My Department has been experiencing problems with our Social Security and other government related benefits since October 2008 due to the lapses of the Finance and Human Resource Departments. It has been a year now and a lot of issues related to our basic benefits have still not been resolved.
One of my colleagues had a car accident this September, lost his left leg, and could not even avail of his social security disability benefit because of the unresolved issues. What’s really depressing about this is that we really shouldn’t have lifted even a finger about our benefits since it’s mandated by law that the company ensures we are given what we are due. What’s worse is that we have been following up on our benefits issues for the longest time, and even with my colleague now recuperating from the accident and needing to avail of those benefits, nothing would have happened had we not requested for a closed-door meeting (tribunal) with those two departments including their respective managers.
During that meeting, we distributed a document enumerating all the issues, their corresponding status, the timeline of those issues and excerpts of our emails and skype correspondents with the other departments related to the processing of those benefits. At the end of the meeting, it came to everyone’s attention that it wasn’t just our department that was suffering from the lapses of HR and Finance – the entire company was in the same boat as we are. The two managers acknowledged their lapses, apologized and promised to fix everything within October. Let’s see if the closed-door-meeting-ala-tribunal strategy works.
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