this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Yeah, I’m in a similar situation. The way my organization works, each department gets assigned an HR rep, and is forced to go through that single rep for anything. And our rep is… Pretty awful?
She’ll randomly close job postings without notifying hiring managers, meaning they’re stuck waiting for applications that will never arrive. She’ll leave job postings open even after they have been filled, meaning managers continue to get bogged down by applicants who have no chance of getting hired. She’ll “forget” to forward PII to hiring managers for weeks, so they can’t reach out to applicants to schedule interviews. And she’ll literally deny doing all of this, even when proof (like screenshots of the job postings page) is provided.
The US Army’s “Simple Sabotage” handbook states that if you can’t overtly sabotage the enemy via things like bombs, you can try to covertly sabotage the enemy by getting a position in middle management and embodying the term “middle manglement”. Just be as useless as possible, all the time, to ensure projects get delayed.
We’re convinced that’s actually what she’s doing to us, simply because she hates our department. We’re an arts department in an otherwise non-artsy organization. Like three quarters of our department’s staff is openly trans, and we’re in the Deep South where that tends to be frowned upon; we used to joke that the one cishet white male part-timer was the diversity hire. She openly refuses to let our trans staff use preferred names on company-provided things (like email addresses and name tags) and her excuse is that IT requires legal names on everything like email addresses… Despite the fact that there is someone in HR who uses a preferred name for her email address.
We’re trying to get the organization to let us go around her or reassign us to a different HR rep, but gathering evidence is a sort of catch-22. How do you gather evidence against her when she’s the sole gatekeeper for basically everything that hiring managers would need to prove that she’s not doing her job? We’ve had a few applicants reach out directly to basically be like “hey uhh what the hell is going on” and those are the only real chances that hiring managers have had to bypass the HR rep.