Real-life MMD: I've enough money not to work, so I give ALL my earnings to charity...

Lum

So your payroll department let slip your personal information and have created a situation where you feel compelled to leave.

Sounds like constructive dismissal to me. (I am not a lawyer)

So if you do decide to leave your job, take it to a tribunal, it sounds like you'll have the free time and the means to fight it yourself.

If you win, donate the money to charity.

That way you free up the job and your charities don't lose out.

You could also do volunteer work in order to keep active and continue helping out.


Of course, if you would rather remain in your current job then disregard everything I've written.

(And yes, I too am jealous of your financial situation, but I'm not going to give you crap for it)

gloriouslyhappy

Gosh, wonder how long that accident-prone someone in the payroll department has been salivating over the secret of knowing your fortunate circumstances! If you still want to keep working in your present job despite the unkind gossip, then you go for it. If it becomes unsupportable, then maybe it's time to look at seeing which higher-level, and therefore likely to be more interesting, jobs are available in the charity sector, and take your generous, thoughtful self over to them.

I'd be interested to know what steps management have taken over this serious breach of confidentiality, and what they're doing to support you.

fatal1955

Which will do more good to the human race: all that money given to your chosen charities or a job given to one individual who might turn out to be socially parasitic? Provided you still enjoy the job and it's not robbing you of other things such as time with family or life expectancy (!), I'd say carry on the good work. :cool:

Mojisola

MSE_Debs wrote: »

I enjoy my well-paid job. However, as I live off a private family income, I don’t actually need to work, so I gift-aid my entire wage.

Now my co-workers say it's selfish of me to have a full-time job when I don't really need it, and that I’m depriving someone else of work.

Like others have said - how many of your colleagues actually need their job to live or are their wages being spent on expensive holidays, meals outs, good clothes, etc?

tafin

Hi.
Firstly it's very kind of you to be doing this with your wages. You're a rare breed! It's a shame it all got out because there are some very jealous people out there that will make your job difficult to enjoy now.
Working for you is obviously not about the money so if it becomes a struggle to work there, find somewhere else. Perhaps you would enjoy volunteering? I know you would find this rewarding in itself.
Looks like only you can decide, but it's a shame that those few envious people had to put the spanner in.
Whatever you choose, be happy!

stampychan

This is a great MMD, and a really interesting one. I think you're doing a great thing, and it is no one's decision but yours whether you choose to work or not.

Sure, you could volunteer somewhere instead if you preferred, but - and this might be a bit controversial - if you add up the value of your time, are you actually able to do more good in the world by working your regular job and donating the money? I suspect that might be the case if you're very well paid.

There's an excellent book by Peter singer called 'The Life You Can Save', and a brilliant charity called 'Giving What We Can' - I recommend you (and MSE Martin as I suspect he'd be interested too!) check them out. Essentially they both look at the issue of how best we can help people who are significantly less well off than we are. I suspect both of them would conclude that - unless you have skills that would be of significant value when volunteering - you can actually do *more* good by earning lots of money and then donating it to places that can use that money as efficiently as possible to help people.

Shame on your payroll department for discussing your personal situation, but good on you for donating your wages.

Inge_Preston

From a personal point of view, having had a number of years not working while bringing up children, there is no way on earth that I would give up my employment. I applied for this work to get me out of the house and have contact and interaction with other human beings, I don't "need" to work, but if I had to stay at home all day now I'd go stir crazy.
Stick to what you enjoy, you like to work, you are in an enviable position in that you don't need the money to live, but you do need the money in order to help others less fortunate than yourself by your charitable donations. You are helping far more than one person by the way you are living your life, everything will calm down in work, your just the talk of the office till something more interesting comes along.
You can't change other people's opinions unfortunately, no matter how much you explain yourself, they will still think what they want, just ignore them, they are being small minded.

liz545

What you do with your income is really no-one's business but your own. In your position, I'd want to have very strong words with the payroll/HR division for breaching their confidentiality/data protection obligations.

It's also worth bearing in mind that volunteering is a more complicated proposition than it first appears. You may be enabling the charity to help more people or benefit from experience they couldn't afford to pay for, but in some cases some organisations use volunteers as a way of avoiding hiring trained staff (such as Special Constables); so in some cases, volunteering could equally be seen as 'denying someone a chance of a job'. I don't think this is the case for all volunteer roles (and I've been doing voluntary work myself for the last decade), but it's not the easy ethical option some people seem to think.

duchy

What charities employ Special Constables ?

The suggestion was the OP instead of working for a commercial organization worked at the same level in the charitable sector ....so the charity could benefit twice -once from their skills and secondly from their donation eitheer of time for free or if a paid position from salary donation via giftaid.

Not joined the local constabulary I doubt the OP works as a bouncer/door supervisor lol

chog24

As I live off a private family income, I don't actually need to work, so I donate my entire wage. Recently, the wages department accidentally let slip this to the entire firm.

Wait... WHAT?!

Ok, to answer the question first off, no you shouldn't quit if you don't want to. An employee is more than a bum-on-a-seat and you will be bringing valuable experience and who knows what else to the job. Then there's the effect that being in employment has on your own health and well-being. People are entitled to their opinion, but it's none of their business whether you "need" your salary or not. The logical extension of their argument, incidentally, is that nobody should be paid more than they actually need to get by; in other words, nobody should be paid enough that they can afford to put aside any of their salary for savings; utter tosh!

However, I'm absolutely stunned at the enormous ethical hole the Wages Department just fell into by releasing details of an employee's salary and what they do with it to other members of the company! I don't know about your company, but where I work, that's a sackable offense!

I very much hope that you've taken the necessary action to make sure that the person or people responsible for that massive breach of your security and privacy receive the appropriate punitive action?