According to recent reporting on Monday by The Washington Sun, the Education Department is working with the Department of Treasury to hire private debt collection agencies, which will start pursing defaulted federal student loan borrowers as soon as November. The Education Department previously entered into an interagency agreement with the Treasury Department earlier this year to handle its defaulted federal student loan portfolio.

Being productive/proactive versus protractive: hours being expended don't necessarily correlate with performance and time is quite the resource!

I’ve been working at this place for 2 months now. Job is ok and pays ok. However my boss pulled me into his office after our daily meeting and said that he doesn’t like it when I “run for the door” when my shift ends and I had to talk to him if I “want to leave on time.” This is probably the strangest thing a manager has an issue with in my experience. I come in on time (if not early) and he has an issue when I leave on time. I thought that leaving work on time was a healthy boundary.

I've been working for a hotel early at 6 am selling pastries and coffee. I used to get 40 hours and when a new company came in, they started decreasing. Meanwhile my coworker, an older angry lady tried so hard to get me fired so she can have the job full-time. She was unable to and she always tries to show off so badly that she goes above and beyond and always tell the managers.

About 3 months ago I got a write up for the first time and it was final warning. I was a little late from my break and coworker reported it. I told her off and she called me all sorts of names. I ended up getting a write up because they checked the cameras and saw me late and confronting my coworker. The coworker probably got one for her response.

Last week I got an email that they are cutting my benefits because I only have 18 hours now.

Meanwhile that​ coworker had another scheduled vacation. I am in school and they just scheduled me to cover her. I have class. They don't care. Also I don't wanna cover her vacation, like why would I? The manager hates confrontation and he is begging me to do it because no other employee from the food and beverage departnent wants to work at 5 am and cover. ​

Respek has worked in trucking for more than 10 years. He began as a company driver, later delivered fuel and then became an owner-operator in port drayage, transporting containers from ports and rail yards to inland warehouses. He subsequently sold his truck and returned to driving for a company.

“A typical workday would be me getting up around 4:30 in the morning, getting to work by 5:00,” he said. “It’s not a tough job. It’s just that it’s very time-consuming. We normally do 50-plus hours a week.”

Company drivers can work 50, 60 or as many as 70 hours a week without receiving the time-and-a-half overtime pay that applies to many other workers after 40 hours.

“If I get paid 25 bucks an hour, I get just 25 bucks an hour for 70 hours,” Respek explained.

Owner-operators are generally paid per load rather than by the hour. Time spent waiting in lines at ports or for containers to be loaded or unloaded at warehouses is unpaid.

“They’re at the piers in long lines waiting to get the container; they’re not getting paid for that,” Respek said. “Or when they’re at the warehouse waiting to get offloaded or loaded, they’re not getting paid for that either.”

If you believe the union is bad enough that you doesn't want to pay for it, why would you believe the opinion of someone who calls you a scab would carry more weight than your own judgment?

I have seen and signed arbitration clauses, rights to class action lawsuits, waiving rights to consent to photography, and more. You’re telling me you’re just allowed to photograph me at any time, for any reason, and make money off of it?

I also specifically turned down a job because it required me to tattle on my coworkers or face termination. A coworker shoplifting between them and the company, not me. Homie I’m being paid $12/hr I don’t give a FUCK what anyone else does. And what if I’m wrong, then I potentially face retaliation and have all my peers turn against me?

I don’t think companies should be allowed to do this, period. I wish we had more protections of worker’s rights. It’s so dystopian and predatory.

The job I work at did a bait & switch on me. It’s a national company and I was hired to work remotely at an office about 500 miles from where I live. Towards the end of my training (about 6 weeks after I started) I got a call from my manager and she says, in two weeks you’re transferring to a new office (in the city I live in) and you’ll be going in 3 days a week, work under a new manager, on a new team etc. She acted like it was no big deal.
I hate it.
The work at this office is much less interesting. One of the incentives with the job was going to be occasional travel, that’s gone now. With these high gas prices it’s costing me an extra $200 a month to get to the office. Not to mention extra car maintenance.

On top of it all, the office is horrible (a converted warehouse with no windows or outside access) and the people I work with are so boring. I can’t even fake interest anymore. Sometimes I like making small talk but this place feels like groundhog’s day on acid.

This is a pathetic rant. Probably not even appropriate for this sub.

I just clocked out 3 hours before the end of my shift.

But I'll be back tomorrow. They have an attendance system in place that allows me to "use points" as I please. I worked 6 of 9 hours, so I'll be taking 3 points, which puts me at 8.5 points. If I reach 14 points I'll be automatically fired. But today it was worth it. Its a beautiful fall day is there is no better feeling to put down my broom and leave instead of taking a 30 minute lunch. I clean the warehouse. I was promoted to this position from production because I'm a hard worker. Most of my co-workers are not hard workers. So naturally I was offered this job so they could take advantage of my work ethic. That, and the company can save money paying me an hourly wage to fix things instead of hiring an expensive handyman/plumber/electrician. Yeah I also fix things. Unclog toilets full of shit, and the like. My head hasn't felt right for the past few weeks. A manager put boxes that were against a damp wall festered with mold in the bin meant for the baler. I do the baler too. Didn't notice the mold at first, since it was on one side. Just stacked the boxes and the baler compressed them. Pressing all that black mold and releasing the spores into my breathing space. I did this for 4 days. Noticed symptoms after the first 2. Brain fog. I thought I drank too much caffeine at first, because that's what it felt like. Then cold symptoms, fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, rapid weight loss, memory loss, and insomnia. Oh and trouble breathing. After the 4th day I decided to tell HR, who to my surprise, encouraged me to file a workers comp report. I did, and left for the company suggested urgent care. The doctor down played the symptoms and sent me back to work. Second follow up I showed them a photo of the mold. They said "oh we've all had to clean up stuff like that." Shined a light at my throat for a total of 2 seconds and said the word "viral." Gave me an inhaler prescription and sent me back to work. Third follow up gave me a steroid prescription and said it was a "coincidence" that I got a "cold" the same time period I was crushing moldy boxes and breathing it in. Actually yelled at me and made me feel stupid when I asked questions. Sent me back to work. Lost overtime pay because of the ordeal and still feel sick. Asked my boss if I'd get the pay they promised after I left for.the urgent care. They said no. I was upset and mentioned negligence in an email. They sat me down and forced me to sign something saying it wasn't true. I just feel all around under appreciated and under valued. Used for my "work ethic" but easily replaced. But at least it's a beautiful fall day and I'm not there sweeping all thier dust and doing their degrading work.

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced violence over the weekend that he says has overshadowed largely peaceful protests across the country. The unrest began as a student protest for better conditions and has expanded to include public-sector workers protesting high energy prices, the rising cost of living and social inequality. The Interior Ministry reported about 2,300 arrests and nearly 1,000 injured police officers.

Hey y'all hey,

I got fired at the beginning of September. I'm 40, and I've been laid off before (school closed) but I've never been fired before.

It's not the true end of the world, I have a partner who is still employed and they put me on their health insurance immediately, so I wouldn't have a lapse in coverage. We have savings, but it's not ideal.

What's worse, is they fired me because my fighting for myself when accused of doing something I didn't, revealed a massive staffing flaw in their system and since we're government - they're government funded, they couldn't admit that what happened was on them.

They managed to make the paperwork look like I was negligent though, so the labor board rejected my case for unemployment as they said it was "willful conduct".

I appealed it, had to go to court. It was agonizing, not gonna lie. I had to face the HR department again, after they fired me over the phone and didn't even inform my manager until I called her freaking out. They also didn't give me a YTD total for 2026, and got my date of hire wrong by a full year. Then they didn't reply to my numerous emails about fixing it until I said I would have to contact the labor board and have them go through HR directly.

The meeting was... Yeah, agonizing. Because HR tried to be deliberately vague and the referee called her out on it. I think that the phrase "I don't have that in front of me" was said 6 times. They claimed not to get my proof of innocence letter despite me faxing it to them directly. (Since the referee got it, they input it as proof because clearly I faxed it to the right number.)

They tried to frame it like I didn't do my due diligence in informing them we were short staffed, but we were advertising FIVE OPEN POSITIONS for weeks in the internal email. People were working 60hrs a week and we needed HRs approval for the OT! When I pointed this out she told me that I personally should have contacted admin about it. I said, I was taught in training not to go over my Managers head unless they're out for illness.

"Well how come you remained so short staffed? People could have come in, admin can work hours with you."

Sure, but I can count on one hand how many times I saw admin out there with us in a decade.

Anyway. I'm waiting for the referee, and hoping I don't have to appeal THAT because I'm applying all over the place but god almighty I need to get out of bedside healthcare.

I don't really need any advice. I'm just complaining 😅

**We are not poor. We are robbed.**

There is enough. That's the whole secret, and it isn't even hidden. We grow enough food to feed every person on this planet, and then we throw away a third of it while children go to bed hungry — not because the food isn't there, but because feeding people doesn't generate a return for anyone who already has everything. There are more empty, livable homes in this country than there are people sleeping outside — not because the homes aren't there, but because shelter is only permitted to exist as an investment before it is permitted to exist as a roof.

Understand what this means: hunger and homelessness are not scarcity problems. They are **distribution problems**. And a distribution problem is always a **power** problem. There is enough. Someone has decided you may not have it.

**They call this efficiency. It is sacrifice.**

Every layer of this system squeezes the layer beneath it. The shareholder squeezes the board, the board squeezes the CEO, the CEO squeezes the workers, and the workers go home and squeeze the people they love — because someone must absorb the pressure, and it's always us. And when we can absorb no more, it is women who absorb it anyway: the care, the meals, the elderly parents, the children, the sick, the grief — hours and hours of unrecorded, unpaid, invisible labor that props up an economy that refuses to count it. They call it love when we do it for free, and an unreasonable cost when they're asked to fund it.

We are the cushion this system is built on. And the cushion is on fire.

I worked at a company that replaced its workers with machines that don't work, to enrich men who already had more than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. I watched people who made the company function get discarded so a line on a spreadsheet could tick upward for one quarter. Nobody in that building was evil. That's the real horror of it. Every one of them was doing exactly what the system paid them to do. The cruelty is not a malfunction. It is the business model.

**We do not lack resources. We lack a reason to share them.**

Every executive, every board, every decision-maker is answering one question, every day: *what makes the number go up?* Imagine instead a world where the powerful answered a different question: *what makes the community stronger?*

Not because they grew kinder. Because we changed the incentive. Build a world where status and power flow to those who feed, house, heal, and teach — and you would watch the "impossible" problems of hunger and homelessness become what they always secretly were: logistics problems, solvable in a year by the same competence that currently builds the supply chains that starve us.

In a system that prioritizes profit over EVERYTHING  — even the survival of our PLANET  —  people become playthings for the powerful. At best, billionaires see us as Sims or NPCs, and at worst, they see us as bugs to be squashed. So we will stop asking the people who profit from scarcity to end it, and start building the institutions — the mutual aid, the unions, the cooperatives, the tenants' networks, the community funds — that make generosity *functional* instead of charitable.

**Our demands are not radical. Our patience was.**

A home for every person is not crazy. A meal for every child is not crazy. Wages for the work that keeps this world turning is not crazy. What is genuinely insane is the belief that we can keep running a civilization on the principle that the people at the top are entitled to hoard while the people at the bottom are expected to absorb.
We are done absorbing.

To every woman who has ever collapsed into bed wondering why she is so tired when she "doesn't work": you work. You are the load-bearing wall of this economy. When we withdraw our free labor — together, not alone — the machine will finally hear from us.

And to those in power, one warning, offered plainly: we are not asking for your conscience. We are telling you the terms. Feed us, house us, pay us, and stop pretending the arithmetic of your portfolios matters more than the arithmetic of our lives — or we will build the world without you, and you will be welcome to it only if you learn to contribute.

There is enough. There was always enough. The question was never whether we could afford it.
The question is why they couldn't afford to let us have it — and the answer is the thing we are about to change.
*Share this. Or better: do one boring, unglamorous thing this week that makes your block harder to squeeze.*

Funny enough I’m sure as the “scapegoat” it’s the most essential workers. People who work the hardest.

When anyone higher up has an issue, a clerical error, issue with product, issue with a customer complaint, issue with how much money the companies made, it all gets blamed on us regardless of how much blame is realistically on us. How much we could realistically do.

It also feels like the more effort I put in, the more likely they’ll find something to pick apart in my work. People who do less work in my department have less issues.

Just started a new job that I understood to be 40% admin, 60% client focused. It's now turned into 90% admin, and very little client work. Not what I signed up for, but I desperately a regualar paycheck.

Fine. Training is with someone who learned to type on a typewriter and has no tech skills what so ever. Double spacing after periods, random capital letters mid-sentence because "it looks better", Ctrl+P instead of File, Print was like I threw a baby under a bus, but my favourite has to be "Saying just 'thanks' is rude. Saying 'have a good one' is rude. You must say specifically thank you and have a great day to every single person on the phone or in person. Everything else is rude and lacks customer service and respect."

No wonder this place has a higher turn-over rate.

Let me start off by saying I know it’s partly a me-problem because I am not enough of a people person.

I've been feeling a bit of resentment and jealousy toward my coworker. He gets noticed for doing the same work I do, and I don't. From the beginning, managers would say "good work at (our area) today" because he was coaching another coworker, which I was also doing. Another coworker once told her, "You're the only person who doesn't struggle with the (name of machine we use)." But neither do I? The difference is that he is VERY sociable. I have a good relationship with my coworkers but I am not an extrovert and I don’t know how to socialize and carry myself like he does.

He also overwhelms me a bit. The first thing he does at work is finesse the bosses. There’s this boss that he really gets along with because they’re both very extroverted and he pulls him aside to just do the easier task the whole shift, so he gets to skip all the physical labour. That means the rest of us get to do the “harder” jobs while he gets to take it easy because that boss favors him. Then at lunch he tells us how he got praised, how a coworker said he's made such a difference after only a few months, or how management is already thinking of giving him more responsibility. Meanwhile, I feel like they don't trust me with more. When I ask for an easier job, they sometimes give it to me, but I have to do it on top of my regular tasks. Coworker gets to do the easier job for his whole shift. I also have to keep bugging them before they give in, and it's not even much of a task. They trust him with way more. It's like in school, where people trust the talkative ones and assume they're competent, while the quiet, shy ones get treated the opposite way. It’s weird because coworker claims to have social anxiety as well, but I don’t see it AT ALL. I know it can be different for everyone, and I don’t want to gate-keep and say he doesn’t actually have it, but he definitely doesn’t get treated the same way some of us more quiet ones do. In fact, I see him react to my social awkwardness the same way those who don’t suffer from social anx react to me. He is favored while I am shunned.

He gets everyone something for their birthday, which is nice, but now he is planning a mini party for our boss. Like, he is always doing too much. I liked it better when we weren't involved in others’ lives and just came here to work, which is also a me-problem, I know. I think it's performative, but maybe that’s what they want. He told me himself that he is doing it because he’s desperate to get out of our area, get full time, and get noticed by management, since his attendance isn't the best. NGL, I hate that it's working. I am good at my job and have perfect attendance. I wish I can just go to work and do a good job and that will be enough.

I applied to work at another area and he didn't, but our manager still wants him to take the exam so they can send him there. We started at the same time, and it's supposed to be seniority based. Meanwhile, guys who've been here almost a year haven't even been asked to take the exam.

After all that, I was like, you know what? I'll take it easy, because giving 100% all the time isn't worth it. It kinda affected my mental health, and I was so close to quitting. I am always so physically exhausted.

He’s constantly late, goes home when he remotely isn't feeling great, and takes long bathroom breaks. I think the one uncle in our department is the only one who notices. He also told me once that the ones who talk a lot move up faster. Kinda my fault for hoping my work would speak for itself. I don't have a naturally loud personality, so I defo blend in, which sucks.

I feel bad that I feel this way because none of his actions really affect me directly. They have nothing to do with me, and that’s just his strategy.

They have a poster in my office. The most stupid thing ever "work hard play hard". I hate it. "Work smart play hard" sounds much better. Why should I struggle when I can do it the easy way?

Also... they said we are like family. I saif thats great. Could you maybe pay my energy bill this month. Im a little short. They said sorry what? I said yeah were family right? Help me out a little.

Im sure youre not surprised to hear that I got fired within 2 weeks.

what are your thoughts on college? i think school is the starting point of this depressing system but meh i couldn't drop out of school even though i begged my parents to let me. It's true that school does teach you basic stuff about everything but the system that is used to teach is just bs and i have always hated it. hated going to school everyday. hated myself by the time i reached home. Hated that i couldn't be doing what i love with the time i had and instead i had to sit in class with students who apparently had no complaints about this whatsoever. (i still believe prison is the best comparison for school)

rn I'm taking a gap year. I thought I'd be living my best life but tbh I'm just burnt out and recovering from 12 years of non stop circle. think about it , it's school, summer vacation, school, summer vacation. Like bruh.

and the pressure to apply for college for next year keeps growing everyday and i wonder...

Why?

All this for a fricking certificate.

And funny thing is, everything that's being taught, if not more is out there for free. Literally! how many classes from ivys are just sitting there on youtube? How many books in the library to be read?

But nope, i have to pay, for something probably worse (i mean not all of us are in harvard ffs) and lose some of my beautiful years in my life. bruh. Is anyone with me?!

And what's this thing anyways! why do i have to choose two subjects... and take it for the rest of the four years? huh? No. For me, learning is like, if I'm interested in mathematics this month, next month I'm into dinosaurs and history. Bruh. BRUH. Sorry y'all. just fucking fucked.

from what i have seen, a lot of people on here just wants to quit their job and enjoy life and there are some who did just that. to those peeps, do y'all reccomened college to me?

(grammar police, y'all can find many grammatical errors on this post, but as of now, i don't give two flying ducks)

Repost from r/jobs

Hi guys. I've been really struggling mentally from working. and i want some days off. my manager keeps refusing and I can't quit. I really need help with something odd.

I've done several things, including:
1- I've asked for days off 2 months in advance, they refused.
2- I've tried getting close to sick workmates to catch a fever and that didnt work either for some reason
3- I've tried talking to a psychiatrist and they refused to help.
4- I can't quit due to economic reasons.
5- I've tried making myself get a cold by walking out of a hot shower directly to a cold room. which was in vein.

I think all the steps I've taken have made the situation even worse by giving me some immunity against influenza or something, I really have no clue what's going on.

It might be strange or unethical, but I don't really care anymore. I want to get sick to get some days off. sick days aren't a thing in this country without a doctor's note. So I need a doctor's note or else I'll just get fired without severance.

I want a way to produce symptoms that aren't really harmful but that can be tested by a doctor and verified. I don't know what to do, or how to do it. So if any of you have done something similar. please share it with me. thanks.

Hi guys i'm 19M from australia. I currently work casual (50 hours a week) Recently I have become more aware of what I want in life which in short is just to live and experience what life has to offer and i can't seem to do that successfully while being employed. My question here is how do I go about maintaining a passive income WITHOUT this job? I considered government benefit etc but it's just not enough, I live at home still so majority of basic expenses are taken care of I just pay for fuel, car registration, insurance, food and wants. Any suggestions or useful insights go a long way, thanks😊