Pay Day

   When I worked at the agar factory, my first job out of college, we got paid every Friday with a real paycheck handed to us by the manager. On Friday mornings he would walk around with the checks hanging out of his back pocket. And eventually he would pass them out.

     A few minutes past quitting time one Friday afternoon, I walked into the breakroom and there was the woman from the shipping department just sitting there looking a little ticked off. She was older than the rest of us, probably in her thirties – one of the recruits from the Your Host restaurant at the nearby plaza. She was married and had a young daughter and was not well off financially at all.

     I asked why she was still at work instead of gone for the weekend, and she said that we had not gotten our paychecks that day. She needed her paycheck so she could put gas in her car to get home!

     The office part of the company had never been in the same building as the factory part when I was working there. When I started, the admins and the two owners were in a building across the street. And later, when they bought and were refurbishing a building a couple of miles down Kensington Avenue, the office part was finished long before the production rooms, and the secretaries had moved in and were working there. The manager would be in either location at any given point during the day.

     Apparently he was at the new building at quitting time that Friday with the paychecks still sticking out of his back pocket! My co-worker was hoping he would remember and return soon.

     I got on the phone and called the office. Then I asked to speak to the manager. When he said hello, I started badgering him about waiting until after quitting time to pass out the paychecks and that he needed to get back immediately. The manager, predictably, told me he had been busy all day and I needed to understand that. I responded that busy was no excuse for keeping any of us waiting, especially an employee who needed gas money to get home. There was really only one thing he needed to do all day and he failed to do it – I was getting a tad hysterical.

     He hung up on me.

     By then there were other women in the breakroom waiting to get paid.

     I was not one of them – I went to my grandmother's house where I was staying when I worked at the agar factory – my financial circumstances were such that I had the luxury of not stressing over some pompous idiot holding my paycheck hostage every Friday – but it still made me irate that he treated us all so badly. Then I called my parents and told them I was probably getting fired.

     The next day, Saturday, I went to work – getting some overtime just like every other Saturday for the last few months, since I decided to get as much earnings as I could as quickly as possible to pay off my student loans and then look for another job. The few co-workers who were there told me the manager had shown up shortly after I left the day before and gave everyone their checks and mentioned how wrong it was for me to yell at him when he had been so busy all day.

     And they were wondering what I was going to do.

     The Saturday manager was a different guy than the one we had during the week. He had only heard about the events of the day before.

     He asked, “So what was your problem yesterday?”

     Surprisingly, I was able to respond in a rational, even articulate way. And I said, “You, and X (the other manager) and the owners expect so much from us every single day; and we all work so hard. It just seems like the least you could do in return is to show some respect for all that hard work and pay us before quitting time on Fridays.”

     The Saturday manager then gave me my paycheck with no repurcussions for my outburst of the day before.

     And from then on we were paid on Friday mornings.

     I think that on payday, whether it is once a week, or every other week or once a month or whenever – the boss or accountant or HR person should hand each employee his or her paycheck or paystub or whatever token signifies the worker has just been paid, and then the person giving the token should look the employee in the eye and verbalize a sincere thank you.

     That would be a class act place to work!

167 20150616 Payday