My employers can quite frankly, get bent.

[agentz.livejournal.com]

So I posted a variant of this in my own personal Journal, but I thought it was worth bringing it here...

(A little background - I work in technical support for the Education department of my Local Government branch. I do the duties of what would normally be a senior analyst in our organisation but I'm not paid as such, in fact according to our progression scheme I'm technically still a trainee. After four years. There are two IT teams within the council, us, who solely provide support to Education users, and the Corporate team who do everything else, but we have by far a much larger userbase and infrastructure. We have recently however theoretically come under a common line management structure.)

I'm really really pissed off with work at the moment. Myself and a the other sensible people in the "team" (and I use that term loosely these days) have the distinct feeling that we're being shafted. Again.

There's the ongoing saga of our über crappy accommodation - blue_monday can vouch for this, he's been in my office, then there's the perceived lack of fairness in certain matters which I won't go into again, the humongous range in salary which means that all the useless fuckers get paid much, much more than I do and the whole lack of teamwork from certain people on a repeated basis.

The latest thing? It's been decreed from on-high that we've all to get electronic time recording software installed on our machines and we will be required to categorise our time into one of a couple of dozen categories. When I heard about this from my boss the other day my first question was "Why are we having to do this?" - the answer I got?

Because the IT Director says so.

Well, excuse fucking me, thats not an adequate answer in my book.

I've told him to get bent about seven times in the last two days now, at least until I get answers to some pretty serious reservations in writing.

What I want to know before I agree to do this are things like:

* How is the data collected
* How is the data going to be analysed
* What safeguards are being put in place to stop blatantly false entries
* This seems like a total duplication of work as our helpdesk system already records time and can do cost against each job
* Who has access to the data and how is it going to be presented
* What is the data going to be used for
* What repercussions are there going to be if people are seen to be 'not pulling their weight'

And a whole stack of other things.

To be frank, my boss hasn't got the answers to these concerns, he's just been told that its happening.

From my perspective, the most important concern is who's going to have access to the data because as far as I'm concerned it should only be the system supervisor and my line manager - the IT Director should have far better things to concern herself with than staff timesheets. The infrastructure manager isn't in my line management structure so he can fuck off (sorry, he and I have had run-ins in the past where he's contacted me about personal issues that are none of his concern), and the business support managers are absolutely nothing to do with the work our team does.

If I'm feeling particularly malevolent at the team meeting tomorrow I think I might just have to bring up the fact that myself and one of my colleagues made a written complaint to our manager and his manager about protection of some sensitive personal data (salaries, addresses, payroll numbers etc in an open share on one of our primary network servers that we do not manage) over a year ago and this situation still has not been resolved, and until this is resolved I'm not going to be putting my name to any more data that could be mis-used.

I also have a huge issue with the fact that the implementation of this package has not been discussed, at all within our team. Yeah sure we've got a team meeting tomorrow afternoon, but I know fine damn well that my boss isn't going to be able to answer any of my concerns at the meeting. I wouldn't have anywhere near such a negative attitude towards this if someone could answer my questions.

The impression I get is that our colleagues in the Corporate team notionally bill their clients for time and other resources on a per job or per project basis and this software (its called Profess by the way if anyone else uses it - http://www.profess.co.uk) is used to help implement this. See, the problem I've got with this is that the salaries of our team are all actually not paid by Local Government - there was an agreement put in place some years ago which means that our salaries are paid for by the National Grid For Learning and this sum of money is ring-fenced - therefore we cannot charge our end users(notionally or otherwise) for our time. There is an ammount removed at source from the per-capita budget of each of the establishments that we suppport which contributes to our operational budget and accommodation costs, but there is no input to salaries from this.

My contract makes no mention of the requirement to do this, and in fact even though we've been 'reorganised' (disorganised is more like it) into the Corporate structure, my contract still says that I'm employed by the Education Service and so does my payslip. My contract says (IIRC) that changes to my terms of employment can only be made by the Director of the Education Service, so that's something else I'm not happy with.

I'm not being unreasonable am I??