"Great Place"

There is a cool new initiative at my workplace called the “Great Place” initiative. Just kidding it is terrible, if the fact that we put “great place” in quotation marks did not tip you off.

The “Great Place” initiative comes in reaction to employees’ expressing that they feel our company is a “terrible place” to work, as its business model is to wear out devoted young idealists by paying them nothing and treating their full time job as a part time job with no benefits, then replace them with new devoted young idealists.  They expressed this by forming a union, which management does not think is cool, and so we now work in a “Great Place,” because I have receive d several mass emails telling me so.

But it’s not just these helpful emails that make things so “great.”

Also, we now no longer refer to the central office that makes company-wide decisions as “corporate.” We now call them “home team.” It’s so “great” that we are actually forbidden to say “corporate.”

Home team! That’s who we root root root for! We can work towards earning health benefits by teaching a certain number of hours a week, but we are restricted to teaching a number below that number, rendering earning said benefits mathematically impossible! Woo! Home team, you hit that one out of the park! Rah! Rah!

You sent some smooth talking asshole hippie to the school claiming to be there to hear our honest feelings about our “great place” who then actually reported everything we said and brought disciplinary action against the speakers through human resources! Just like the Hundred Flowers Campaign in Communist China! Hey batter-batter-batter! Swing batter!

You refuse to pay teachers for holidays and natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, even though students still pay for the classes on the days that schools are closed! Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks, I don’t care if I ever get out of crippling debt!!! Wooo!

OK, Home team. Bottom of the ninth. We are a school that takes in billions of dollars of foreign students' money, but are drastically understaffed. Bases loaded.  The windup…and! You cut the entire academics department, leaving only financial, marketing and human resources! FTW Home Team wins again!

What a game!