The Trainee Is Obviously Guilty

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Got this email from HR today:

“We are happy to announce that Ellie Krug will be coming to provide a professional development opportunity on “Gray Area Thinking”. Ellie will share her personal story as we learn about human inclusivity. This will be first of a series of professional development opportunities available throughout the year. We value employee development and will make sure opportunities are available for all employees. This is mandatory and all employees are expected to attend one of the sessions.”

Somehow, I missed the mandatory half-day training on how horrible Minnesota white people are, what with having white privilege from slavery and all. I sure hope I can make it to this mandatory two-hour training session so I can learn how horrible straight people are.

It would be a shame if government employees accurately processed paperwork in a timely fashion, without being sufficiently sensitive to the plight of the mentally ill. Wouldn’t it?

Joe Doakes

In a system built on rent-seeking, consultants are going to seek rent.

Posted

September 10, 2018

Minnesota Politics, Progressive Tyranny, Public Employees, Social Justice!

Mitch Berg

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Comments

9 responses to “The Trainee Is Obviously Guilty”

jdm

September 10, 2018

At my employer, a semi-public company, HR is up to the same shenanigans – maybe not quite as overt as Joe’s employer, but still. The variation in my case is that HR has convinced itself through an annual employee survey that people want, nay, are demanding employee development training. Mandatory employee development training.

The fact is, everyone is quietly warned that serious and/or truthful, ie, negative, responses to the survey will result in “punishment” for one’s boss. So, nearly everyone just writes “completely satisfied” to every question. A task made easier because the answer options lie in the same position for every question. In short, I don’t believe HR; the demand for training is something they made up out of whole cloth.
MacArthur Wheeler

September 10, 2018

HR in corporate America always seems to be looking for the sweet spot between Orwell’s Ministry Of Truth and the Nazi’s Geheime Staatspolize, often characterizing themselves as more benevolent than the latter and more effective than the former.

jdm I also have had to participate in similar surveys where it was understood there would be “consequences” for a discouraging word.
Greg

September 10, 2018

Somehow, I missed the mandatory half-day training on how horrible Minnesota white people are

Shame on you, Joe!

Having skipped the half-day abbreviated training, you will have to attend the full four day workshop. Clear your calendar and check your privilege. 🙂
Joe Doakes

September 10, 2018

Actually, it’s not the course content I object to, it’s the marketing. If they scheduled these sessions on South Padre during Spring Break, I’d be all over them.

I’ll drop a hint in the Suggestion Box.
Greg

September 10, 2018

I am with you there, Joe.

I often wondered why it costs $19,000 per year per student to education a child in Minneapolis – but then I had not considered the cost of diversity training in warmer climates in January.
reader15

September 10, 2018

Ellie runs frequent commercials on AM 950 for her business. She says businesses need diversity training “now more than ever.” I would have thought there had been some progress in the last century. I think with diversity training they don’t want to ever claim success because the money would stop flowing.
nerdbert

September 10, 2018

If they scheduled these sessions on South Padre during Spring Break, I’d be all over them.

Not too many years ago, my company decided to get all the engineers on our project to get together in San Jose for a meeting, mainly for team morale and integrating a new site, I suspect.

When I looked at the price for the hotel and flights, I told my second line manager, “It would be cheaper to fly everybody to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun for a week for this meeting than to fly half the department to San Jose for a 3-day stay.” He looked at my math and said, “I don’t disagree, but I don’t think I can get the CEO to pay for that.”

So I got stuck in a lousy hotel in San Jose in March rather than a luxury resort on a sunny beach. My morale didn’t improve.
nerdbert

September 10, 2018

Somehow, I missed the mandatory half-day training on how horrible Minnesota white people are.

There must be something brewing out there. We’ve been pestered at our company with emails about needing to finish these online training courses for things like anti-bribery, sexual harassment, and the like much more than we have in the past. To the point where the CEO has made a point of mentioning that we need to do it in his usual tours through the various company sites.

Have employees been burning out on these things to the point where the economy is good enough that HR feels it can’t creditably threaten employees anymore? Nobody I know views those things with anything other than utter derision, to the point where we’ve had competitions to see who can fill out the forms the most quickly (defeated by timers inserted by HR), and to the engineers writing javascript to the courses automatically. But have we reached a good enough economy that folks feel they can safely ignore these distractions these days?

And yes, as bad as things are for employees, when I look at the California mandated set of HR courses for managers and the time they take, I do NOT regret my decision to turn down a management position.
Bill C

September 12, 2018

“It would be cheaper to fly everybody to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun for a week for this meeting than to fly half the department to San Jose for a 3-day stay.” He looked at my math and said, “I don’t disagree, but I don’t think I can get the CEO to pay for that.”

With business acumen like that running the place, it’s amazing it’s still open.

You sure you don’t work at Gamestop, nerdbert? Their geniuses at the top levels make bewlidering and inane decisions like this all the time. I am amazed that company didn’t corporatize itself out of business 5 years ago.