Monthly Archive for September, 2007
Page 2 of 5
On the heels of a story about an Oprah assistant clocking massive amounts of overtime, publications (including the New York Times) ran articles about how hard it can be for people to get paid overtime. Today, MSNBC brings us some positive news on this front: it turns out that more employees are suing for overtime they’ve earned, and they’re winning.
The news is especially encouraging, because it’s coming from companies all over the employment spectrum, from law firms to Wal-Mart. From the article:
“This is the biggest problem for companies out there in the employment area by far,” says J. Nelson Thomas, a Rochester, N.Y., attorney, who, like Thierman, switched from defense to plaintiffs’ work. “I can hit a company with a hundred sexual harassment lawsuits, and it will not inflict anywhere near the damage that [a wage and hour suit] will.” Steven B. Hantler, an assistant general counsel at Chrysler, says plaintiffs’ lawyers are “trying to make all employees subject to overtime. It’s subverting the free enterprise system.”
Keep this bookmarked on your computer the next time you’re at work til 9 PM. Just a friendly suggestion from your friends at STA.
A reader sent us this link from IMDB, about an upcoming TV movie called The Perfect Assistant.
All we’ve been able to learn so far is that the lead character is played by Josie Davis, who we will always know as Sarah, the sister who wasn’t sleeping with Scott Baio in real life, on Charles in Charge. And Rachel Hunter is in it!
Do any of you know anything about this movie? Like, what channel it might air on, and whether it’s worth snarking on? Write us!
As the Jewish half of STA knows, tonight at sundown begins Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Your boss may or may not be Jewish, but she could definitely stand to make some amends. After all, repentance is good for everyone’s soul.
We’ve provided this handy list of suggested things to atone for, alphabetized for convenience:
- Asking my assistant to do anything for me I wouldn’t do myself
- Blaming my assistant for something I messed up
- Calling my assistant the wrong name
- Demanding my assistant work weekends, overtime, or anything besides normal business hours
- Ego tripping
- Forcing my assistant to handle my personal life
- Going to L.A. for three days for business and making my assistant book and re-book my flight, hotel, and rental car at least five times each
- Having a meltdown and cussing my assistant out for having the nerve to call in sick
- Issuing stupid rules like “You have to be here at 8:00 AM sharp, even though no one else gets to the office til 9:00″
- Just being a giant bitch/prick/waste of space/incompetent bastard.
We’re sure your boss provides enough material to fill in the rest of this list.
Happy atoning! Or, for the rest of you, happy Friday!
For those of you who refresh Facebook a dozen times a day, have we ever got a fun toy for you. Save the Assistants is now a Facebook group. You can click on the link here.
Come be our friend!
From Gawker comes an exclusive, and hilarious, look at a taping of an episode of The Tyra Banks Show. Turns out that production assistants on the show have many important tasks to perform–like returning items from a ‘bedroom makeover’ back to Bed Bath & Beyond the second the cameras stop rolling.
Enjoy this excerpt below, or read the whole sordid thing.
Finally around 5 the show starts, nothing spectacular but I noticed that on the show there was a segment where Tyra redecorates a couples apartment. She has the apartment staged in her studio. Tyra also claims to have shopped for herself. When they finally start the horrible decorating, I notice it is everything I saw the PA’s returning from Bed Bath and Beyond with. Sorry but I do not want my apartment decorated by BBB. The show was about Expensive and Cheap clothes, make up, furniture and party planning. During the show Tyra keeps letting us know how cheap she is. By the looks of that show – she is too cheap.
Meet our current hero, Aaron Green of the blog Groovy Green. Plenty of people (us included) think the work week should be shorter ‘just because,’ but Aaron has a host of practical reasons for a four day work week that would reduce greenhouse gases, reduce money spent on road construction and maintenance, increase worker productivity, and make all-around happier people.
Here’s a link to Aaron’s 16 Reasons for the 4 Day Work Week. Feel free to print out a couple of copies and ‘accidentally’ leave them around the office.
Following a New York Post story about a Harpo Productions assistant named Carla Bird who had clocked a record amount of overtime, we ran an exclusive story from some other Harpo insiders who told us there was a lot of backstage drama at Harpo.
Today’s New York Times adds their own take on the Bird story by talking about the concept of overtime pay in general. They correctly note that plenty of employees work overtime and are never properly compensated for it. There are also some interesting comments on how to know when something is work time, especially when it sometimes comes in the ‘five minutes here, ten minutes there’ amounts. While the story is somewhat oddly placed in the Style section, it’s still worth a read, since almost any assistant will end up in a ‘disputed overtime’ situation at some point.
In college, “tenure” means a professor has earned the right to job security. But what does “tenure” mean in the workplace? Our friend Lawyer’s Right Hand writes about tenure for legal secretaries and assistants:
Idleness is the hallmark of underperformers. They spend more time on gossip, primping, and non-work-related Web surfing than do high-producers. Often, they arrive late, leave early, and take long lunches. They work inefficiently, produce less, and refuse to learn new technologies and processes.
Thus, underperformers are working less for the same pay. Their effective rate of compensation — whether calculated on an hourly basis or by the volume of output — is greater than that paid to high-producers who receive the same money for more work.
Every office has one–or seven–of these people. They’re buddy-buddy with someone in HR who will never fire them, or they have a boss who is set in his or her ways and would rather keep on their current assistant than deal with hiring and training a new one. Either way, these people have a sort of unofficial “tenure,” and their slackness/incompetence makes it harder for all the other assistants.
Read more about spotting a tenured coworker and how to cope here.
- He keeps breaking keys on his BlackBerry because he pokes them with his hook.
- His pet parrot molted all over his office and you have to clean it up.
- The HR manager had to speak with him about using the word “booty” in the office even though he said it wasn’t sexual harassment.
- Your last check was paid in 10s, 20s, and pieces of eight.
- When he doesn’t think you’re working hard enough, he threatens to make you walk the plank.
- He refers to the colleague he hates as “a landlubber.”
- His name starts with a color and ends with “beard.”
