Employee Survival Guide® - Share Your Story With Mark: Turning Employment Stories into Empowerment

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Comment on the Show by Sending Mark a Text Message.This episode focuses on inviting listeners to share their personal work stories anonymously, aiming to highlight the importance of employee experiences in understanding employment law. You can share your confidential story with Mark by sending him an email to [e-mail].   By discussing the potential impact of sharing these stories on workplace dynamics, Mark encourages collective empowerment to reclaim employee rights.• Invitation to share anonymous employee stories • Importance of accessible employment law discussions • Anonymity and confidentiality in story sharing • Learning from peers’ experiences and patterns • Addressing the current loss of employee power • Empowering a community of informed employeesSend Mark your story via email to [e-mail]. Your personal information will not be shared in the podcast episode if your story is chosen to be aired.  The names of coworkers and the company will also not be shared in the episode.   If you enjoyed this episode of the Employee Survival Guide please like us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We would really appreciate if you could leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player such as Apple Podcasts. Leaving a review will inform other listeners you found the content on this podcast is important in the area of employment law in the United States. For more information, please contact our employment attorneys at Carey & Associates, P.C. at 203-255-4150, www.capclaw.com.Disclaimer: For educational use only, not intended to be legal advice.

Hey, it's Mark here and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide where I tell you, as always, what your employer does definitely not want you to know about and a lot more. Hey, it's Mark and welcome back. I wanted to have a brief episode, essentially an invitation to you, to ask you to provide your own story, your story about your own work. And it's to be done anonymously because we need to protect your, you know, who you are. So I'll explain that further. But the reason why I'm asking this is that, you know, this podcast has episodes

that where I'm talking or I'm interviewing colleagues of mine, or I'm using, you know, legal cases to explain some concept of employment law. Because employment law, for some silly reason, is inaccessible to a large measure of people. It's not because I didn't create employment law. I came to it 28 years ago and found it to be archaic in the way it's enforced and the way it's even just described in cases. So the podcast, Employee Survival Guide, is designed to allow you to, you know, if you had to ask me the one thing, my elevator speech is, I want to give you access to implement

law concepts in a way that's easy to understand and digest and you can use it. I get a lot of feedback from people, they write to me and they say that's very, very helpful. And so I'm always thinking about how to produce more information to you in a way that helps you. And one of them is, you know, to work on and convey stories that people are really going through themselves. So, you know, employee stories come through, maybe an article I read in the paper or something or some legal case just erupted or, you know, they come through that way.

But there are hundreds and thousands of employees stories that are out there and They come through court cases, of course but You can actually help yourselves By sharing your stories But I have really tight conditions on how you do this because I want to protect your identities I don't want to actually know your identities Your identities will not be known

if you participated in this little exercise. I'm not going to share the name of the company, the name of the employee, and I'll change the names of everything you give me. But what I'm trying to get at is I want the real story itself that you're experiencing. That way you share your story with me, then I share it back with you via the podcast, and then I will interpret or provide some type of analysis or discussion about what's happening in a particular story. We can learn from each other by sharing our stories.

That's the point. And whether you're willing to do that is up to you, of course. How to do that is really simple. You can simply send me an email and the email address would be mcaru.com or capclaw. So mcaru.com. It's basically an acronym standing for my law firm, Carried Associates PC. And when you send the email, put in the subject line, story for podcast. And put your cell phone name, cell phone number in there.

It's private to me. It's only my email address. No one else can see it. And put your, obviously, your email address will be attached to that. And then send me your story, your narrative. I talk, I'll probably overstate this, but the power of your narrative is crucial to severance negotiation and legal cases.

And invite you to write your story about what has happened to you. You can just write it as it has happened. You can use people's names, whatever, but I'm not going to use their names. So I'm going to actually filter it. When I, you know, I'll take your document and your narrative and I'll write over it and cancel out, you know, who I'm speaking with. All I'm concerned about is, you know, company A did this to employee, employee company, company A, whatever, and I'll just make up a name.

So you'll have that. But I'll go into the issues of the conflicts a person's having. Maybe you discuss the concept of hostile work environment, which is, it seems to be the hottest issue that most people want to know about. So I just use that by example. Or you just explain some horrific affair you've had with your employer where you think you've been discriminated against or some form of like a non-compete situation that you've experienced, which has a very detrimental financial impact upon you. Any story, any story at all is important.

It's gonna allow collectively us to learn from your story as I work through the concepts and figure out whether there are claims there or not. And what it's gonna do is gonna get you the ability to see the same way I see these cases and whether or not they have a claim or not. Because isn't that really the important part of this? Is that you're listening to a podcast about,

God, the most boring effing thing possible is implement law and you wanna learn something. So my job is to make it not boring. My job is to make it real to life because people are going through these circumstances every single day. I get calls every day. I handle consultations every single day.

We get hits to our website about people's conflicts every single day. We can't handle them all, but we certainly try to. But I really encourage you to express in a confidential way, your information to be used here on the podcast, whereby collectively we can learn from what has happened to you. Maybe you yourself will learn.

I'm not suggesting you send your case to me to get some free review of it. It's really more about the collective use of your story. And I'll change things to make it so it's not, that no one can recognize who you are and who the company is, so there's no trace back to you. But it's the importance of seeing the patterns of behavior that employers go through. I always describe in episodes how employers behave badly and the various patterns.

I want you to see the patterns. I want you to see in advance when things start happening to you through these stories, much like those case stories that I share in episodes where the my AI partners produce this dialogue about a case and you are learning from that case what's happened in that particular case about a concept. I want to do the same thing here with these stories that you're sharing with me. It's almost a sociological experiment, an investigation of what's happening today. I'm working on a story that I'll share soon in terms of either my blog or the podcast, but it's employee power.

There was a story about a friend of mine in the Wall Street Journal wrote an article with her colleague about employees losing power from where they they were before now, and employers taking it back. I want to hear your story as it's occurring today, and how employers are eroding your power, your ability to enjoy your career, your ability to take a leave of absence for a maternity leave, because that's your right to do that. I just heard a story today that companies fire employees

because they take maternity leaves, and it's like, wait a minute, it's the law, you can't do that. So I wanna hear those real life stories that are occurring today, because today we're trying to figure out, where is the employee power? Is your story gonna help somebody else? I mean, I really have to ask you that ask yourself the question, do you want to help other people? Now, I'm not trying to unionize you

all it's, you know, I'm trying to educate through providing information and breaking down the barriers to this area called employment law, which can be archaic or designed by ivory tower people. Take back control of that concept of employment law. It doesn't belong to companies and corporations. It belongs to you. You're the workforce.

You make up employers. Without you, there are no companies. There's no, there's no starlink. There's no, uh, Elon Musk. There's no anything about without employees and people don't want to recognize you. And so I'm trying to recognize you and your story. And by the way, we can, you can share stories that are both, you know, tragic, discriminatory, whatever, but you also can share stories that are, how about good stories?

Where people are actually doing the right thing as well, because we can learn from those positive examples as well. Doing the right thing is really important, but if you listen to my podcast, it's always me chasing after and shaming a company all the time, but there are good stories within all of this. We just don't hear about them because, I don't know, that's a good question, why don't we hear about them?

Is it newsworthy to hear about doing the right thing at work? I was thinking about a podcast episode or a blog about teaching managers how to manage correctly in good conscience without having the ability to sleep at night when being told to do something to terminate somebody because the higher-ups said so. I mean, companies don't tell employees how to do it correctly, they just tell them,

managers how to fire people. We live in this really Byzantine-like archaic world of black and white and employees have power and employees don't have power. It's you know that's all intentional. They're designing that dichotomy between the employees employers for a reason. It gives them leverage and creates fear for employees. So you can actually do something by sharing your story and share a positive story.

I mean, and I'll review it. I'll again, I'll make it, you know, so you can't figure out who's the person is and who the company is and I'll change names. But I want you to exercise that right to, yes, you can share your story and we can educate each other about, you know, these patterns of behavior we see all the time. At least I see them. Maybe you've picked up through listening to the podcast that there are patterns of behavior.

If you see them early enough, you can spot them. You can manage them in a way that works out in your favor. You can actually force an employer to do things you want to do, because that's what I do. Given the right set of facts, I can make an employer do a lot of things. And we want to have that ability to do that. Employers have to make mistakes first, of course, and they do that all the time, because they can't manage themselves very well. So my job is essentially to publicly shame them and I do that,

but I, you know, so share your story, be very specific about it. It can be as long as you want it to be. I'll edit it and try to find, you know, what is the importance of that story to share with you so we all can collectively learn because, you know, I'm learning every day about new stories and new concepts of what employers do.

It's my job. It's why this podcast is important is because I'm doing that. I have this kind of creative interest to learn everything I can about this dysfunctional relationship between employers and employees and no one else is doing it. And I discovered that recently and no one else is doing it. And I discovered that recently that no one else is doing that.

Why is that? Why is it so, why is the area so silent? Why don't more people talk about this like this? I'm not talking about employee engagement. You can have your whole side of that arrangement over there. I'm not talking about employee engagement podcasts or concepts, that's all corporate and consulting stuff of the McKinsey types and I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about you working and talking about enlisting and developing concepts that aid your fellow workers in a way that provides a collective leverage against your employer. Not unionization. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about increasing the knowledge base that when employees become more knowledgeable about their arrangements or push on employers, employers have to adjust.

And we've seen the most ideal example of that through the pandemic. And I know you watched it, you benefited by it. We're still working through that, that remote work aspect of quality life issues. That was the biggest wake-up call for a lot of folks. And it's the ability for employees to, you know, express and exercise their strength with employers. And the Wall Street Journal recent article was, you know, employees losing power, but

not everywhere. I mean, you know, people still do work remotely all the time and are happy and are productive, which is my colleague's other article about employees are in fact productive, because we know it. We can manage our lives. I want you to express yourself and help each other to do that through sharing your stories. And if I don't get any responses back, I'll be upset. And I'm not gonna punish you on anything,

but I'm just kidding with you. If I don't get responses, I'm gonna continue to share legal cases with you about people's horrific circumstances. And legal cases, so you understand it, it's a filtered story narrative about somebody's case because the lawyers and the judges have interacted with the fact pattern in such a way that it's no longer

in the conversational tone. It's more of the legalese of a court case and that's how they talk about it. That's why actually I put and used an AI device to interpret cases to put it more conversational style because that's where we're gonna learn. Instead of if you wanna read cases, you actually read the real decision of each case

is actually gonna be in the show notes for each of those podcasts. But real stories about employees are gonna happen, I think collectively through a podcast like this where I will share that story. Maybe I'll play out the roles of the characters in some way. Maybe I'll change my voice to, I'll go back to drama class from high school

and I'll enact the scene for you and maybe dramatize it in such a way because people are so used to maybe podcasts doing that or stories, they wanna be told a story. But please share your information. I'd be really appreciative if you do that. Again, through email only to my email address. The only person who's gonna see it is myself.

And please keep the information private, and I'll do the same, and then I'll change the characters and the name of the company, it's whatever, and yourself. But I'll need to maybe interact with you via email or by phone, depending upon what's transpiring in the storyline. But the email address again, just so you remember, is mcarry at CAPCLAW.com.

So it's mcarry at CAPCLAW.com. Please send your stories. Looking forward to it. And I'll work very hard to provide the feedback via the narrative story in a podcast episodes to come about you. You're the employees that work in this country and you in fact do control what happens in this country. It's just the employers don't want you to know that. So let's be very quiet about that. Why am I whispering? It's just for effect. You get it. Have a great week. Talk to you very soon.

If you like the Employee Survival Guide, I'd really encourage you to leave a review. We try really hard to produce information to you that's informative, that's timely, that you can actually use and solve problems on your own and at your employment. So if you'd like to leave a review anywhere you listen to our podcast, please do so. And leave five stars because anything less than five is really not as good, right? I'll keep it up. I'll keep the standards up. I'll keep the information flowing at you.

If you'd like to send me an email and ask me a question, I'll actually review it and post it on there. You can send it to mcaru at capclaw.com.