And answering every suggestion, request or complaint with "you can always work somewhere else" is simply craven and greedy. An example: Mr. Brickbat is called to work by an automated telephone system. It works only on voice print, not keypad. This morning he had to say his employee ID *seventeen times* to get it to work before he could talk to a human being and confirm the shift he'd be working. Seventeen times. At 4:45 this morning. This happens regularly, and it's simply disrespectful. The company is a multi-billion-dollar multinational, and it can't get a phone system that works properly, and as a result the workers feel disconnected and insulted even before they go to work, and a request for improvement is met with "you can always work somewhere else."
That's true, they could. But why is wanting to make a current workplace better seen as an expression of discontent at the level of wanting to leave?
The phone example sounds petty, unimportant and really something a person should be able to get over. But it is the first thing Mr. Brickbat has to put up with before he goes to work, and so he's already in a bad mood before he is met with dirty and broken equipment, a manager who reinvents the wheel every morning, other managers who are trying to tinker with Mr. Brickbat's work from an entirely different state (and sometimes a different country) without ever having been here, and radios that don't work. Every day. He truly loves the job. He doesn't want to leave. So when he tries to make it better, why is his request for help seen as an insult?
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