Month: September 2020

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues–everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

Here’s a roundup of answers to five questions from readers.

I work in a small office in a declining industry. Our salespeople have seen reduced commissions because they are based on sales, and the owners have taken pay cuts to avoid layoffs and cutting employee’s salaries.

One of our designers has been in the job since the company’s inception (20-plus years) and has become increasingly difficult to deal with. Among other problems, they seem to feel we owe them something for sticking around so long, and are now demanding that we pay them a high hourly freelance rate in addition to their salary: A salary that is the highest in

I never thought this could happen to United Airlines and American Airlines.

In July, United Airlines warned that nearly half its workforce — that’s 36,000 employees — could be out of a job on October 1. 

American Airlines made a similar announcement soon after, warning that 25,000 employees risked losing their jobs the same day.

But I thought at the time that these were probably just warnings of things that would likely never actually come to pass — ironically less likely to happen, in fact, because the airlines were warning about them.

Why? Because the strategically timed announcements were designed to try to get the U.S. government to pass a second stimulus bill, including billions of dollars for the airlines to keep their employees working.

Since the government had already passed one stimulus bill earlier this year — which contained a provision that said the airlines had to promise