Work Daze

OK, fatty. Put down that jelly donut and step away from the conference table. I don’t care if you are a big boss or a total loss, if I see powdered sugar on your chin, I’m going to do something drastic, like call the HR department and report you for making unwanted advances on a box of Entenmann's.

Tough love? Perhaps, but it’s only fair to warn you. You may think no one has noticed the extra inches you’ve added to your waistline since the New Year. You may believe that no notices the junk in your trunk, but you’re wrong.

Management has noticed, and they’re out do something about it. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that management does best – fire people for trivial reasons. In this case, the reason is fat.

“Waistlines Expand Into a Workplace Issue” is the headline on Kelley Holland’s “Under New Management” column in the June 22 issue of “The New York Times.” And while being caught in the computer closet with a bag full of chocolate croissants is not yet a firing issue, those of us who have played the workplace game of hide and seek with downsizers and cost cutters can smell a “fireable offense” a mile away.

It could be that your managers are overwrought at overweight employees because the company knows that it is healthier to be Paris Hilton thin than Bubba the Love Sponge fat. It could be, but it ain’t. It’s money that drives your managers to drive you in anorexia. “Obesity costs companies $45 billion a year,” according to reporter Holland who cites research by the Conference Board and RTI International, a research institution. [These statistics would probably be different if the research had been conducted by the Sara Lee Institute, but what can you do?]

The cause of these costs is not, as you’d expect, the price companies pay for adding steel reinforcements to the seats of Aeron chairs, or widening cubical doorways to insure egress to the rotund. Turns out fat people may be fun to be around, but they are expensive to have on your health plan.

“Obesity is a more powerful trigger for chronic health problems than either smoking or heavy drinking,” economists at the RAND Corporation have determined. Their research also reveals that fatties miss work more frequently and “tend to be loss mobile on the job than their thinner counterparts.”

This last barb could be explained by the really obvious fact that fat people are more likely to be stuck in their desk chairs. They’d like to jump up and run across the office to help a supervisor in distress, but they’re so wedged in that they can’t reach escape velocity. Fatter people could also be smarter. They know that volunteering in an office environment brings many more risks than rewards. Plus, they may not want to leave the three hundred bags of M&Ms they have stashed in their bottom desk drawer.

Sadly, what is riling up the big thinkers in corporate America is not the prejudice that is being unleashed on those of us in the chubby minority, but the fact that managers are not speaking up loudly to promote the cult of thinness.

The experts want our managers to operate like the Japanese, where a recent Federal law mandates that companies measure the circumference of their employers to insure that they are within national guidelines. “Those exceeding government limits -- 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women -- will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight,” reports “The Huffington Post.”

Here, in America, some companies are taking a less Orwellian approach and actually offering cash incentives to employees who start slimming. Giving discounts and rebates on gym memberships are other ways enlightened companies try to lighten up the staff. Some even build gyms inside the workplace, taking over office real estate that once housed corporate vice presidents, and replacing the dumb bells with bar bells.

Best of all, a few company officials are finally beginning to understand that being overweight does not represent moral weakness, but is, instead, a disease. And about time. After all, we’ve accepted the pathology of the loonies who manage us, with their toxic demands to come to work early and stay late, not to mention their life-threatening desire to participate in meaningless “mission statements.”

They’ve taken away our dignity. The least they could do is leave us our donuts.

It’s a tough question in a difficult economy – what do you do if you hate your job, but are afraid to quit, and your boss is too dumb to fire you?

You could complain constantly to anyone who will listen, or take out your frustration on the family guppy, or you could do something positive and life-affirming. Like stealing a stapler.

Or a box of rubber bands, or a #2 pencil, or a ream of paper, or a light fixture. You could even come in one day with a pair of industrial shears and cut out around the perimeter of your cube, netting you a nice patch of industrial carpeting that would look just lovely in your man cave.

If you think that stealing office supplies is an unusual way to pay back your boss for your many grievances, think again. According to the recent “Workplace Snapshot” survey on Office Supplies Theft from the nosey-parkers at Spherion, nearly one in five of your co-workers report to having taken office supplies for personal use in the last year. And if one in five admits it, you have to believe the real percentage of culprits is much higher -- say five out of five?

Of course, many of us who take office supplies are not involved in premeditated crimes. How often have you been forced to work long and late to protect the posterior of some dim-witted supervisor? The office has emptied out, and the air conditioning is turned off, and after hours of drudgery, who could blame you if you absent-mindedly stuff half-dozen laptops in the trunk of your car?

Sad to say, many instances of office theft are as well planned as the bank caper in “The Italian Job.” According to John Heins, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Spherion, employees are not just striking out in an entrepreneurial mode. They are striking back.

“It’s important to consider employees’ intentions regarding the personal use of office supplies. With one in five workers putting in ‘excessive’ time on the job according to the U.N.’s International Labour Office, it is certainly possible that employees simply don’t regard the personal use of office supplies as stealing, but rather a matter of convenience or a small reward for their hard work.”

In other words, if our bosses gave us half the perks they lavish on themselves, we wouldn’t have to take our annual bonus in paper clips.

If you are beginning to suspect that your fellow employees do not know the difference between right and wrong, rest assured that the Spherion survey shows that’s 74% of workers feel it is wrong to steal office supplies. Still, only 22% of those who did manage to conquer their ethical convictions feel guilty. Perhaps, when compared to the behavior they see from our elected representatives and our anointed managers, pocketing a gross of ink jet cartridges drops from mortal to venial on the sin scale.

The primary reason workers gave the survey team for having taken office supplies for their personal use was that “they needed them.” (42%) Funny, most bank robbers say the same thing.

One-third say that they stole because their boss or the office manager said it was OK. I don’t know where these people are working, but I want a job at one of those companies. The office managers I have suffered under invariably get extremely agitated when you take advantage of your employer’s generosity by breathing too much company air. This leaves 18% of workers who say they take office supplies because “the company will never miss them.” I hope this isn’t true. Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I like to believe that at least one pampered CEO is tossing and turning on his feather bed, unable to sleep because he suspects that somewhere in his far-flung empire, a lowly peon is pocketing a package of Post-It© notes.

Most of the petty theft is petty indeed. 66% of office supplies taken are pens, pencils and rulers. Only 8% risk doing hard time with high-priced items like laptops, PDAs and cell phones – an increase of three percent from last year’s survey.

Our managers may call this crime, but I say it’s loyalty. We want our home to be an exact duplicate of our workplace, even if we have to risk a business trip to San Quentin to make it happen. Prison life may be awful, but it certainly can’t be worse than life in the office.

Gee, maybe you can take it with you.

Consider Brian L. Roberts, the CEO of Comcast. Should Mr. Roberts be so unfortunate as to die while in office, his life would end, but his salary would continue. In fact, it would continue for five full years and yes, during that period, he would also collect his annual bonuses.

James M. Bernhard Jr. of the Shaw Group has a similar stipulation in his contract. This CEO gets an extra $17 million dollars in exchange for a promise not to compete with the company for a period of two years following termination of employment. The payment is due even if Mr. Bernhard dies while on the job. No one quite knows how he is going to compete from the grave, but if anyone can do it, it’s Lucky Jim.

There’s a lot not to like about these sweetheart deals, known in the compensation game as “Golden Coffins.” Are we outraged by executives running amuck while the rest of us are running aground, or are we angry because these guys make more dead than we ever will when we’re alive?

The matter of lavish posthumous paydays was the subject of a recent front-page story in “The Wall Street Journal.” Since the Journal takes a rabid pro-business stance, I can only assume the author, Mark Maremont, is not trying to shake a finger, but to point a finger at a one more bloody perk that some vampire CEOs may have forgotten to suck from the necks of their increasingly anemic employees.

Defending humongous salary payments to the dead has not been easy for corporate compensation committees. “Companies defend the practice as an appropriate way to take care of an executive’s family after an unexpected death,” reporter Maremont writes. “They also note that the benefits often are negotiated as part of a pay package that has many components.”

The discovery of these spectacular death benefits may be news, but their existence dates back to corporate pre-history. Only a change in the federal disclosure rules have forced companies to reveal the outsized deathbed gifts being lavished on top of the giant salaries and a panoply of pricey perks.

[If you earn less than $50 million a year, alive or dead, don’t even try to understand these “components.” They’re way beyond you. You probably don’t even understand why it is necessary to shovel on the six-figure perks to retain a top executive who is six feet under the ground. As in – “ I don’t care if Jane is dead. I don’t want her working for the competition!”]

When XTO Energy CEO, Bob R. Simpson, kicks the bucket he will find the bucket filled with the proceeds from a $3 million dollar insurance policy. It’s a skimpy reward, even for a dead man, but don’t worry about the Bobster. Had he died on December 31 of last year, he could have also taken with him a $111 million “bonus,” plus $20.5 million in instantly vested shares, plus – let’s be fair here -- $4.4 million in salary. And if you think you can’t take it with you, why does CEO Simpson’s death trigger an additional $158,400 payment listed as a “car allowance.”

Hey, you don’t expect him to drive through the Pearly Gates in a Kia, do you?

Eugene M. Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries has himself lined up for over $275 million dollars as his last day payday – an amount that is actually more than the company’s entire first quarter’s income for 2008. That pot of gold at the end of the rainbow must be looking pretty good to Isenberg who is 78 years old. The concept of making more than a quarter of a billion dollars simply for giving up breathing must be very attractive. Fortunately, the CEO received over $500 million in compensation between 1992 to 2007, which probably took the edge off all that heavy breathing he had to do.

We could rant and rave over these swollen salaries, but I have a better idea. Next time you get your annual review, and your supervisor dangles a 4% raise before your red, swollen eyes, ask if you are worth more to the company dead or alive. Considering the cost of all your screw-ups, management will probably be glad to double or triple your salary if you add “a quick painless death” to your goals and objectives.

Maybe you really can’t take it with you, but with the pittance they’re paying you to stay, you might as well try.

Has this ever happened to you?

You walk into work feeling great. You’re happy, healthy, full of pep and vim. Then, as the morning progresses, you start feel weak and woozy. Your vision clouds. Every time you try to express your feelings to your manager, your throat contracts and you find you can do little more than rasp out a feeble, “OK, I’ll do it your way.”

By the afternoon you can hardly breathe. You’re tearing up every time you face your computer, and the thought of a late-in-the-day meeting makes your heart start to pound so rapidly you start eying the company defibrillator. When it’s time to go home you’re so tired and sick that you know you will be able to do nothing more that evening than flop on the sofa, sucking down brewskis, and watching the conclusion of “America’s Top Model.”

If this sad description comes close to describing your everyday worklife, here’s good news. The problem might not be your awful, soul-crushing job. Really! Chance are, you aren’t sick of your work. You’re sick because of it.

Lisa Belkin, the Life’s Work columnist at “The New York Times” opened my scratchy, red eyes to this critical issue in a recent screed entitled, “Sickened by the office (Really.) Her theme is that even in allergy season, many people are not suffering from ragweed, but from the ragging they get at work.

The syndrome is called “work-induced allergy” and, according to Belkin, it is “fairly simple to diagnose: the symptoms worsen as the workday progresses, and lessen after you leave. And you feel fine on weekends and vacations.”

And you thought you simply hated your manager!

The specific causes for work-induced allergies listed in the Times article are rooted in the physical world, rather than the psychological torture which we suffer in our workplace Abu Ghraib. The white coats at The Mayo Clinic’s web site (mayoclinc.com) agree. They list 16 professions that are especially at risk for occupational asthma, including veterinarian, cabinetmaker, baker, and hairdresser. [I believe in the new Adam Sandler movie, “Don’t Miss with the Zohan,” the fearless, hairdresser super-spy is eventually brought down by the fumes from a jar of Dippity-Doo.)

For the worker in the more traditional office environment, Ms. Belkin puts the blame for our weakened conditions on sneeze-inducing carpets, rather than snooze-inducing meetings. I’m sure that the cheap building materials and shoddy health standards our companies provide are to blame for much of our misery, but carpets and drapes are hardly the entire cause of our problems at work.

After all, it’s one thing to be allergic to peanuts. It’s quite another when you’re set off on a depressive, downward spiral because of a supervisor who is nuts.

Fortunately, some of the recommended cures for allergic reactions will also work when trying to protect yourself from a psychotic supervisor. For example, sitting at your desk wearing a full-face ventilator mask attached to a C-PAP machine will not only assure you a source of clean, fresh oxygen, but it will also allow you to spend the day dozing without anyone being able to see you’re asleep.

Another workplace irritant that has received a good deal of press lately is the automatic allergic response many of our fellow employees suffer when they come in contact with a co-worker’s odorific perfume or cologne. Right now a number of cases are bubbling through the court system as the judges try to balance the rights of the occupant in the next cubical to be free from nausea and migraines with your right to slather yourself in Paco Rebanne.

[While I would be the last person on earth to tell you to use chemical warfare to defeat an office opponent, if you can rid yourself of a competitor simply by spritzing yourself ten times a day with Calvin Klein’s Obsession, I say, “spritz away!”]

One final fact that is clear in the issues surrounding workplace irritants is that while the employee is certainly free to complain to management or even to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA,) you may risk more than a stuffy nose.

One ailing worker who complained found that management “started treating me like a potential lawsuit, giving me bad reviews and sending me for meetings with H.R.”

My advice: stock up on antihistamines and start stock piling Kleenex. Being sick as a dog is no fun, but anything is better than a meeting with H.R.