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Excerpt from "Is the boss a real piece of work?" (Los Angeles Times) . . .
Getting even with an ogre, or at least venting, is a cottage industry.
Lawmakers across the country are considering legislation that would give workers grounds to sue their superiors for being, basically, jerks. Bookstores are stocking bad-boss advice tomes, including "Snakes in Suits" and "Was Your Boss Raised by Wolves?" Today the AFL-CIO will name the worst boss in the country, based on the results of an online contest.
Are relations between workers and management really in such an awful state?
Maybe. The ranks of bullying bosses are growing, some experts contend, as short-staffed companies tap managers with lousy people skills. Others point out that though mean and dimwitted supervisors have been around since work was invented, baby boomers on the cusp of retirement and restless younger employees are more likely to complain or quit than suffer in silence. It's easy to decide against taking the latter tack, thanks to the proliferation of venting websites, among them www.ebosswatch.com.
. . .If [a jerk boss] doesn't sound like grounds for a lawsuit, at least four state legislatures are thinking about making it so.
. . .
This year's contestants -- all anonymous, of course, as they were in 2006 -- tell many horror stories.
One of the hundreds posted is about a lawyer who called the office every morning to give instructions as he brushed his teeth and conducted other business in his bathroom; another is about a manager who refused to let an employee whose husband had a brain tumor take a day off unless she provided a note from a doctor.
Read the rest of "Is the boss a real piece of work?"
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