To think some employers absolutely take the piss?

[malificent7]

On the bus this morning...a desperate young man turned up wanting to know why his bus was late by 15 mins. He then said if he was late to work he would get the sack.

Now he may have been a repeat offender but tbh if any employer was to sack you as the bus didnt turn up aibu to think they can shove their job up their arse ( not that this young man can afford to loose his.)

Some employers are piss taking slave drivers, some employees are habitually late or lazy shirkers 🤷‍♀️

This.
However, from when I started proper work people used to say "the early train is never late"

It fucks up other people's day if you are late and is not professional or respectful.
Very very few people are fired for one off offences.

If he’s a repeat offender he maybe should have thought of that before getting to a situation where he’s in a final warning about it...

Whilst I agree that it is an employee's responsibility to get to work on time (and despite having very limited transport options, I have always managed to be on time except in very extenuating circumstances such as being stuck on the motorway for hours because there has been a fatal accident) the comments here show just how little understanding a lot of people have of how poor public transport is in some areas. When I commuted by public transport I didn't have a choice of buses, there was only one bus a day that got me to work on time. There was no earlier one. Similarly I had to leave promptly in the afternoon because if I missed my bus home I would be wandering the streets overnight as I would have been made to leave the office when it closed and would have had nowhere to stay.

And I was commuting from a large town to a big city, not from some remote area. Public transport needs to improve, for the good of employees, employers and the environment.

Yabu. Some employees think they can take the piss by being late and blaming public transport.

My workplace wouldn’t be able to function properly if people were late, I’d expect to get the sack if I were unreliable and unable to get myself to work on time.

If the bus being late by 15 minutes was enough to make him late then he's not giving himself enough time. When I used to get the train to work I would make sure it was in at least half an hour before I was due to start. This would be enough time to get a coffee and Potter about.

What? Seriously?
Get real! I'm normally not an employer sympathiser but this is ridiculous.
It is your individual responsibility to get yourself to work on time. If buses or trains are regularly late (which they are! We all accept this) then you MUST catch an earlier bus/train. Simples. How you can't grasp this, is questionable.

I love how so many people are saying just get an earlier bus!! You must all live in London or big cities etc where there are buses every 10 minutes!

Just looked at our local bus time table. From my local town to our closest city. Earliest bus leaves at 7.25 and arrives in the city at 8:52!!!
Absolutely no earlier bus to catch!

I was in this guy's situation for a while. My local buses are notoriously bad at being on time or turning up, so I was a little bit late at least once a week. I felt awful about it but luckily my role meant that there was an element of flexibility so it wasn't the end of the world if I was a bit late. I am quite conscientious though, so I always worked through my lunch and stayed a bit later if I could.

I used to catch the earlier bus and was at work at 7.30 for a 9.00 start before I had a baby. Then I had to do the nursery run and couldn't leave as early. It was quite frustrating. I wish I had learnt how to drive really. Luckily I don't need to commute at the moment.

Anyway, I would be annoyed if an employee was constantly late, but if they made up for it I would be more tolerant. Especially if the work is flexible. If they had to be available at set times it would be a different story. It's really difficult if your transport links are shit.

Not all employers are evil bastards! Given the workload, cost and time involved in advertising, recruiting, payroll, compliance, not to mention all the work involved if an employer needs to discipline or fire someone .... believe it or not, many employers simply want the job to be done efficiently.

If this was genuinely a first offence, then of course the employer would be unreasonable to sack someone. But IME there are employees who just take the piss... if you cut it so fine that a late bus or a traffic holdup prevent you starting work on time then you probably need to rethink your morning schedule. If as the OP seems to imply, the bus service is crap and often late, then users need to factor that in. It may mean getting an earlier bus or investing in a moped or looking at car shares ... I’m totally aware that public transport can be woefully inadequate in some rural areas but why should that become an employer’s problem?

Oh yes so many employers are shit because of someone on the bus

I don't miss the days of working in a call centre and having to get up the the ass crack of dawn to get a bus which in theory should get me into work an hour before my shift started (just in case they were running late or one didn't show up). If our shift started at 9am we had to be logged in ready to go at 9am on the dot. The systems were notorious for running slow or crashing, so you had to allow extra time for that as well. Then getting stuck on a call at the end of your shift was yet more unpaid overtime!

YABU. It is your own responsibility to get to work, so if it happens more than once that the train is late or the bus didn’t turn up, you take an earlier one to counter this.

I don't want to sound like an old curmudgeon but we're having problems like this with our younger generation staff members. One of them told me the other day he'd have to leave before his official finishing time from now on because if he didn't the traffic would be bad on the motorway going home. Er, that's a no from me.

your question really depends on how many times the person has been late?

@IHeartKingThistle ahh this old gem, lazy youngsters. I had a colleague who used to moan about this, spend 50% of her day chatting and the rest of the time trying to use a computer. She got the same amount of work done in a day that our younger staff could do in about an hour. Office jobs should be flexible wherever possible, it benefits everyone.

Buses are only allowed to take 50% capacity these days.

DH, a 50 something professional, was 2 minutes late, yes 2 minutes, due to bus trouble. Most days he was 15 minutes early. There was a company rule that if you arrived after 9 you had to email the whole company explaining and apologising....he didn't bother for the sake of 2 minutes but was then dobbed in by someone who had been in the same bus, and made to send the email

Any good will he had for the company went down the toilet at that point. Along with any notion of arriving early or staying late.

YANBU. A minority of jobs are that time sensitive and yet you have people in this thread giving 30+ minutes of their time every day for free out of fear of being 15 minutes late occasionally.

If there's one positive from COVID, let it be that employers will stop insisting on a pointless presenteeism culture.

Love the comments about getting an earlier bus. Where I live you need the bus to get to the train station. There are 2 buses a day. The first is the school bus run, you can get on this at 7.15 for a round the villages tour before it gets to the bus depot circa 8.45. Even though it is the 1st bus of the day it is often late, to the point where kids taking exams have to be ferried to school by car. It leaves the bus depot in the afternoon at 3.15 to 3.30 and does a reverse journey. On a weekend there is a morning bus and an afternoon bus to a bus stop 2 miles out of the village where you can join the wider bus network. The return is afternoon and early evening. In these circumstances perhaps the young man should sleep at his place of work.

Many employers are totally unreasonable and basically think they own their employees and can treat them like dirt.

Unless someone is late all the time, which shows that they just don't care, then this should not be an issue.

If you live in London like I do you are going to be stuck on the tube, buses, trains through no fault of your own now and then.

There is nothing you can do to avoid that as we have an aging, overcrowded transport network.

And, no, there is nothing you can do to plan for it if your tube carriage suddenly decides to stop for 20 minutes in the middle of a tunnel or if the entire network suddenly goes down because of signal failures...

People who think that life is always a smooth ride and problems don't happen live in cloud cuckoo land.

@Beccasb I agree on office jobs, but we work in a school!