The Mission Statement

A few years ago, in what seemed the actions of mysterious invisible elves, nicely framed Labcorp mission statements suddenly appeared above all the employee time clocks in our lab. The Mission Statement can be seen here.

This sounds all wonderful and high-falutin', but it is just plain bull puckey. The whole goal for Labcorp is to "create value for our shareholders and opportunities for our employees."

I can tell you that opportunities for employees just do not happen. It makes me wonder about the value for the shareholders part as well. And you can plainly see where patient care falls in their priorities.

Where I work, part time employees are not allowed unless they do not have any benefits. Two part time people filling in one full time job costs the company an extra person's benefits. And we are told to wait for our breaks in order to use the restrooms. This is something you hear about in third-world assembly line factories that exploit workers, not a modern large U.S. based corporation.

Employees under conditions such as these can hardly delight customers. And with patient care taking second place to creating "value for our shareholders", I see that ethical standards are bent and broken every day in the lab.

The accountability part just puts the onus on the employee and takes the pressure off the management and gives them someone to blame when things go wrong.

What I see is that some people hired are excellent, a lot of people, especially in the entry level jobs that are concerned with data entry and accessioning, turn out to be unsuitable for doing the job.

Conserving company resources leads to what I have described before in my post labeled "Running on Empty".

Employees are the corporation's largest and most burdensome expense. When profits are down and expenses must be cut, employees are the first to go. Like Dilbert says, "Its like printing money." But no thought seems to be given to the increased workload of those left behind. What the corporation never seems to get is that too much work for too few people invariably leads to customer dissatisfaction.