional light slap on the wrist for violating what few protections workers have (often only after repeatedly violating them) even the largest and easiest target gets away with all kinds of abuses not covered under law.

Companies and entire industries spend massive amounts of money on bribing politicians so they can continue to exploit workers and even manipulate the workers themselves to be so anti-regulation and anti-union that they'll fight against efforts to improve the conditions that they themselves suffer under.

Workers being exploited in the US are not uncaring or spineless. They're just working against a system that has been carefully designed and refined over centuries to keep them powerless. We're starting to see some pushes for change though. There's been an increase in efforts to unionize, but just talking about unionizing can get you fired and laws have been changed so that unions don't always have the power they used to. In the meantime, folks still have to pay rent and eat, so they're forced to suffer under exploitative practices.

While I suppose that most people will be considering this topic under American rules and regulations; please note I mentioned Canada in my comment. That said, I accept that USA has all sorts of things to work out and get fixed. BUT, Don't look north for inspiration. It's not exactly better up here, cause the employers up here (except for the few good ones) take inspiration from your bad employers all down south of our border.

Let's just say that we have it just as bad in slightly different ways. The only saving grace for us Canadians (IMHO) is that we still have stuff like the old common law stuff in effect. (of which many of our citizenry is not aware of its actual legal standing, and so they don't make use of any of it.) {Also the libertarian free-man-of-the-land types make erroneous use of some of this stuff, which doesn't help either.}

I state it as such, because when I brought this all up with a lawyer to see if I had a case at all; he was surprised I even knew about some of the old common law stuff that employers legally are supposed to be obeying. This has to do with things like wrongful dismissal for example, where an employee has decided to say no to a bad boss, and gets fired for it. A lot of our current laws state that's already illegal as well depending on the situation; but even those old laws had details in them pertaining to things like severance pay. Long story short; some employers know about this, and will pay out extra weeks even under probationary period because it could land them in court if they don't.

So it is better up here in some ways; but that kind of stuff will probably never be enacted down there, because it would mean accepting that ol Britain was right about a few things.

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