Hey, listen! I am not a lawyer! Nothing I say here is legal advice. These are just my opinions. I am not qualified to help you make decisions. Talk to a legal professional before you do fuckin' anything!
OK, with that out of the way (for now)!
I work intake at a small law office that deals with employment issues. My job is to talk on the phone (YUCK) to people who are having problems at their job, or at their former job.
This is U N S P E A K A B L Y frustrating work.
Don't get me wrong - I often talk to people on the worst day they've had in a long time. I know they're having a much more frustrating, painful day than I am. I always do my best to be kind and understanding to the people who are not shitheads.
But I end nearly every workday having spent a good chunk of time correcting misconceptions. Sometimes people argue with me and I'm like why the fuck did you call a lawyer if you already know all about the law ANYWAY
I'm not mad at these folks (except the arguers) because this information - this very basic, critical information - about how do job go? Is obfuscated, on purpose.
Laws are difficult to understand because the ruling class does not want the average person to understand the law. They want to wield the law with impunity against the masses, while being protected from consequences themselves. This is pretty much the system we have in the US. (more on this another time.)
Workers here are royally, supremely fucked beyond belief compared with other places I know a little about. Europeans and Aussies are horrified and sometimes just don't believe how little we have in the way of protections. Frankly, it's shameful, and I've had to develop a variety of little phrases to express all the ways we're fucked.
Turns out--people do not like receiving this information! especially on their worst day in a while!
My heart sinks when someone opens a call by confidently asserting that they have been wrongfully terminated, or that they are experiencing a hostile work environment, or that their boss is retaliating against them. >=90% of the time, the caller is about to have their bubble burst. By me. :(
Goodbye, mansion dreams. Goodbye, revenge fantasies. Goodbye, just-world fallacy. (lol nah you can't stop that one)
Hello, lack of job openings and eviscerated government supports.
Love it. Love my job. 's great.
So I thought: maybe people could learn this shit ahead of time, and get a leg up. I would like that. Make my job easier. Have one or two fewer people crushed in the unregulated gears of capitalism. Nice. Good. Ooh, this would make a good TikTok???
Then I remembered that I'm a millennial. I'm boring beyond description, I'm neither conventionally attractive nor willing to make a fool of myself in public, and social media does bad things to me. Better idea: maybe I dig out the ol' HTML machine and make a neocities site instead (inspired by this video).
Basically, I'm just gonna tell y'all what the lawyer I work for tells me. Because he won't tell you what he tells me - too much risk. (more on that later, too.)
But I'm not your lawyer. I'm not a lawyer at all. My perspective is limited, especially when it comes to state law. I'm definitely not giving anyone legal advice here. Just sharing observations from a more unusual perspective.
Plus it's really, really not worth suing me.
nota bene: i got the adhd real good, so updates will be irregular and infrequent, if I even remember this thing exists in a week. the point is really not to create content in perpetuity, but to just make a list of shit ppl should know about.