I don't mean 'callings', but actually worked for the church. I would love to hear your experiences.

Do they ever hired nevermos? What happens if you leave the church, etc.

You get fired.

Must be in good standing, hold a recommend and pay tithes. They can legally fire you if you don't.

Yep, you have to pay them their 10% kickback, or you lose your job.

And they can call your bishop at any time and check up on you.

Isn't that religious discrimination?

I have an aunt who has worked for Beehive Clothing for about 25 years. Basically, she can't talk about anything, express any opinions or have a rational conversation about anything. Any expression that can be interpreted (by who, who knows?) to be negative about the Church is grounds for dismissal.

Her husband, my uncle, has an incurable chronic illness (that he contracted ON HIS MISSION and ANY personal injury attorney would tell you all of his resulting medical bills should be covered by the church, but. . . .!!), so they absolutely have to have the medical insurance her job provides, so they both say nothing, about anything but it is obvious that they don't think, "nothing."

They are both extremely circumspect in what they say. My uncle, sometimes in close conversation, less so. I would love to hear what they really think, but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon since his life depends on their keeping their mouths shut.

No, they do not have to pay kickbacks. Just the normal tithing, fast offerings, missionary donations; you know, the normal 30% of your income.

Reading your aunt and uncle's story HURTS, spwdone.

I feel so much for them!!!

I am so sorry......

:(

I know, it makes me sad too. They are both pretty great people.

My father was.
There was also a code of silence around his job. There were a boat load of secret things that couldn't be talked about. That went on for about 20 years.

However, it's pretty difficult to hide anything from the family when the office is IN your house, and the worker bees are parked in your driveway. The secretary is sitting on the other side of your bedroom wall keeping track of everything (including my dad).

This set up combined with mormon insanity drove my mother into a mental breakdown.

I lived at home during this time. I was also a very inactive mormon who didn't want anything to do with it. The things I learned about all the secret keeping should have kept me out for life. Mormons come up with great excuses for their secret keeping though. They feel like they're special, and shouldn't have to live by the rules of society. Most secrets revolved around where money went, where it came from, who was being lied to (members and neighbors) and who was being robbed (the government, members, neighbors) The pay and perks that my father had were also a big hush hush secret.

Housing/utilities/food/vehicles/gasoline/repairs/taxes/pensions,and much more were all paid for on top of the paycheck and medical bennies. It was a good financial deal for my father. A living hell nightmare for my reclusive mother.

what did you dad do for the church? How did he handle money?

It was awful. I got slammed for being my outspoken self. Nobody understood me. This also happened on my mission. There was no chance for women getting promoted unless they had connections and then some of the dumbest women got some pretty choice positions. Any kind of corruption or misbehavior got covered-up. If you knew anything that made the church look bad you were sworn to secrecy.

I finally found another job outside the church because I felt so dishonest. I couldn't stand the way things were being run.

Also, my boss spied on me at home. If a car was parked on the street outside my house he would ask the next day at work if I had any overnight visitors (ie men). That really creeped me out.

Yeah, I was employed by the Church. They keep a photocopy of your Temple Recommend in your records folder and as kismet said, they periodically call up your Bishop to make sure that you're still temple-worthy.

They will hire non-Mormon contractors for things like maybe doing renovations on the chapel, but you must be temple worthy to be the actual Church employee.

They did the usual calling of my Bishop, to see how I was doing church-wise, and the Bishop told them he hadn't seen me every Sunday lately and I was immediately put on probation from my job.

They didn't ask me what was up, or how they could help me. They just told me that I wasn't worthy to work for the Church.

I obeyed all of the rules. I had no Word of Wisdom problems or Law of Chastity problems or anything like that. I was just struggling with my testimony. Working for the Church had caused me to see it as a good ole boys club and I recognized that it was nothing more than a corporation, with their method on how to get to Heaven as their product.

I did finish out my job there though, but they only let me stay because I was leaving in a few months anyway.

i worked at the genealogy library making copies of family group sheets. I worked there from 1977 to 1978. I was fired because I just sort of came and went as I pleased, was constantly being reminded to get haircuts and was just basically not professional or conservative enough. I heard though that the guy who got me fired was in prison for child abuse but I can't verify that.

I didn't work for the cult, but I rented farmland from them and was never asked if I paid tithing on my profits. My answer would have been "none of your business".

Ron Burr

Yep...I worked in the COB and it was horrible. Very controlling atmosphere. They have layers and layers of management. They promote the incompetent over the qualified. (And just so you know, I wasn't the one who didn't get promoted). I saw it time and time again. They don't handle any HR issues that come up. Things were swept under the rug in the hopes that it would eventually go away. Strange place for sure!

he was still covered by the Desert Medical Insurance plan.................and so were his wives......#1 wife died...#2 wife was then covered...........good insurance after medicare.

He traveled for the church too. He always paid his 10% plus.........

KJ

My husband was on a contract that was supposed to be for six months. He had been able to dress very casually for past jobs so we had to buy some appropriate dress clothes meeting Mormon requirements. We spent about $500, which isn't much for a sport coat, a few white shirts, dress slacks, etc. The contract ended up lasting six weeks. Pissed much. The job was taken off contract and made a permanent position and someone's relative was hired, if I remember correctly. Again pissed very much at the time, now very glad.

(From a previous post, here are my impressions for what it's worth)

"My impressions of working life at the COB go a bit of something like this...

Working at the COB really gave me insight into the inner workings of the corporation and a bunch of little things learned over time really eroded for me the "mystique" the Church has for a lot of members. I remember being asked in an interview "You're not going to lose your testimony by working here, are you?"

So from working at the COB, I had the following base observations (I'll elaborate on each of them:

1. The departmental structure was highly siloed; This led to major inefficiencies due to lack of information sharing which cause major duplication of work.

2. Lack of solid, definitive leadership

3. Employee morale was low, in general; a highly frustrated workforce

Just as a little context, a project I was working on at the COB was designed to facilitate the cross departmental flow of information within the organization. This project was intended to break down silos and prevent the massive work duplication
that was occurring on a regular basis. This project was met with a great deal of resistance and it was eventually killed in a somewhat passive-aggressive manner. I talked to someone I knew recently whose group was close to this project. I told him about what I did when I worked there and he says that he had never heard about the project but that it is a great idea and that it was exactly what the organization needs. He is only one of those low morale, frustrated people I refer to above.


Departmental structure:

The COB (and Church in general) has a very siloed environment. It is made up of a lot of individual departments that have their own missions and do their own thing within a proverbial vacuum. Information sharing was next to non-existent and because of this, there was a ton of duplicated efforts across the organization. As I mentioned, my project was designed to break down the silos and was met with a great deal of resistance with the department heads. Upper leadership was not doing anything to counter the resistance either. I remember
thinking that this whole organizational dynamic was totally absurd. They need to get into the 21st century and become technologically efficient. Businesses that do not do this will not succeed within today's marketplace (please note that this project charter wasn't being driven by the business but by the IT group).

After I stopped working for the organization and subsequently became more acquainted with "other viewpoints" of the LDS faith, a light bulb went on surrounding the method behind their organizational madness. Being siloed was actually the DESIRED approach.

For example, I'm sure many of you are aware that only about 3 people within the LDS Church actually know the full financial picture of the organization. This is by design. The same goes for information within the organization. It seems to me that
the whole organization takes a "need to know" approach. Only access what you absolutely need to know to do your job. Information sharing is dangerous within the Morg. Too much outside departmental information will allow insiders the added ability to "put the whole puzzle together" and figure out too many of the Church fallacies. Probably designed to help take away some of the power of "Deep Throating" information. It's like the whole dual key approach on a safe deposit box. Both keys are needed to access the box. The same goes with organizational information. Pieces of information may be meaningless on their own, but put together with other pieces of information, it suddenly becomes very powerful.

Lack of Leadership:

An ongoing theme within the COB is the lack of definitive leadership. Leadership within the Church organization is generally done by council which isn't highly efficient or effective within a traditional business environment. No one was willing to make an authoritative call on stuff (i.e. an executive decision). Often, employees would be working on stuff and not know what they should really be doing or what the true vision is for their efforts. They would often, out of frustration, just "take things and run with them". Often stuff they would work on would get "killed" and replaced with "the vision of the day".

Employee Morale:

Employee morale, IMO, is a symptom of the two above subjects. Inefficiency and lack of leadership can't help but have a negative effect on employee morale. A lot of times I think people would wonder if they were just wasting their time doing what they were doing (I know I did). To a successful and results driven employee, this can be highly demoralizing. Over time, I've randomly run into several individuals I used to work
with at the COB and there is a common theme among all of them: lack of job satisfaction and frustration. I haven't run into one person I know yet who I asked them "how is everything going at the Church" and getting an answer something like the tone of "wonderful! or "couldn't be better!" I almost always see a demoralized tone in the conversation. Some are more apt to criticize than others. Some tend to want to avoid going down the path of criticism because we are taught at Church not to talk ill about the leadership but I can always read between the lines regarding how they are feeling. It is written all over their face and their tone speaks for itself.


An additional subject: Office Politics

A lot of Church members have the false notion that working at the Church is all "Kum-bye-Yah" and it is completely devoid of all backbiting, infighting and all other forms of office politics. This couldn't be further from the truth. Don't get me
wrong, there were tons of nice people working at the COB, but office politics were alive and well. I know someone that is employed by a major temple and most members would probably be shocked at how much crap goes on between workers at the Temple of all places. You would think that would be a peaceful environment, but it is does not have the lack of contention as much as one might think.


In Conclusion:

To sum it up, working at the COB was an interesting experience to say the least. As I stated at the onset, it went a long way to break down the "mystique" the Church has in the eyes of an average TBM. There was no one thing that I saw that made me think "all is not well in Zion". It was a combination of a lot of little things that made me think that the organization isn't quite all what it seems (what it would like to portray to members). One big thing I saw (heard through a reputable source) is how scripted General Conference really was. For example, stuff like GA's giving stories about members and saying these people are in the audience today I now believe is highly contrived because talks are written far in advance. Also there was a lot of post conference editing as well. BTW, I wouldn't be a bit surprise if they tried to edit out Bednar's Jesus' birthday comments from the most recent conference.

Most of all, working at the COB began to open up my eyes more regarding the Church (though they were partially open already). Reading the so-called "anti" stuff after working there suddenly didn't seem like a absurd pack of lies anymore. It gave me a whole new level of perception (the veil was lifted :))--kind of a new and improved "BS detector" of sorts. Suddenly I would read inside information posted on forums like this and I could legitimately say that the info was in the realm of possibility. I would no longer dismiss it as a bunch of "anti-Mormon lies read on the internet". Working for the Church truly supplemented an inner feeling, a hunch of sorts, that "something stinks within the Church organization and if we dig long and hard enough, it will be exposed."

My two cents..."

Your post just confirms for me that everyone at the upper levels of the church know full well that it is all a sham. The departmental structure itself, designed so that no one actually sees the whole picture, tells me that it was consciously designed that way because they know it is all rotten.

Very revealing, Zenmaster. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

I wasn't in the COB, but I did communicate with them a lot. And I can sure relate to everything you just posted, especially the low morale, the office politics and the damage done to one's testimony when they work for the Church.

Zenmaster,

Someone I know who worked for the COB said that there was a dark and evil element to the hierarchy. Did you experience anything like this?

I don't know about "dark and evil", however I always had a feeling "something isn't quite right" or "things aren't quite as they seem on the surface".

The detective/investigative reporter in me has always wanted to "put my ear to the wall" and uncover the dirt...because I just know it is there.

I worked there for nearly 10-years. I concur with the opinions expressed here. I was "let-go" for "insubordination" which didn't appear to be insubordination to me . . . I dared to provide a "shoulder to cry on" for some employees who were demoted. That was enough for my superiors, a SP and a BP.

A coworker (programmer) used to work for the church.

They would solve programming conflicts by way of team prayer. This, of course, led to whomever could bridge 'feelings' and engineering best to getting his way, with the outcome being code that would never get released anywhere.

Which is why I always laugh when people talk about the church implementing its own ISP or filtering or big-brother-ish programs. Their IT shops, while maybe? internally capable, are not competent enough to publish anything that would see even limited adoption.

Yeah I never worked there, though I was offered a contractor-to-perm position way back in 1995 or so. Glad I did not take it.

I ended up working for Novell and later a spinoff of Novell - my role was in pre-sales engineering. So (at the time) being based in Utah I ended up with TSCC as my customer. My experience was that the corp IT folks were not super organized, and definitely not inspired. Just a bunch of IT guys with crappy PMs, too much churchy involvement in tech issues, and never enough resources. Of course, to add to normal work duties, you had to dress up like you were going to church, and pray before meetings, go to devotionals, etc. One thing I can say about them was that they seemed to always go home at a normal hour. That part looked good for someone who spent eternal hours in the Novell datacenter waiting for things to break.

I know a bunch of former Novell folks who have ended up over there. I also know quite a few of them were not really TBM when I worked with them. Inactive, spoke badly about TSCC, could swear up a blue streak. Pretty good guys. I'm guessing they just do what they have to do for a check. There was one guy who would always change what he was doing when you burst into his office. I'm guessing he had to stop browsing what ever he was browsing when he went to work for TSCC. :-)

Incidentally, BYU was a customer too. Those guys were even more dysfunctional than TSCC corp IT. Too many ivory tower academics, not enough practical experience. But that's just IT stuff. They were pretty nice folks otherwise.

Your commentary is congruent with my observations while there. I worked there more recently, and they had an influx of new hires/contractors with experience in the private sector which made the operation more professional in the corporate IT arena (BYU was still like the Keystone Cops).

Lack of good business decision making hampered the IT organization, though. Ideally, IT is supposed to serve the business. If proper decisions aren't made timely (or at all), the work tends to go in circles. I did see some good work get done in spite of it all, though.

He turned the place from complex chaos to practically an organization that ran itself because it was properly designed. I've seen him do this innumerable times in other situations, so I don't doubt a bit of it.

However, he got caught in some unsavory crossfire between some members (I'm being vague on purpose) and without so much as a How-de-do, the big guys marched in, fired him, watched while he packed up his desk and escorted him to his car.

While I'm not saying he was totally without fault in the issue, it was something so trivial that it goes on in "normal" workplaces a lot and nobody gives a rat's whisker.

Somebody later told him, "It was a setup from the beginning. They were looking to make that a volunteer position rather than a paid one. You were the fall guy."

They disfellowshipped him (which was about the time I met him) and it hurt him terribly. It lasted for several months of what must have been humiliation for him, but I didn't realize how awful because I hadn't been in the church that long. But as the weeks wore on, I saw how much it hurt him.

When they held another kangaroo court to see if he was worthy of being un-disfellowshipped, we were married and they strung it out agonizingly. At length, the pompous jerks fully reinstated him, but I think that may have been an early chip in the bedrock of his faith in the church.

So all in all, from this and other stories I've heard, sometimes it is how you do the job, and sometimes, you walk into a preset bear-trap. You don't have a clue that it's there.

These posts are fascinating and make me happy I never got a job there. I wonder how many people don't leave because they feel like they need a job and just go through the motions

I had worked in the private sector and served 10 years as an officer in the military before I decided to go to university. After graduating from BYU at age 34 I applied for a management position with the church in SLC. I thought that I had all the right experience and served in dozens of church callings I would qualify for at least an interview. Not so. I was told that I had not served at the required level. I told the them that I had served as elders quorum president 3 times, ward clerk twice, stake young men's president, gospel doctrine teacher, early morning seminary teacher along with other callings. In the Army I had been the Brigade Adjudant.
I was told that the position was a powerful one and was reserved for men that had been at least a stake president.

So much for all callings were important. Seems that they follow the Animal Farm model of all are equal but some are more equal than others.