Desk for Sirius? Who owns what?
Summary: The previous part in the Sirius ‘Open Source’ series showed the financial issues at Sirius; to make matters worse, the company does not provide any means for work to its NOC staff (except an ancient Cisco phone, about 20 years old and bought second hand through eBay)
THE articles that we published about the EPO showed that as horrible and autocratic António Campinos has been, at least the Office chipped in and covered expenses for home working, such as ergonomic chairs. At Sirius, however, the company pays for nothing of that sort. Not for desk, chair, computer, and so on. Workers are on their own; technical problems with a work device? That’s your problem. That’s your device. The company won’t cover it. Then they impose bloatware on staff — software that ordinary machines cannot run (yes, staff did complain; it was a common problem) or can barely run. Does the company help procure suitable hardware? No. Was it asked about it? Yes.
Here is an internal report circulated in the company earlier this month (a day prior to departure):
Remote Workers’ Procurement and Other Costs
Equipping staff with suitable assets is a basic, very basic, requirement. Roy has covered the legal aspects of that for many years in his Web sites. In Sirius, the company failed to equip home workers (“work-from-home” staff) with any computers or chairs or anything required to do the work. The managers expect staff to pay for purchasing and maintenance of all work equipment at their own expense in their own time. There’s no IT department to help with computer issues or even issue a replacement.
To make matters worse, bloated software which requires very powerful and expensive computers was introduced some years ago. Roy and colleagues also complained about this bloat, but that fell on deaf ears (Roy internally suggested the company can purchase suitable equipment or cover the costs of that). That’s aside from the very low (by market standards) salary, adding further burden. More on financial aspects shall be discussed later.
In recent months workers began observing that Sirius had customers with no way to access their systems. So how are workers supposed to deal with tickets they receive? There was expectation of dealing with queries by using “Google” to throw some answer at a client (as if the client cannot access Google), otherwise find an associate or escalate. It was starting to get hard to even tell apart clients and non-clients, as documentation was scarce and outdated to the point where clients were vaguely described and their status was unclear. Sentences like “Google is your friend” were said inside the company (Google is surveillance, it’s not a friend) and our skillset ought not rely on using search engines, following a textual script (like clerical staff in a call centre), or mere escalation to some other company. As noted before, many associates are at best loosely connected to the company and are in effect third parties.
About a year ago Roy faced disciplinary action over something unjust (to him). Instead of an independent, impartial tribunal acting as arbitrator it was likely the culprits judging the incident, then resorting to cover-up/distortion over the sequence of events to pass to the blame to ‘low-level’ staff. This started to become a typical modus operandi, which dated back several years, as a later section will explain in detail.
These issues turned out to be more widespread as staff managed to communicate with one another. For instance, lots of people were having phone issues. The company did not admit this; individual people reported it, then there was blaming of the people unable to use a defective “service” that keeps changing and breaking things that previously worked. Instead of admitting this migration was a mistake and acknowledging prior warning were given, there was only further entrenchment. More details will be given in the last section.
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