As a son who works for his father I feel that I can absolutely relate and connect with Fanny Fern from her excerpt of Tyrants of the Shop. I work for my father part time and I am mostly secluded from what goes on around the rest of the factory because I stay in the office answering calls and doing paperwork. But, for the rare occasion that I am out of the office and following my father and his managers around to learn more about the business, there will always either be my fathers partner or one of the managers yelling at the workers for doing something which seems minuscule or even “innocent.”
Almost 90 percent of the time when I have the misfortune to witness this exchange of yelling, I feel as if they are doing it just to teach me some sort of lesson in control, or it is perhaps just a way to show off with the hopes that I will tell my father about how he stopped a worker from doing something wrong. My father employs around 80 people in his Coney Island location with more worldwide; I hear the stories on a constant basis about workers incompetence or inability to handle simple tasks. Those stories are usually the fluffed up versions of what I really hear when I walk out of the office.
I feel bad for his workers, and I will always go up to them after and tell them that it is okay, and to ignore him (that particular manager). It turns out, that my father actually likes it when I make his workers feel confident that he made sure to talk to his managers to lighten up on the workers and to stop yelling at them regardless of how many mistakes they make. I tell the managers all the time that they won’t accomplish anything by yelling at my fathers employees. It feels good when I tell them that because I see the look on their faces when they want to answer back to me. They know they can’t or they’ll lose their jobs, but some of them realize that it is actually true and they won’t accomplish anything by yelling at them.
The author made it very easy for me to relate and I hope her message were spread around more freely because as an employers son, I can assure you that situations like the one mentioned in the excerpt occur more often then you would think.
If you were an employer to so many people how do you think you would handle the workplace environment? After all, we are in a business school and not all of us will have a smooth sailing ride with our bosses.
PS. Sorry for the blog not being done at noon. I was in class all day and didn’t have time to get it done until now.
