How to Sabotage an Organization
Issue #4 🧩 The best employee of 20 years 🧩 A manual for sabotaging organizations 🧩 Destroying vs. creating 🧩 Implementing radical transparency
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While some companies are ready to fire you on the spot, others seem like they’ll never fire you no matter what you do.
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Joaquín García was an engineer and a civil servant. In 1990 he began working for the local authority in Cádiz, Spain, and in 1996 he was posted to the municipal water board, Aguas de Cádiz. His job was to supervise a wastewater treatment plant.
In 2010, one year before García retired, the deputy mayor, Jorge Blas Fernández, attempted to give him an award for 20 years of “loyal and dedicated” service. However, García was nowhere to be found. “I thought, where is this man?” the deputy mayor said. “Is he still there? Has he retired? Has he died?” But the payroll showed he was still receiving a salary.
Another manager, who had the office opposite García’s, told Fernández he had not seen García for several years. That was when the deputy mayor called García at home. “I asked him: what are you doing?” Fernández recalls. “What did you do yesterday? And the previous month? He could not answer.”
An investigation began which found out that García had not shown up to work for at least 6 years (possibly as many as 14), and he had done “absolutely no work” between 2007 and 2010.
This went undetected for so long because the water board believed García was the responsibility of the city council, whereas the city council thought he was working for the water board.
Meanwhile, García felt he had been bullied and given a job with no actual work to do because of his socialist politics. Therefore, he stayed at home. He became an avid reader of philosophy and an expert on the works of Spinoza (a Dutch philosopher).
In 2016, the court fined García €27,000, the equivalent after tax of one year of his annual salary and the most that could be legally reclaimed.
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