Perhaps not so surprising, really: Google's "free food" is not free
- but sad to see if Google's true colours have come out ($green$), as is suggested.
"Not so surprising" because - and I feel obliged to state this - allowing an employer to make so-called "free food" an item with an agreed fixed notional $ value in your employment contract would seem to be an incredibly naive (if not stupid) thing to do, but there we are.
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I learned a powerful lesson here. If you allow them to placate you with some kind of luxury, don't be too surprised when they take it away. They will conveniently forget that it was used as a bargaining tactic.
No, that's not the lesson. The lesson is a set of rules/guidelines: (off the top of my head)
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- Take the trouble to learn about and understand useful negotiating skills/techniques.
- Take the trouble to learn about and understand contract law - especially employment contract law.
- There is THEM (i.e., the employer) and there is YOU, and they are obliged (as good corporate psychopaths) to regard any contract negotiation as a confrontation where they know what conditions they want to meet in order to WIN. THEY (being psychopaths) lack empathy and don't care about YOU.
- THEY are usually going to be much bigger and stronger than you in any employment negotiation, unless you can catch them in a contractual error. (It's been known to happen - been there, done that.)
- RULE: Never allow yourself to enter into an employment contract where your cash benefit is reduced/substituted by an estimated fixed or variable notional dollar amount for a fixed or variable non-cash item or "perk", as a term of the contract.
- By all means get an estimate of the cash-equivalent of the item, and then say "No thanks, I'll take the cash" - whether a perk like food or a car. Cash is liquidity and readily convertible into something you can eat. You can't eat a car.
- The only exceptions to this would be where there was a significant dollar tax-benefit or cashflow benefit that you could gain by taking the cash-substitute. There are not many of these nowadays though, as the IR have been closing the loopholes on the tax-benefits, and usually only financial companies are in a position to be able to offer you perks that could give you a cashflow benefit (e.g., a loan or mortgage at a rate well below prevailing market rates).
In the above blog post, rachelbythebay has already been made a victim, and the victimiser is the employer.
But in the case of rachelbythebay, she unwittingly made herself a victim when she entered into that employment contract under those terms. She did that because she had the "wrong" paradigm to start with.
Protesting about it afterwards, or feeling hurt or feeling that you have been short-changed and then arriving at a wrong conclusion ("my lesson learned") is classic after-the-event victim mentality.
After being ripped-off in minor ways a couple of times, I learned years ago from a book entitled "How to be a non-victim" (or something like that), that you needed to maintain a non-victim state of mind before dealing with anyone - so you avoid being made a victim of in the first place.
From my experience, this isn't necessarily an easy thing to do, as it requires you to modify your behaviours and habits and to change your paradigms, and to fight back. But the important thing was that I did do it, and so could anyone else.
Perhaps even more importantly, as well as learning to be a non-victim, I learned to be a non-victimiser.
Logged
My point is not that Google is great, just that those numbers don't mean a lot. Oh and Proletar doesn't appear to have Facebook. Er..?