This can’t get said enough. HR is not there to help you. HR is there to keep you from being able to sue the company if something happens.
If you have, or someone gives you a cause to sue the company, before hiring a lawyer and possibly (likely) losing your job because you’re suing your employer, you can instead take the complaint up with HR. They should recognize the liability for the company in your situation and take steps to minimize or eliminate any possibly perception of blame that could be cast upon the company.
Here, I’ll give you an example of something that actually happened to me. I used to work at a grocery store and to say the “left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing” … Would be an understatement. It was a fairly large place in a national chain of stores. I was working in the produce department at the time…
So, the supplier for grapes informed us that the location where the grapes are grown has black widow spiders in the habitat. Though every effort is made to prevent it, there is still the possibility that the grapes may contain traces of venomous spiders.
Corporate HR appeared, like a fart you didn’t hear, but you can definitely smell. They tasked my manager to get everyone in the department to sign a paper that said, and I shit you not: we’ve been made aware of the possibility of black widow spiders in the grapes, and that we understand that we should use specialty gloves that are bite resistant/bite proof when handling the grapes… As soon as I read that I turned to my manager and said what fucking gloves? Where are these gloves?
We, of course, didn’t have any such thing. I asked the manager if they could get some for us and they didn’t even know how to do that.
Simply: after everyone has signed the statement, and if anyone is bitten by a black widow, the HR dickwads that work at the company can hold up the form you signed saying “we tooky them to use the gloves for safety, and they were not using those gloves at the time of the incident” … Because nobody ever got the gloves. Regardless, it lets the company throw you under the bus for getting injured, while management won’t help you in staying safe on the job, often encouraging the behaviour that HR says you should not be doing.
HR is not your friend, they’re actively protecting the enemy (the business owners) from you, the worker.
Why did anyone even touch the grapes after signing the paper? Seems like a good excuse to say “I can’t do that. No gloves. I signed a thing, remember?”
That’s essentially what I did. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who took issue with it.
I looked my manager square in the face and told them I would not, under any circumstances, be stocking grapes unless the proper safety equipment was available.
That’s a log l job I never had to do again. Because they never got the safety equipment.
Right to refuse unsafe working conditions is a right where I live. If they tried to retaliate against me it would become a very short lawsuit.
They can’t fire you, what are they going to fire you for?
If it goes to an employment tribunal then you simply say “I was not been uncooperative I simply was upholding the rules they require me to uphold, do not touch the grapes without protection.” Now they’re stuck.
Then the judge slaps them with an unfair dismissal and you get several years wage compensation and the company looks awful in front of the judge. Possibly a safety violation fine as well.
This can’t get said enough. HR is not there to help you. HR is there to keep you from being able to sue the company if something happens.
If you have, or someone gives you a cause to sue the company, before hiring a lawyer and possibly (likely) losing your job because you’re suing your employer, you can instead take the complaint up with HR. They should recognize the liability for the company in your situation and take steps to minimize or eliminate any possibly perception of blame that could be cast upon the company.
Here, I’ll give you an example of something that actually happened to me. I used to work at a grocery store and to say the “left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing” … Would be an understatement. It was a fairly large place in a national chain of stores. I was working in the produce department at the time… So, the supplier for grapes informed us that the location where the grapes are grown has black widow spiders in the habitat. Though every effort is made to prevent it, there is still the possibility that the grapes may contain traces of venomous spiders.
Corporate HR appeared, like a fart you didn’t hear, but you can definitely smell. They tasked my manager to get everyone in the department to sign a paper that said, and I shit you not: we’ve been made aware of the possibility of black widow spiders in the grapes, and that we understand that we should use specialty gloves that are bite resistant/bite proof when handling the grapes… As soon as I read that I turned to my manager and said what fucking gloves? Where are these gloves?
We, of course, didn’t have any such thing. I asked the manager if they could get some for us and they didn’t even know how to do that.
Simply: after everyone has signed the statement, and if anyone is bitten by a black widow, the HR dickwads that work at the company can hold up the form you signed saying “we tooky them to use the gloves for safety, and they were not using those gloves at the time of the incident” … Because nobody ever got the gloves. Regardless, it lets the company throw you under the bus for getting injured, while management won’t help you in staying safe on the job, often encouraging the behaviour that HR says you should not be doing.
HR is not your friend, they’re actively protecting the enemy (the business owners) from you, the worker.
Why did anyone even touch the grapes after signing the paper? Seems like a good excuse to say “I can’t do that. No gloves. I signed a thing, remember?”
That’s essentially what I did. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who took issue with it.
I looked my manager square in the face and told them I would not, under any circumstances, be stocking grapes unless the proper safety equipment was available.
That’s a log l job I never had to do again. Because they never got the safety equipment.
Right to refuse unsafe working conditions is a right where I live. If they tried to retaliate against me it would become a very short lawsuit.
Because then they fire you.
They can’t fire you, what are they going to fire you for?
If it goes to an employment tribunal then you simply say “I was not been uncooperative I simply was upholding the rules they require me to uphold, do not touch the grapes without protection.” Now they’re stuck.
Then the judge slaps them with an unfair dismissal and you get several years wage compensation and the company looks awful in front of the judge. Possibly a safety violation fine as well.
Yeah but then you get bullied about being reasonable