We’re Tired Of Having Employers Play ‘God’, But What Can We Really Do?
A few years ago, I accepted a job offer at a firm somewhere in the heart of Ikoyi, Lagos State. It wasn’t my idea of a decent job, and in hindsight I shouldn’t have taken the gig, but at least I no longer had to brood on the couch in the apartment’s living room while every other working class individual stepped out of the neighbourhood gates, and in any case, my friend whom I lived with at the time was fed up of giving me handouts.
I soon found out that that the information on the firm’s website was bogus, that the number of available staff were far less than what was represented on the firm’s letterhead, and that the office space was much smaller than what the Managing Partner had held it out to be on the day of the interview, but those were not even the major problems. Every other workday I would be at the receiving end of a condescending statement from the Managing Partner which would cause me to question my own abilities, my lunch breaks were frequently cut short, my salary was delayed on multiple occasions (I once received a post-dated cheque!), and I had him continually demand that I bring in more clients, in spite of the fact that I had just moved into the city and I knew virtually nobody.
The death knell on my contractual relationship with the firm was when, at the end of my three-month probation period, the Managing Partner kept looking for reasons not to effect an upward review of my remuneration, and casually stated that my output “had not been up to standard”, even when I worked the longest hours and had even functioned in dual roles from time to time. I simply waited for the close of business one humid Thursday, cleared my desk and formally withdrew my services. It took me three months to reassure myself of my self-worth and get around to drafting cover letters to attach to my resume once again.
This story is by no means unique, especially when the ordeals encountered by a sizeable number of millennials in the name of “being gainfully employed” are taken into consideration. No thanks to the never-ending spike in unemployment figures, account balances reading like radio frequencies and (probably) subtle taunts from relatives, they take whatever comes their way; when you have been without a steady source of income thirty months after the end of your national service year and your calls to your well-connected uncle keep getting “forwarded to another number”, due diligence becomes the least of your concerns. You are taken in by the firm’s fancy web page, you sign the employment contract without bothering to read the terms (that is if they remember to draw up a contract for you, desperate ultra-grateful you), they slowly coerce you to take up more roles than your job description suggests, the ridiculous targets find their way into the equation, and then they let you go after overworking you on the slave plantation (you’ll probably get a formal notice if they are nice enough, don’t set your sights on the severance package). If you are not flushed out (usually without any ceremony), the conditions become so unbearable that you end up deciding to take a walk (don’t worry much about the letter, they won’t care), leaving behind three months worth of salary arrears that you may have to bring an action in court to recover.
Wait, did you read ‘court’? Which money do you even have to begin the legal processes? Can you afford the services of a lawyer versed in Nigerian labour law? Are you even in a proper frame of mind to take any future steps, after your (now previous) employers have left you mentally and emotionally drained?
It is this balance of power (or lack thereof), this state of financial convenience, this realisation by employers that those who work for them are pretty much at their mercy, that gives them the impetus to assume the place of Zeus, Jupiter or Amun-Ra over the lives of their employees. Public organisations which are operated with a defined structure are less hellish for those at the lower end of the organogram, but with private enterprises, your source of bread could be wrested from you if the manager wakes up on the less fancied side of his mattress, comes to work and pulls a Thanos on you; the snap of a finger is the difference between a change in status from being employed to being “between jobs”.
Funnily enough, ads will be put out within hours, and there will be people willing to fill up the vacancy because the fear of Hunger is one that seeps into your early evening dreams to haunt you. People are not sure of when the next employment will come, people are eager to avoid an unfavourable recommendation, so they do everything humanly possible to hold on to a job even in the face of sub-human conditions. This is why people french-kiss the rectums of those in higher positions of power, this is why people get their jaws sore from paying oral obeisance to the shoes of their bosses: nothing is far-fetched for a human when he is stripped of all dignity. The urge to point at labour unions and make inquiries as to their utility is very tempting, but it easy to overlook the fact that financial might and the possibility of compromise are very weighty factors when it comes to assessing the functionality of groups of this nature.
A potentially effective method of checkmating the Xerxes-esque tendencies of employers is to provide a portal on recruitment platforms such as Linkedin, where previous employees can (without fear of having their identity revealed) say a thing or two about the conditions of work at the firm in question. If we have to sometimes rely on recommendations from former employers, then we should be able to influence public perception of them by sharing our experiences, too.
Google Play provides an avenue where users are able to review applications downloaded therein. It may be too much to ask, but employers should be open to scrutiny and strong opinions, too. Bad publicity will make a firm less attractive to work in, so this will not only make its management be mindful of how employees are treated, it would also take away the feeling of omnipotence from employers of labour.
