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113 Times Bosses Did Something So Stupid It Instantly Made Their Workers Quit Or Lose Will To Work
If you have seen the movie 'Horrible Bosses' you know there is only so much an employee is willing to endure from a bad employer. Sure, most people aren't resorting to murder plots, but they will walk out of the door.
For those of you who don't know the pain of bad management, consider yourself extremely lucky, because it is an experience almost all of us go through at least once. The moments where you sit and think, "I don't get paid enough to put up with this shit." It's so common in fact there is even a Reddit thread asking the question "What's something your employer did that instantly killed employee morale?"
Perhaps you've had the boss who made fake wage and promotion promises only to screw everyone over or the boss who destroyed and source of workplace morale (come on let the people have their snacks!). Well the people in the stories below know exactly how you feel, some even decided enough was enough and quit. Scroll down below for some outrageous boss horror stories and don't forget to upvote your favs!
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#1
My wife was let go after she announced her pregnancy to her manager, and approximately when she would need maternity leave. She was told that they'd rather replace her than deal with a pregnant employee and all that goes with that. A well worded letter from out attorney got her one year's severance, and two years medical coverage for her and the baby.
Dian Ella Lillie 7 years ago
Let's be honest: she wasn't "let go" because the "let" implies that she wanted to "go" - she was, quite frankly, fired for being pregnant. And that is blatant discrimination. I hope her employer's name was widely publicised.
Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
The person stupid enough to do that to her should be fired. He's a liability to the company
Stannous Flouride 7 years ago
In the US we're protected things like free preventative medical care during pregnancy, maternity leave, flex-scheduling, or work place child care by our avowedly "pro-family" Republican politicians.
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Azure Adams 7 years ago
Oh you guys could have gotten way more if you had just pulled the balls out. Get that company shut down
Carol Emory 7 years ago
I actually had one company that I interviewed for tell me that they just lost an employee that decided to quit after having her baby. They then asked me if I had any plans to be pregnant in the next 2-5 years. I said "You know it's illegal for you to ask that in an interview?" Needless to say, I was not hired.
BusLady 7 years ago
@Carol: I have a similar story. It was 1978, and new laws had just been passed (USA) regarding this very thing. I was pregnant and beginning to show. The interviewer leaned over and lowering his voice, said " I know this is illegal to ask, but are you pregnant?" I looked him in the eye and said "No." Didn't get the job of course.
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RELATED:
#2
A manager once explained it to me...."everything needs to be organized, labeled, and free of clutter. That way if you're replaced the next person can take over without missing a step." She was replaced the next day. The irony wasn't lost on me.
Helen Dashiell 7 years ago
I agree with the manager... Organization is key and it sucks to go into a job of mess. I wouldnt word it as "replace" but as "if you choose to leave and we have to re hire" sounds better.
Chantel Atwell 7 years ago
oh my gosh, I know someone exactly like that. She was replaced months later. But many people had to be hired then fired because they weren't perfect. The turnover was so bad! It's better now.. Some people are wayyyy too a**l about things.
weatherwitch 7 years ago
Mind it makes sense. I have carers in and if everyone puts things back in the right place then a stranger can find it immediately. if I'm too unwell to tell them where something is they can ring a fellow carer who can tell them Exactly where to find something.
#3
Banned smart phones in the break room to force us to talk to one another and build camaraderie. Ends up we didn't like each other that much.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
*sigh* You can't force people to become friends, the best you can do is hope for that everyone acts professionally.
Rhân 7 years ago
Hm i think its not a rule for your break time directly. Its more a rule for the room like „don‘t smoke“ - anyways stupid rule for a stupid reason, you can‘t force people to get to know each other
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Ryo Bakura 7 years ago
"It was only after our boss banned us from using our phones in the break room that I realised that the person I thought was 'Jeff from Accounts' was actually 'Hannah, Senior VP'. That messed with me for a while."
Daria B 7 years ago
If the friendship chemistry is real, a phone can even make the quality of conversation better. Like.. For example, "hey! Let me show you a funny picture! Then you both look at one phone, the picture makes you both laugh and start a related conversation, progressing to differrnt topics. Same with songs, videos etc. Even games.
lakitha tolbert 7 years ago
Had any of them liked each other, there would have been no need to ban the phones in the first place,
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Trixster Million 7 years ago
A break in a break room isn't much of a break at all. Go outside and get some fresh air, or hang with the smokers.
Ryan-Michele Eagleton 7 years ago
There's nothing I hate more than someone trying to force a group of adults to interact. We're grown-ups, y'all. We can decide for ourselves whether we want to socialize with each other, and imo, socializing is usually highly overrated.
#4
Boss Pitched a sales incentive trip to Cancun if the team hit the goal. My team exceeded the goal, and then they cancelled the trip. 2 people quit, I accepted a position with their main competitor, and less than a year later, they closed in bankruptcy. Karmas a beach.
Greta Cortesi 7 years ago
You sure had a great motivation while working for the competitor! 🤣🤣🤣👍🔝
Ashley Lopez 7 years ago
I understand why people quit, I went to Cancun and it was AMAZING. I would really be pissed if this happened to me
Josh Shawver 7 years ago
I got fired becuz i stepped on my department managers toes.. I kept informing him of everything the shift before me would do.. like the messes they would leave and the responsibilities they wouldnt do.. that got pawned off on me.. so i would spend an hour of the beginning of my shift doing the work they were suppose to do.. but im still expected to produce the same amount they do.. only i have less time.. so i would tell my boss over and over about the work not being done.. but he would never ever do anything about it.. but said that he would... he was the department superviser(day shift guy) and i worked nights..(i had nite shift boss ) day shift boss would oversee the whole department but would leave 2 hours after my shift started... so i think he took it personal because he told me "you worry about your job! and ill worry about mine" needless to say i got fired like a month later... for having my "cell phone out charging" although year after that he got cancer.. and DIED
BetsyB 7 years ago
This reminds me of when my dad's work wanted their employees' 20 year rings back so that they could "add more diamnds" for the people who had worked more years. The rings appraised for at least 3000. People who fell for the ruse never got their rings back & the company soon filed bankruptcy. (People suspect the rings were only taken in the 1st place to help pay off debt.)
Laugh Fan 7 years ago
It might just be me, I admit I haven't a lot of info to go on, but is that a good use of the money in the first place?
Load More Replies... #5
New principal came in. It was like he forgot what being a teacher is like... he made us sub constantly on our plan periods instead of getting around to calling a sub. If we weren't subbing, he would come into our rooms as we worked on plan time things and go over ridiculous things that could have better been sent in an email. He fired the lunch supervisor and made us supervise lunch. Then he started giving us a hard time about using the bathroom between classes because if we were in the bathroom, who is supervising the halls? It boiled down to us working before and past contract hours with zero breaks. No bathroom. No lunch time (you can't eat and supervise). I went off on him one day because he accosted me for going to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom to change my tampon. I waved a spare tampon around in the hallway in front of God and students and told him I'd had enough of this and if he had time to drive to McDonalds for lunch (he had a fry box in his hands) I could be spared two minutes of supervision to change a tampon. To add insult to injury, the staff banded together and we documented these things to get him fired. The next person comes in and decides that action of creating unity with the staff needed to be dismantled so she changed where all our rooms were and in most cases what we taught (regardless of our certification). I quit. I couldn't take it anymore. Kids are my number one in teaching and when a school dissolves into politics and bull sh*t nonsense it just isn't worth it to me. I could get treated like sh*t in any profession and probably get paid more.
Sheila Robinson 7 years ago
Similar story here, I quit too. Teaching skills are transferable and attrition rates for teachers in many countries is shocking. If you have children or are still in school/college then you should consider how this affects their/your standard of education.
Rabbit O'Hare 7 years ago
Our school system has trouble with horrible administrators too. The teachers are the important ones who do the actual work and know what needs to be done. The admins just seem to muck things up.
Kevin Camp 7 years ago
The problem is not with teachers per se, but with the managers who run it. Always has been.
MJ Beecker 7 years ago
I went to college to teach and coach, second semester practicum opened my eyes to the level of abuse from admin and parents...changed my studies to science.
Crochet lady 7 years ago
My son quit teaching after his 3rd year. He said the teachers felt unsupported by the administration, petty things like those listed above, they were expected to cover for the gifted & talent teacher during their planning periods. Also, he was being paid part time but his Latin enrollment kept going up. Admin. assured him if he could increase enrollment he would be made full-time the next year, he did, instead they put 30-31 kids in each classs to keep him part time. He said there was no way to teach Latin to such a large class. As a parent I would be furious in my kids classes were that large, this was in an upper middle class area so money wasn't the issue, just bad administration. He also hated the standsrdized testing. He said he wished he had been able to teach years ago before it existed he said you spend a huge amount of time preparing kids for the test instead of curriculum. It's sad, he loved the kids, hated the atmosphere. His stress has gone from 10 to 0.
#6
I work in a very quiet dull office with no vending machines or drink machines. We have a water cooler and the branch manager's old coffee maker from the 90's as the coffee for the entire office (30+ people). My friend and coworker "Sue" took it upon herself to stock a filing cabinet with treats for when people forgot breakfast or lunch. Sue did this on her own money and included items such as oatmeal, nuts, crackers, soups, all great stuff. She just asked you put a quarter in a cup when you took something. Remember, we have no vending machine. To buy food you'd have to drive to buy it as we're in the suburbs. Our branch manager decided that too many people were distracted by going to her filing cabinet and getting snacks so he told her to remove all of it. We still do not have a vending machine. :'(
Azure Adams 7 years ago
Start "passing out" in his office of hypoglycemia, get doctors to verify, then go to HR. Lawyers would also be the icing and cherry on the cake. Make sure the whole office does this. Worked at my old place
Cesi Baca 7 years ago
Yeah exactly. When my boss started bitching about no eating or drinking allowed except during. Break and lunch....I just went to my Dr and asked for a note that said I needed to be allowed to have small snacks throughout the day. Problem solved. The Dr does not even need to list the reason BTW.
Load More Replies... Carol Emory 7 years ago
A simple solution is to pack a cooler and bring it to work with you. It's a healthier and cheaper option anyway. I had one place I worked at chew me out for bringing and keeping a small cooler at my desk. I brought lunch and stored it in the break room fridge only to find that someone had stolen my lunch..twice. I told them that until they catch the lunch thief, this is how I would store my lunch and, if they had a problem with it, they could talk to my GP about the importance of a diabetic eating on a regular basis. They backed off.
BusLady 7 years ago
I hate the lunch thieves. Also the refrigerator police who throw everything away, even your dishes.
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Carmen Elena 7 years ago
We don´t have a vending machine either, so a co worker buys snacks, cookies, chocolates and stuff like that. She sells them but everybody keeps the secret from our boss bc he´s the only one allowed to eat in the office.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
I hate bosses that make the "do as I say not as I do" rules.
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rakuninaru 7 years ago
I thought I was reading the description of my office... We don't even have a proper place to eat
#7
Small business. 20 employees +/-. Boss made a big speech about austerity measures and no raises this year. A week and a half later he drives up in a brand new Silverado with all the bells and whistles. Expensed to the business of course. He would hate to have to pay taxes on those profits. One of the less subtle members of the staff took a literal sh*t in front of his office door.
Mark Grudzinski 7 years ago
During the financial crisis we all had to take deep pay and benefit cuts. After 6 months of that, the layoffs started. I was amongst the first round. Another victim of the first round was a woman from HR. She went on to inform me that none of the upper management had to take any kind of cuts whatsoever. S**t really does flow downhill, doesn't it?
Thomas Turnbull 7 years ago
My son was laid off from a job because the company could not afford to pay minimum wage when it came into force. He overheard the three bosses of this family owned company discussing what brand new cars they were going to buy that weekend.
Carol Harrison 7 years ago
Only one? I'd hope for a veritable Close Encounters Devil's Tower of mixed origin.
Cherry Warr 7 years ago
ha!! MINE had me organize his vacation...after telling me I couldn't have a raise (after 8 years without)
#8
During the 2016 election cycle my boss told us if we didn’t vote for (a particular candidate) we would be fired. I’m still lying about how I filled out that ballot. It’s not that I didn’t already know the kind of person she is but it reaffirmed my belief that the biggest danger I personally face is the forceful nature of extremists. PS - It doesn’t matter what side she or I was on. Threatening someone’s livelihood over personal beliefs is appalling.
Night Owl 7 years ago
This makes me angry. Voting in an election is supposed to be anonymous (at least here, in Europe). It's one of the staples of democracy :/
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
I sure it's actually illegal to demand to know such things in the US. You can ask for it but you can't demand.
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Laura Odelius 7 years ago
If it happens again, PLEASE report it to the Secretary of State's office in your home state. For example: http://www.sos.state.tx.us
Crochet lady 7 years ago
My husband's company "recommends" which presidential candidate to vote for and make a donation to. It makes my husband extremely angry and frustrated because it's none of their business! They tend to lean Republican and my husband was NOT voting for Trump and hubby is not a Republican anyway.
Suzi Gauthier 7 years ago
My old company sent out strongly worded memos to ALL employees, stating that they were starting a PAC & if we didn't contribute to it, then we would be considered disloyal. After a HUGE backlash, they backed down.
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Tom Witkowski 7 years ago
Just because someone employs you does not mean they control your vote.
weatherwitch 7 years ago
Absolutely no one has the right to force you to vote for their candidate. I'm sure there's some legality about that too. Your political choices are your own!
#9
I worked at a family owned market that was well known and loved by locals. The owners were a lovely couple that took care of their employees and would bend over backwards for their customers. They were very active in the community and highly respected. They had a few core employees and would hire on temp staff during the summer and holidays. The temps were mostly highschoolers and college kids that were home on break. They would bring back the same people as long as they could and the kids would try to stay as long as they could. The pay was well above market for those positions, we could shop the and get a 75% discount, after six months you got two weeks paid vacation, and the owners would close the store a couple days a year and host a party for all of the employees. It was the best job any highschooler in the area could get. I lived right next to the store and my parents were friends with the owners so I was given a job there. All my friends were jealous. After working there for a few years, the couple decided they wanted to retire to spend time with their daughter and her children in another state. Many tears were shed and they had a huge retirement party where they introduced their son to everyone and told us he was taking over. They gushed about his prestigious business education and background. As soon as they were gone, the son decided he was going to remake the store in his image. He fired basically all the staff, most of whom that had been there for 10 to 15+ years. He then staffed the whole place with homeschool kids and junkies. He cut the discounts and vacations. He hired some old highschool friends to manage the place so he could take the profits to go party and get coked out. The shop went from having the same staff for years to having to retrain an entirely new staff every other month. No one wanted to stay. Managers were reporting perfectly good product as damaged and taking it home. Shelves sat empty. Locals stopped shopping there. The place became a corpse of what it had been. The original owners had enough of their friends complain to them about their son that they came back for a short time and tried to make it right, but it was too late. Their original staff had all moved on and vendors had stopped doing business with the store. They decided to close the store, sell the property, and move away permanently. Last I heard, the son was in trouble with the IRS and his wife divorced him when she found him banging a stripper.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
As much as I feel sorry for this couple, I can't help but think they created their own nightmare. After all...they raised him.
Azure Adams 7 years ago
Never give your kids your thriving business. Make them both earn it and buy it
Elizabeth Molloy 7 years ago
You see this so often. The kid sees the profit, but not the hard work which went into achieving it. Such a shame.
SirWriteALot 7 years ago
Isnt there a saying ... one generation builds it, the second one kills it ... if it survives to the third generation it's good.
Mr. Re-in-act-ment 7 years ago
I have a story like this. I had a great principal in the school I attend. She never wasted money on things that were not necessary. There was even a school currency and if you had 50 pawbucks you could have lunch with her! Then the new principal came in and we had pawbucks for one more year. Then he changed the color of the pawbucks and we couldnt use the old ones. He only lasted 3 years managing the school. This year we get a new principal (the new principal is a friend of the first principal i mentioned)
Emme Garcia 7 years ago
This has probably happened to countless families in the last few hundred years. I've read that the money is usually gone by the second generation. Should have sold the biz to someone who would love it as much
#10
Former teacher. The administrators at my school were usually pretty chill, but had a habit of randomly coming up with minor rules that they would enforce for us (male teachers had to wear ties even on jeans day, etc.). Overall it wasn't bad, except for the time an administrator made a crucial mistake... they banned staff from drinking coffee in front of students. Now if you've never worked in a school, you'd think this isn't a big deal. When you spend nearly 100% of your day in front of students, it definitely is a big deal. First we tried to find any loophole we could. Energy drinks? Banned the next week. Tea? Banned two days later. It was chaos. Eventually, we realized they couldn't fire an entire school's worth of teachers and aides, so we ended up doing the one thing that private schools fear most: we formed a union. Realistically, it was more of a weird pseudo-union focused specifically on civil disobedience regarding the coffee issue, but it ruffled feathers nonetheless. The administrators caved to our "demands", allowed us to drink coffee again, and even bought each of us a reusable coffee mug as a gesture of goodwill. And that's the story of how a handful of school administrators almost accidentally created a teachers union over a complete non-issue.
KT Trondsen 7 years ago
Would have been a good idea at my high school. I'll never forget my English teacher starting to scream and running out of the classroom. A little later the principle came in screaming because it turns out one of the students had put a psychedelic drug in her coffee. Another time same teacher started crying at her desk and ran out. I went up to her desk and saw tacks in the bottom of her empty coffee cup. I went to school with terrible people :(
Viviane Katz 7 years ago
Well, y'know, drinking coffee in front of children sets a terrible example. My parents drank coffee right in front of us. By my mid-20's, I was hopelessly hooked on caffeine. Still am. So sad. I might have to switch to heroin.
Magpie 7 years ago
In Australia it was unions that made the laws humane enough to be workable without destroying the workers' health. etc.
Magpie 7 years ago
Also the nurses' union does a LOT of post-training education.
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#11
I was one of a large number of programmers working on a project at CSC. We had a deadline coming up in a couple months and they over-promised to the client and then asked us all to work extra hard to meet the deadline, and asked us to work 50+ hour weeks. Which we did - and then some: some of us put in 70-80 hour weeks to meet this deadline. But once that deadline was met, suddenly there was another deadline they needed to meet. And another. People got tired, had lives to lead, and scaled back on their hours. Most of us were still working 50-60 hours a week, but not a lot more than that. Once they realised we weren't killing ourselves on their project any longer, there was an All Hands meeting where the managers told us that they were incredibly disappointed in our lack of professionalism because so comparatively few employees were now working more than fifty hours a week. One of our harder workers stood up and said, "Look, I have three kids. I'm driving an hour into and out of work every day, I'm taking care of my family, I'm trying to get presents for Christmas, write out Christmas cards, decorate and clean the house for everyone we're having over for the holidays - I'm having a really hard time just getting to fifty." And the manager looked at her and sneered, "If it wasn't Christmas, it'd be because it's Easter, or Memorial Day, or because it's summer and it's nice out. You'd always have some excuse." There was dead silence in the room. When we left that meeting, we didn't talk to each other, but every single worker on that project put in exactly fifty hours a week after that. Then came Christmas - raise and bonus time! Every worker on the project got a 1/2 percent raise; the managers got a five-figure bonus. We were pissed. For management, the pain came after Christmas. First week off the year, four programmers had better jobs lined up and quit. Three more the following week. Five the next. We hemorrhaged 3-5 programmers every single week for over three months. It got to the point where the managers had to schedule a meeting every Monday at eleven to discuss that week's resignations and rearrange the surviving staff. F*ck CSC
Caroline Allnutt 7 years ago
These were programmer treated like this?? What arrogant bastards the bosses are! Don't they know programmers are in high demand? Nitwits!
frederic eeckman 7 years ago
Well, even if it was a staff of cleaning ladies, treated people like that is vile, no matter their job is :/
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Samantha Carter 7 years ago
I’ve worked in a factory where the boss would literally stand over you and criticise you until you cried. While you were working you weren’t allowed to raise your head up as that would be seen as not working. Until recently you had to put your hand up to go toilet, even now it is noted how long you take when you are in there and he will sometimes go into the ladies and confront you. We were told that we were all replaceable and we were not a highly skilled workforce (we made shoes) we all in that factory worked hard for no thanks. I once had to ask for a day off for a funeral off my nan and was told ‘our customers don’t care about your relative dying’ ! Indeed one workmate had to come back straight after a funeral service as he said to her ‘you don’t need to go to the wake as you will just be eating anyway’. He’s still there and still as bad.
Barbara Meyer 7 years ago
"If a project can't be completed within the 40-hour work week, it is being mismanaged."
Isabella 7 years ago
50 hrs weekly? You people are not normal at all. In most EU countries it is 35 hrs/week.
Sierra Wells 7 years ago
CSC has been around for 60 years now. I doubt there's been a time when they DIDN'T suck!!! I know they sure did when I was in IT 20 years ago
Sophia Cai 7 years ago
It's alright, programmers are probably ruling the world in a few decades :)
Jim Hunt 7 years ago
If anyone ever tries that on you, make sure to check with an employment lawyer. I don't think it is legal as a matter of policy or expectation, to expect/require more than 40 hours a week, even if you are salaried (in the US). Truth is most engineers do work well over 40 hours per week, but if a company/boss starts expecting that it becomes an ethical issue and probably a legal one as well.
#12
She actively tried to ban friendships. If co-workers became friendly she would schedule them so they would NEVER see each other. "You're here to work! Not to socialise!" She also banned everyone from coming into the workplace when they were not working. It was a pub. She banned socialising in a pub. She became insanely paranoid when she learned four people were in a WhatsApp group. She said the only reason people who work together set up group chats is because they wanted to talk trash about her. She was actually kind of right
Sally Appleton 7 years ago
I had a teacher like this in high school. If you were talking in class, it was definitely gossip about her. At least once a week she'd spend lesson time "addressing" rumours she'd heard about herself and accusing us of being terrible people. I'm pretty sure she was making these rumours up as well since none of us had ever even heard them.
Biljana Malesevic 7 years ago
This seems like some personal issue she was lashing out on her employees. Totally not right.
#13
Fired the girl who was in her third trimester of pregnancy three days before her maternity leave was to start.
Random Panda 7 years ago
How is this even possible? In most countries that is against the law.
Quinn 7 years ago
Contrary to what everyone else here is saying, it IS against the law. The Pregnancy Act of 1978 made it illegal to discriminate against pregnant women in the workplace. So because they can't just cite "pregnancy" when firing you, they'll find a convenient and unrelated reason to kick you out. Or you'll get demoted. I'm not sure what's worse, it being legal, or it being illegal and people getting away with it anyway.
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Trixster Million 7 years ago
Shoulda lawyered up; apparently the going rate is one year severance and two years' post-natal healthcare.
Suzi Gauthier 7 years ago
Depends on whether you can afford an attorney, where you live, whether your company has friendly judges, etc
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Pam 7 years ago
My sister was fired from a major publishing house WHILE she was on maternity leave. When she returned, they offered her an interns type of position with a huge cut in salary and said "we can remove you from your current position you as long as we offer you another". When she declined, they had security escort her from the building. I never purchased that publication again...shameful
Carmen Elena 7 years ago
That´s illegal! If they don´t prove she did something against the rules, she can sue them!
Annie Nelson 7 years ago
My friend went on her unpaid maternity leave, came back to her job and received her layoff notice.
John Fisher 2 years ago
That wouldn’t happen in Canada and if it did they’d have a lawsuit in their hands wether they had a different reason for firing a pregnant woman or not and that pregnant women would win. It wouldn’t matter what she did ( within reason ), as long as she’s pregnant her job is safe.
John Fisher 2 years ago
As well as after her maternity leave. The labour board here doesn’t mess around and they’d find it really fishy to all of a sudden fire a new mom. We have a lot of rights here.
Load More Replies... #14
Company consisted of something like 1,200 employees at the time, and rented out a big conference center for a Christmas party. At the opening of the party, the CFO was giving opening remarks, and asked - expecting cheers - if everyone liked their Christmas bonuses. He got booed. See, of that 1,200 people, a bit over a thousand were in customer service. No one in customer service got bonuses, only people in the 'corporate' departments got bonuses. And our awesome CFO decided to rub everyone's noses in it, because clearly the Chief Financial Officer of a company would have no idea that 80%+ of his company didn't get bonuses. At the same party, the CEO made an announcement that the company would be closed on friday (Christmas that year was on a Thursday), and everyone got a day off. Now, he had literally just finished making a speech about how everyone was important, and everyone was part of the company, no matter the department. He had shoveled sh*t hard, trying to make CS happier. The next day, we all got a memo that Customer Service still had to work on that Friday. We apparently didn't count as 'everyone,' and the CEO just hadn't realized that the announcement wouldn't apply to anyone. January saw a 60% attrition rate.
Sarah Hoskovec 7 years ago
I was going to guess that this was my former employer in telecom, but they would have never paid for a Christmas party in the first place.
Luka Hamer 7 years ago
Ah, I remember how they told everyone in our company to go home early so they could get home before a big storm would break out... Everyone except those in customerservice, that is. Because some manager person got mad that we were promised we could go home on time as well.
Suzi Gauthier 7 years ago
If you want a real education on what corporate America has done, see https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014. He's the only original non-family member to invest in Amazon and has run several businesses. But he's honest as hell about what has been done to the United States over the last 30 years.
Suzi Gauthier 7 years ago
Yep, our CFO took over for our retiring CEO, who was very big on innovation & making employees happy to reduce turnover. He even opened a day care and then a K-5 school, in conjunction with the local school district. CFO only cared about money. Regular raises were 7% - he gave all departments a limited amount of funding for raises, so if everyone got a raise in the department, then we could only get 3%. We didn't get COLA raises. He then sent out a memo reminding all employees of the cost of all the extra benefits we got - insurance, etc. Another memo shortly followed thanking all the employees for helping the company do so well that quarter. Then another memo telling everyone that all spouses who could get insurance through their workplace had to do so immediately, even if they couldn't get it until their open enrollment, even if they were undergoing medical treatment, even if the other company's insurance was crappy. This was our thank you for making our company so successful.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
This sounds a lot like Nintendo of America. The office and administration were treated like royalty and the CS departments were just cattle in need of prodding now and then. When people that had been there for several years started complaining to management, their answer was.."let them all quit. Well hire and train more people to work for half of what we pay them."
David Toh 7 years ago
Serious question why would a company need 1000/1200 of employees in customer service (83%)? Should they improve their process and quality so that less of their time is spent dealing with customers (except sales of course).
Jace 7 years ago
Because many companies have huge call centers for sales, support, and promotion. These are the people who maintain the customers the business has and sometimes they are the people who acquire new customers. CEOs treat these call centers like s**t. They see them as merely a necessary evil (an unwanted expense), so they treat the employees there just like that. These are generally "unskilled" jobs, where anyone without a degree can work. While this is NO excuse for treating these employees like s**t, the management, full of privileged people with degrees, usually look down on these people for this. Then they work them extra hard and give fewer days off because "we can't shut down the call center".
Load More Replies... #15
Had a boss everyone loved, then she got transferred to another store and the new guy that replaced her decided the schedule that we'd all gotten used to needed to be "shaken up". He posted the next week schedule that was completely different than it had been under the previous manager, got a bunch of complaints from people saying they can't work x days or y times and it SEEMED he was receptive since he took that schedule down. Then suddenly BAM, he just reposted the same exact schedule and said f*ck everyone. Oh, we had some people calling in sick from time to time under the old manager, but this new manager has pretty much half his crew every single day calling out because of his sh*tty tactics. Here's the first thing to learn about being a good manager...you don't need to "shake things up" for people to be better workers. You don't need to "put your mark" on anything if it's working just fine the way it was.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
The worst thing you can do is change things just for the sake of changing them.
person (i think) 7 years ago
My parents are members of a club and 3 years ago they hired a new manager after like 20 years w the same manager. Instead of the new guy coming in and swinging his d**k around to "put his stamp on things", he had the whole place run exactly as it had been running while he learned what worked and didnt work for the workers, for the club, and for the members. Then, after a few months of learning about the people and the club he started to change the things he thought needed to be changed and left the things that were working well. He has been really great for the club and has done a great job revitalizing it. _That_ seems like the best way to be a manager.
Caroline Allnutt 7 years ago
The old "I gotta mark my territory"..... lucky he didn't pee on all of you.
Suzi Gauthier 7 years ago
If anything, as a new supervisor, you need to shut your mouth & observe & listen before you make any changes. I've seen too many show-offs do a tailspin.
Jace 7 years ago
You'd think that people who go to school for management jobs would have had someone in their management classes tell them that this is the number one thing stupid and arrogant jerk-a*s managers do when they move in to a job, which instantly pits every employee against them. Yet, it continues to be the number one behavior of new managers.
#16
One of our CAD drafters had to get brain surgery last year. He got through it with no issues and has been working since with the occasional doctor meeting. He's not necessarily the fastest worker, but he gets the job done and I haven't noticed a difference before and after. Last week, during a meeting, our boss said to him, "...ever since your surgery you haven't been as capable, I can't trust this project to you." I have wanted to quit for a while, and this pushed me overboard.
Hans 7 years ago
And how low must you sink to say this in a public meeting? This boss is human scum.
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Carol Emory 7 years ago
I would have turned to the boss at that moment and said "Ever since he had his brain surgery, you just seem to lack compassion and empathy. I can't trust your that you're even a human being anymore." And I would have walked out.
weatherwitch 7 years ago
Under the Equalities Act in the UK this wouldn't be acceptable and would result in a discrimination law suit
Laugh Fan 7 years ago
My husband had a member of staff who'd had a brain tumour removed. This man needed to rest at lunchtime and didn't always pick the best place to rest. He was perfectly good at his job though. My husband was asked to ensure that this staff member only received a 'satisfactory' grade in performance reviews rather than 'good' (or better). One satisfactory review would lead to a staff member needing to be put on a performance improvement plan. If you got another 'satisfactory' grade in a performance review you were sacked. My husband discussed places to rest with this man but refused to mark him as satisfactory when his performance was good. So my husband was marked as 'satisfactory' himself and then put on a performance improvement plan. My husband left. Not jumping through corporate hoops just to end up treating people like c**p.
#17
Try working in IT. That attitude is just the standard state of being. It's a job where if you work absolutely perfectly, you're totally invisible and only appear on the radar when something f*cks up. Just a few weeks ago we did a major office move. My department worked back to back 12-18 hour days to get everything moved over, which we managed with less half a day's down time (and we were moving the company's main data center). By the end of the final weekend after carrying 30+ servers (plus cabs) up four stories, re-cabling 200+ desks and literally moving trucks worth of gear I got home and my legs just wouldn't work any more. I still have the blisters on my feet from walking about 30 miles in two days...and I was still at my desk at 7am the next day to run around the office fixing teething issues. Then, a few days ago the country chief got the whole office together to thank everyone for their hard work. He had a stack of envelopes with 'thank you' card £50 vouchers in them. Everyone who volunteered to help with the move got one...including the people who 'volunteered' to have an early snoop around the new office, spent 30 minutes on site and did precisely f*ck all. You know who didn't get a mention, or an envelope? Anyone in IT. The people who were there working unpaid overtime until 2am for weeks.
Katinka Min 7 years ago
Why would anybody in IT do this is beyond me. There is a ton of jobs out there for IT people, you can pick and choose!
Chris Kilcrease 3 years ago
Because if we didn't you wouldn't be able to work.
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Louise Brigance 7 years ago
I've noticed that. Amazing how quickly the IT people can go from hero to jerks in a matter of seconds
Elizabeth Butler 7 years ago
Helped my company move main data center....twice. My boss DID appreciate our efforts. Lucked into a good place to work and stayed.
Catherine Spencer-Mills 7 years ago
Worked in IT 20 years. This is exactly how it is - whether you are help desk, system admin, or programmer. I worked 30 hours one weekend upgrading a system. I had to come in at 8 am Monday and was greeted at the door with complaints about things that I had no control over. If you are salaried, you work unpaid overtime, no matter your position or department. It is a big reason why employers don't want to hire IT as hourly.
Chris Sprucefield 7 years ago
You have a contract. You work to the contract as expected from either side. as to business needs means up to 10-15% extra, which can be taken back in liue time, not as a constant rate of unpaid work. Anything above that? The staff needs to agree to it and the company to pay up for the time.
Jace 7 years ago
IT is almost as much of a pariah as a call center. It's another "expense" department that the executives only pay for out of a begrudging necessity. Then again, there are a lot of socially backwards people in IT, so that doesn't help the image of the thing in many organizations. And then there's the fact that computers just f*****g suck, and IT is always to blame for s**t they cannot fix (because you're not a programmer, even if all the software wasn't proprietary... and open source stuff tends to suck anyway, for normal users).
Sophia Cai 7 years ago
My dad's boss told him and his coworkers to work unpaid overtime. There was no work. My dad spent half the time on video chat with my mom :)
#18
My boss is looking to retire in the next 3-4 years. He told everyone that he wanted us to come up our visions for the company and it's future over the next 5, 10, 20 years. We're a small office of about a half dozen people but we've been growing and so everyone brought up growth projections and succession planning once he retires, etc. His son is the heir apparent and has a precocious 8 year old so in my 20 year version I even included the grandson joining the business and grooming it to become a legacy company. My boss went last and we were expecting something acknowledging some of our thoughts or at least an expression of appreciation that the company he founded would live on well past his retirement, be in good hands, etc. Instead it was brutal and short. It was something along the lines of "I do everything around here anyway so I should just sell the company to fund my retirement and you can all find other companies to work for in a few years." Mood killed. Meeting ended.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
I hope most just quit or went elsewhere so the value of the company plummeted. I mean the owner practically said that everyone had 3-4 years to look for a new job.
Lars Lasersson 7 years ago
Yeah, that would at least have made him realize that those other people were actually doing "some" of the work, after all...
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Wil Vanderheijden 7 years ago
This would mean for me: Start searching for another job, because this company is going out of bussines shortly. And I think that a lot of coworkers would feel the same. Could well be that the owner just blew his retirementfund.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
If he does everything anyway, then I guess all of the employees taking a "vacation" at the same time means he can handle everything without any worries...aka walkout.
#19
I work in a big corporate building. The same older lady came by everyone's desk towards the end of the day to collect the trash. Just the sweetest lady ever and every time she'd walk to my desk she'd give me a big smile and ask me how my day was and chat for a minute as she got my trash (usually I'd dump it in for her). I had some rough days but she has a way to cheer me up and send me home on a higher note. I know I'm not the only one either. So then a few weeks back our work implemented a new policy to 'cut down on trash usage'. It's no longer allowed to have a trash bin at our desk and we have to walk across the room and use the community trash to throw anything away. Not a huge deal but the real reason they did it is so they can cut down on cost... ie the cleaning crew. Sad to say that I haven't seen Sharon since.
diane a 7 years ago
I am gobsmacked at some of these - I thought I had dealt with some s**t
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Janine Randall 7 years ago
I don't care what they do, it ALWAYS comes down to money and how much they can screw you for their benefit.
Barbara Meyer 7 years ago
So the boss didn't care about all the time wasted walking to the bin?
Grumble O'Pug 7 years ago
Wrong, son. We have recycle bins at each desk. The imaginary problem is solved.
Load More Replies... #20
This school wanted to switch to Chromebooks. So what did they do? One summer while teachers weren't working, they removed every single Windows station and replaced them with Chromebooks to be issued to teachers. They were told to "figure it out". When teachers came up and asked how they could teach Photoshop, programming, AutoCAD 3d modeling, etc., admin basically googled their program name plus "Chromebook extension" and told them "see? There's an extension for it and it works!" I don't think I have to add that it did not work. They ended up bringing back the desktops for most teachers.
PBMc 7 years ago
Chromebooks are great if you want something that looks like a computer but isn't. On the bright side, if they ever have a class on cat videos, Chromebooks are perfect.
Wil Vanderheijden 7 years ago
Yeah, it's really absurd how in some systems people who don't know anything about IT get to make such ridiculous decisions. I chose early retirement because my boss told me that we were going to be working in the cloud. According to him IT staff of 4 persons would have less work to do allthough the number of devices to maintain would go up to over 6000. "But hey, It's all in the cloud...."
SAF saf 7 years ago
I agree, this was a poorly thought out change. The person who made this decision should have been fired. What a waste of time and money.
Load More Replies... BlackestDawn 7 years ago
I bet most of the extensions are of the light, display, and/or viewer variety. Programming I can understand (at least for the last few years) since there are online tools that are good enough to get the basics across but not so with image or 3D model creation and manipulation, unless of course if the programming was advanced levels then most likely not good enough.
Red Pantone 7 years ago
Ok not a teacher but a designer here, looking at the programs needed in that place, even some computers can't handle them! You need to have no less than 16GB RAM, a great video card, etc etc... I mean... Come oooon!
Carol Emory 7 years ago
Chances are, some slick sales rep sold them on it and made a bundle before they knew they'd been had.
Rabbit O'Hare 7 years ago
When our highschool went to chromebooks they took the computers out of the computer lab, thinking they were the same when they are not.
#21
Business had been running for three years and many of the employees had been there from the beginning without getting a pay rise. After some requests the company announced that there would be a review of everyone's pay. Called in each worker to discuss. Basically they had decided to pay every employee the same amount. This meant that a few got a raise, most stayed the same, and some (who had negotiated better at hiring) had their wages reduced. Needless to say most employees were unhappy. Two weeks later the three brothers who owned the business bought themselves two new cars and a second hand Rolls Royce. That was a real slap in the face.
Zenozenobee 7 years ago
I love when everyone have to make effort for the sake of the enterprise/country... except the ones that take the decisions for the collective effort.
Joseph Brzezinski 7 years ago
My father in law owned a business.. it was always his policy to never have a nicer car than the employes...
Emme Garcia 7 years ago
I know a couple workaholics that don't get that they will give 80% of their life to a company that will forget them before they even walk out the door
Louise Brigance 7 years ago
Oh yeah I've seen that one before. Company was a partnership, two crooked guys decided not to give bonuses one year. After the New Year one boss came in with a new Lamborghini , the other on got himself a Bentley. We were all thrilled.
Jace 7 years ago
Just so you know: This kind of s**t is often justified by libertarian and republican ideology. The number of entrepreneurs I've encountered who think they deserve more than their employees just because they came up with a money-making scheme... No one should be specially rewarded just for being brazen and lucky (yes, being a business owner demands a lot of work; if you treat your employees as well as you treat yourself, then you're not the kind of person I'm condemning).
Jace 7 years ago
I voted you up just so I could tell you that you've been completely and utterly brainwashed into believing absolute bollocks about "the left wing". There is nothing "progressive" about the employee treatment shown in this story. If anything, these bosses/owners demonstrate the arrogance and selfishness of privileged libertarian or republican business owners who will justify treating themselves much better than they treat their employees. The "left wing" does not force arbitrary "equality" onto people. Progressives seek equity, not mindless distribution. Please consult this illustration: IISC_Equal...Equity.png 
mulk 7 years ago
Tis situation has nothing to do with socialism ;) It's neo-capitalism, the opposite of socialism, where everyone has equal salary, even the bosses... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism)
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#22
I found keylogging spyware on my computer. My bosses had installed it and we're tracking/reading everything I did.
diane a 7 years ago
How do bosses even have the time to track and read everything every employee does??? they are supposed to be running the business
porcupine 7 years ago
My company just started doing that... one of the supervisors literally sits there watching us all day. I want her job so badly.
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P.Brux FHell 7 years ago
My thoughts exactly. If this is a company asset, they can install whatever they want. It is YOUR responsibility how you use this asset.
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Hamlets twin 7 years ago
I don't really see this as a bad thing. In the corporate world its scary how much can be tracked with or without a keylogger. The tactics used are primarily for monitoring threats some of which can come from the employees themselves. Just assume you are being watched, because you probably are. If they didn't mind you going to X website they could block it.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
Our university had a strict rule about people not using the office computers for personal business. I can understand because it can lead to unwanted viruses being released into the servers. I was disappointed though when one of the professors who dedicated more time than any other professor to that school was fired for ordering a Saturn Sedan on his computer in his office.
diane a 7 years ago
if an intelligent and tespectable person is stuck in front of a screen for hours and it gets quiet and boring - they will look stuff up
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#23
Put up a poster that said "Complaining is like vomitting. You feel better but everyone around you feels sick.". The morale was already bad but it was just a sh*tty way to take a hit at upset employees rather than do anything positive.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
And if almost everyone is "vomiting" then perhaps there is a "bug" going around that needs to be "fixed".
Daria B 7 years ago
Exactly. Also, you cannot stop yourself from the urge to vomit, your body just does it, so.... useless.
Load More Replies... Jace 7 years ago
In the USA, "complaint" has become some kind of f*****g social faux pas. This anti-complaint attitude is most found in/driven by nationalists (who hate hearing legit complaints from patriots), republican/libertarian business owners, corporate bosses/managers, and pretty much anyone with power and authority (and privilege). These are the same people who are quick to complain about "entitlement", yet they are the ones who most egregiously demonstrate entitlement as a personality trait.
#24
They banned phones, electronics, puzzles, books, etc. from being used at your desk. I work at a call center. We were expected to just sit and wait for the next call to come in "distraction-free", even if it was a super slow day.
Daniel Wei 5 years ago
they probably had those bright lights that make it impossible to sleep
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Little Menace 7 years ago
Get a pen and paper under the guise of making notes, then chose a long word and see how many words you can make out of it. Or are you not even allowed any paper? Talk about victorian factory work.
Martha Meyer 7 years ago
At a call center I worked this too was banned due to the fact that we handled customer's bank data in there and could have copied customer information. Needless to say this was the most boring job on the planet when no calls came in.
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Cora Fields 7 years ago
It's more of so the employees won't write down info regarding their clients
Gosiaatje 7 years ago
That's a poor excuse because if you really wanna save that kind of info, you will do it no matter what.
Load More Replies... diane a 7 years ago
if you are talking to someone on the phone - helping them to buy things - you obviously have to get their bank details
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Captain Marvel 7 years ago
They banned books? They BANNED BOOKS????!!! OKAY I NEED TO SPEAK WITH THESE PEOPLE
#25
In a very short span of time, they changed everyone's 401K plan (for worse) and then implemented an office wide cleanliness policy. No eating at your desk. Only 3 personal items on your desk. Everything labeled. No items other than your keyboard, mouse, and monitors on your desk at the end of the day. Talk about pissed off. You could feel the gloom when you walked in. Everyone's give-a-sh*tter broke at once.
Daria B 7 years ago
Sounds like nightmares to me. My desk os filled with toys and comics to keep me company. But then, that's normal for my profession...
JillVille 7 years ago
I have small plants on my desk and a photo of my kids. Under my desk is my sewing stash for quiet/slow times and along the top wall of my cubicle are a few Lego figures. Coworkers adjust the figures randomly when they come in to drop off paperwork. I don't know how we would function with a sterile office environment like that.
Neill Powell 7 years ago
3 Personal Items? One Giant blow-up-doll, 1 Giant, decorated teddy-bear with all my office gizmos permanently fixed to it, and one giant poster of a cat. I would pack them up and put the in the storeroom and remove to place at my desk every day... Oh and i would then cut the cords of the Keyboard, mouse and screen every day, because they were not specific enough on the "your keyboard, mouse, and monitors"
Joolz 7 years ago
My desk at a previous job was covered with Transformers and people loved it. There would be notes from the cleaning staff on my desk in the morning telling me it was awesome. Even my manager would come in and say good morning to the large Bumblebee that talked when you walked by.
Stannous Flouride 7 years ago
"If cluttered desks are a sign of a cluttered mind, what are empty desks a sign of?" ~ some anonymous genius
Megan Johnson 7 years ago
OMG that reminded me of this clip from Transformers Dark of the Moon when Sam Witwicky was at a job interview: https://youtu.be/ee8E1I6vn5g . Somewhat related to this clip, about 3 years ago the owner of our company decided that he didn't want anyone to use their personal mugs or water bottles anymore, and ordered a bunch of company mugs and drinking glasses that we were supposed to use. That isn't THAT big of a deal, but it still leaves a bad taste in your mouth when management starts nit-picking little things like that.
#26
Was “told off” for not sitting straight forward enough at my desk as it looked like from afar I was tilted to the side slightly and managers would think I was talking to my colleagues next to me instead of waiting for the phone to ring. I’m 5ft 10, sitting forward at all times is uncomfortable I like to cross my legs.. We used to work as a team to make sure we had enough cover that allowed us to go on our 15 minute break with a colleague, this was banned and we had to go alone at all times even when there were 8-12 people covering on the phones and we haven’t had a call for 20 minutes. Our “team” came 2nd in a award ceremony for customer service, this award was for excellent feed back in regards to the service our team provided on the phones and on site. The managers and supervisors are never on the phones and mainly do “reporting and auditing “ The managers and supervisors were all taken for an all expenses paid dinner, drinks and hotel stay to celebrate, this was kept a secret from the actual staff who had done the work! I only found out when I saw some pictures on a managers desk. We were awarded with 6 pizzas to spilt between us..
Louise Brigance 7 years ago
Those places are the devils answer for hell on earth. Totally and completely without soul.
Load More Replies... Thomas Turnbull 7 years ago
Had that happen to me as well and I'm allergic to pizzas so got nothing.
#27
Told a bunch of people they were going to be promoted to get us to do extra work, no one got promoted. I basically did her job for a month. Me and three of my co-workers quit and she got fired a few months later.
Anthony Talak 7 years ago
Been here. Got the promotion speech 3 performance reviews in a row. And then I decided enough BS was enough.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
Had a friend that worked marketing. She had approached her female boss with several ideas..all of which were shot down. Then my friend finds out her boss had special meetings with the owner of the firm in which she pitched my friends ideas as her own work. Once the pitch was complete and the owner was happy, my friend approached the owner with her well documented development of all the "bosses" ideas. There were also other employees that approached him to say she'd done this with them too. Needless to say..boss lady was fired and blacklisted from any other firms in the county. She had to move to another state to find work again.
#28
I worked for a small environmental consulting business a few years ago. We relied heavily on the work utes to function well so we could do our jobs (driving around rough terrain and such). The utes were old and tired, and broke down a lot. More than once I was stuck in the middle of nowhere trying to spontaneously learn to become a mechanic to get myself home. I understood it was a small business, and the boss was just trying to make ends meet and it didn't make sense for us to have all the latest and greatest equipment and vehicles, but when his wife drove into work one morning with a brand new BMW when our tools of trade were falling apart, that kinda killed it for me.
Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
? Here 'utes' are member of the Ute tribe of natives. What are they there?
#29
While working at a sporting goods store, I had a supervisor offer me a managerial position. He talked it up by saying I'd have new responsibilities and tasks. That I'd be able to delegate jobs to other employees while I focused on my new work. Me: "Cool...What's the pay?" Him: "Well, we wouldn't be able to give you a salary increase." Me: So I'd be doing a lot more with the same pay? Him: Yeah, you'd have more responsibilities! Me: "No."
mrreeow 7 years ago
Sounds about right. I use to work at a small clothing boutique and the owner said the exact same thing to me. When I confronted him about it he said I wasn't "proving" myself enough to actually become manager and the "attitude" I was giving him was the reason why he hasn't promoted me. EVEN THOUGH I WAS ALREADY DOING ALL THE WORK WITHOUT A PAY RAISE. ugh I quit and sent him a letter stating how much he owed me for unpaid overtime hours and all these legal papers stating how it was illegal to not pay your employees for overtime.. lalala whatever he paid and I moved on THANK GOD.
Alex Call 7 years ago
Your ex-boss must have had red horns, a sinister-looking trident and a pointy tail.
Load More Replies... #30
held a super positive, pep rally style company wide meeting about how they were going to start combining our sick days with our vacation days and now just call them 'PTO.' This was presented to us as a great thing, since we could all now use our PTO days fully as vacation days if we wanted to. Once the system was implemented, everyone realized that instead of getting 10 vacation days and 10 sick days per year, we now all had 15 PTO days. Everyone was pissed.
Magdalina777 7 years ago
Here the law says 28 vacation days per year and sick days are...well, sick days. They aren't paid in full though I think there's some minimal wage % rate for those and then it depends on employee - so you can have them if you need them but due to lower pay people still try to get back to work quickly. My current job is perfect in that regard 'cuz they can just let us work from home for a few days if we're sick rather than have us come in and infect everyone(we can communicate via Skype and stuff just fine, just perhaps some things take slightly longer to figure out); is not official but we do it anyway and everyone's happy. <3 this place
Jean-luc Picard 7 years ago
Here in Australia you get so many paid sick days, so many paid annual leave, varied maternity/paternity leave (a mix of full time pay and part time pay), (unpaid) domestic violence leave, and some other types I may have missed. .We have universal health care, so being sick shouldn't be a catastrophe and have plenty of laws that make it difficult to fire somebody for b******t reasons. .Where you work often determines exactly how much time you get off. .Probably not perfect but seems to work well although you can still have a s**t job and work with real losers and dickheads.
SirWriteALot 7 years ago
sick days? Join the rest of the civilized world where you just call in sick, no matter how long it takes.There are no sick days. Oh, and there's 4, 5 sometimes even 6 weeks of vacation. Land of the free my a*s.
Rebekah 7 years ago
Wow. The same thing happened at my company. Everyone was all Yay! Then we learned we actually had less days. It was such a slap in the face.
Jace 7 years ago
Because corporate befuckery spreads like a fad, from manager to manager.
Load More Replies... Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
Paid time off of any kind, sick or vacation or holiday, is a gift. How do you b***h about a gift?
Sarah Lee 7 years ago
I'd hardly call treating one's staff humanely a gift
Load More Replies... #31
Once upon a time I worked for a media investment group. One year we all got Christmas cards in the mail. Problem was, they weren't addressed to us by name, but by employee number. Employee 273051 44 West Main Street Corporatedeathville, US 11111
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
Ohh for effs sake, if you can get the adress then you can get the name.
Lynn Noyes 7 years ago
If they were using Word or something similar they may have just inserted the wrong field in the address. Still, someone should have noticed.
Load More Replies... SirWriteALot 7 years ago
Some poor secretary pressed the wrong button and inserted {{emplyee_ID}} instead of {{employee_name}}
Stannous Flouride 7 years ago
Are you from Corporatedeathville too? I knew a kid from there in middle school. He was called 273451. Any relation?
Louise Brigance 7 years ago
ROFLOL...that is cold, brother, cold. Almost as bad as a fax informing office they will be closed at beginning of new year, forever.
#32
Large factory(Not Unionized). Each department clocks in at a different place, mainly that department's breakroom. My department clocked in across the facility from the main entrance, which meant it took about 15 minutes to walk from the front door to where you clocked in and out at, and another 5 to walk from that entrance to the parking lot. There was a side exit that we would use, however, that literally cut that walk down from 20 minutes to 3, since our department was right next to the parking lot. Management decided that ALL employees must enter and exit through the SAME DOOR. Which meant we had to walk all the way down to the main entrance and then back around to our cars. There was so much rebellion from the employees in our department that they had to bar the door shut with 2 x 4's. Jokes on them, even unionized employees can be a pain in the ass. We contacted the fire marshall, who upon seeing a fire exit barricaded, fined the company 8,000$ We still were not "allowed" to enter through this door, but they stopped trying to stop us.
Zenozenobee 7 years ago
Wait... barricading a fire exit??? Who in Hell could think it was a brillant idea?
#33
Old folks home kitchen. Maybe 20 staff members. Boss declared we were too happy and made a new set of rules: ° there was to be absolutely no talking, laughing or jokes. The kitchen was to be silent because we were "distracting ourselves from work" °anyone working less then 9 or 10 hour shifts were forbidden bathroom breaks. Going to the bathroom on a shift with less then 9 or 10 hours was a fireable offense. Permitted Bathroom breaks could not be on the clock. Your lunch must be used to use the bathroom. Lunch breaks were 15 minutes long. °any communication with management was seen as inappropriate. Staff and management were to be kept separate at all times. (A manager f*cked a staff member and it made a big deal. That's why this was made) °you will not be paid overtime but will be expected to work. If you are to clock out by 8pm but are still needed you must clock out then return to work. Complaints to HR or labor board are fireable offenses. Yes people complained. Yes the place was investigated. Ex boss was sued. Lost. Morale dropped. They have a hard time keeping employees now and from what I heard most of the new employees are high school students. Ex boss announced a sudden retirement for the end of the year and the kitchen will be taken over by all new people. I jumped ship early on. Do NOT miss the place.
Katinka Min 7 years ago
Stuff like this is just plain crazy. And how can it be legal to forbid your employers to go to the bathroom or to stop talking???
Jamie Fiorito 7 years ago
It's not. The last bullet point in particular is the literal definition of wage theft. The employees can sue and get the owed pay plus overtime very, very easily.
Load More Replies... Jean Jacket 7 years ago
What about women working 8 hours that need to change their tampon?! C'mon. That's f****d up.
Sophia Cai 7 years ago
I don't think Stalin would go for a reason like "you're too happy". :)
Load More Replies... frederic eeckman 7 years ago
What I don't get is HOW people really expect workers to do a good job when they are ripped of their humanity this way....
Joseph Dunn 5 years ago
90% of all that s**t is illegal to begin with! At least here in the US...
Sophia Cai 7 years ago
Those are people. People need to pee. Like, people generally need to pee every 2 hours or so. 9 hours? They're gonna pee themselves.
#34
My department banned earbuds/ headphones. Now that we can hear how loud the rest of the office is, productivity AND morale have tanked.
Night Owl 7 years ago
I can only imagine how horrible this would be for people who ao are wery sensitive to sounds.
Chris Sprucefield 7 years ago
Could even be a breach of health and safety in some cases, denying the use of PPE. (personal protection equipment)
Load More Replies... Caroline Allnutt 7 years ago
Because the "open office concept" is such a great idea...... ugh.
Nikki D 7 years ago
They look like a nightmare to someone who is painfully shy!
Load More Replies... Laugh Fan 7 years ago
People would sometimes ask to have a radio on quietly. I was one of the two managers that agreed but then struggled to concentrate! Fortunately it didn't last more than a couple of days while I worked elsewhere. In another office I worked in people wore earbuds/headphones and it was like a morgue.
Nizzle 7 years ago
this seems like a troll account against normal people - of course you are expected to talk to other people and deal with an office.
Lars Lasersson 7 years ago
The human brain is programmed to pay attention to speech. When you're supposed to get stuff done, concentrating on it, and there are telephone conversations and other discussions going on around you, your focus will plummet. There are people who can filter pretty much anything out, but open offices reduce productivity because of this phenomenon.
Load More Replies... #35
In a company of 6 people, owner said in a meeting with everyone that his 2 sales guys are irreplaceable and that the rest of us are "just paper pushers
Caroline Allnutt 7 years ago
I was told by a boss that my work was just "loss leader" to get work funneled to more expensive services.
ispeak catanese 7 years ago
One of the VPs referred to our service center as the "red-headed stepchildren." Nice.
Jenna Boatright 7 years ago
I had a high up exec say that he did everything and nothing we did amounted to s**t. He was gone 20+ days a month travelling.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
There are way more "levels" between irreplaceable and paper pusher. To me paper pusher means they do nothing of value however you don't need to be irreplaceable to do something of value. Although I bet he only said because the doesn't how to properly value the other peoples work. Doesn't matter how good the sales people are if you don't have good people behind them delivering the actual product.
Load More Replies... #36
Firing half the staff for no reason other than to "clean house" when new management caused the other half to leave as well. You wouldn't think it possible for a hotel to go out of business in less than 2 months but lo and behold it did just that.
Jace 7 years ago
There seems to be a type of business mindset that is virtually suicidal... Maybe they wanted to shut down this hotel for veiled reasons...
Stannous Flouride 7 years ago
Sounds like a stock short sale. A vindictive person might drop a dime to the SEC.
Load More Replies... #37
It was a one two punch. The company wide meeting announced the promotion of several high level management and executives (mostly title and responsibility changes). Lots of smiles and handshakes, not unlike a college graduation ceremony. After these promotion announcements, they declared that due to the stagnant economy and poor sales, the entire company would be experiencing a pay freeze as a result. So, no raises for anyone. They then concluded the meeting by discontinuing "Casual Fridays." So, no more jeans on Friday. It almost felt like it was designed to make people want to quit and leave. It worked though, I and many others moved on to greener pastures within the year.
Emme Garcia 7 years ago
I wonder if that is a tactic to avoid paying unemployment or severance packages
Hamlets twin 7 years ago
it can be. you make it miserable for people so they quit. That shows up as they left voluntarily so no exit benefits.
Load More Replies... Carol Emory 7 years ago
Sounds like when I worked for Whirlpool call center. They would threaten us with taking away casual dress, vending machines, etc if we didn't improve our numbers. Most of the employee wouldn't really help the customers..they verbally pat them on the head with some "try this and try that" c**p and mark it as save a call. My boss kept wondering why my call times were so long. I said "Because I spend most of it cleaning up the other messes the other call center reps refused to acknowledge. What good is short call times if you never help the customer and their forced to call back 3 or 4 more times before they reach someone who gives a damn." When your job as a boss dwindles down to making sure the numbers are what corporate wants to see..you're no longer in charge..your a sheep following the herd and hoping you don't get picked off by the wolf.
Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
When it was called "Personnel" we were people. But now it's "Human Resources" so we're just another resource to be consumed and replaced.
#38
Installing solar for a really sketchy northern irish dude who turned out to be a local drug manufacturer. Boss ran away with £25000 of the clients money and left us on site completely unaware of what just happened, still on the roofs. We only found out about the clusterf*ck when said scary irish guy brings all his goons in to threaten us and our families unless we recovered the money, trapped us there for hours before we defused the situation.
Chris Sprucefield 7 years ago
Unlawful detention, blackmail, personal threats... this guy could easily have ended with some jail time..
#39
Had a worker that worked herself silly for the job. Really loved the venue, loved the clients, loved the work so she would work after clocking off, take work home, go in on weekends. Really just go above and beyond always. We always got incredible feedback from clients and suppliers about her. In our contract it says we’re entitled to a 5k raise after being employed for 3 years. At our yearly renewal (having been there for 3.5 years) she asked for the raise. She was flat out told there was no room in the budget. She could have taken them to fair work commission but instead she just started looking for jobs. She left (got a great position in a great company and is loving it!). The guy they hired to replace her had a quarter of the experience, no love for the job and his annual salary was 10k higher. Most of us have since left and the place is falling to sh*t.
Katinka Min 7 years ago
His annual salary was 10k higher - the gender pay gap in a perfect example.
Jace 7 years ago
These guys need to do some reading about what's actually going on in the real f*****g world, because the gender pay gap is absolutely demonstrated by statistical data.
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#40
My current job we had a kid out of a very prestigious Ivy League school. He was extremely bright but a complete asshole. He would talk back to managers and ask them where we went to school and say he could do their jobs in his sleep. He proceeded to tell HR after eight months that unless he could do only FP and A and pick his own schedule- he would quit. He also demanded to make 70k as a first year... Management bought it. He works for the CFO now and while he is extremely bright this f*cker walks out of busy season coming in at 10 am leaving at 4. While we work 12 hour days- I like my company but that makes me mad. Eat a d*ck Brian
Azure Adams 7 years ago
Go to HR and do the same thing. If they allow it for one then you all have leverage to make demands as well or walk... You have to do it en mass though for it to work. Also take a dump on Brian's car
Jace 7 years ago
Brian is probably in a job that gets respect and is viewed as important, while the person sharing the anecdote is probably in a "loss" job (some expense position that the bosses hate and provide with the least possible resources to do the work required).
Load More Replies... Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
Take consolation in the knowledge his first and second wives are going to take everything
Test Oratiusx 7 years ago
Nah, if he's as bright as stated, he'd make them sign pre-nups.
Load More Replies... #41
One of our senior employees asked for a raise because it had been a few years since he had had one and he was doing a great job. Management reviewed his file, realized they could pay one of the new guys half of the salary of experienced guy, fired senior guy, promoted junior dude. They weren't aware of the warehouse dynamic and soon found out that no one liked or wanted to work for or with junior guy, morale dropped a lot. A week later, senior guy committed suicide. Once the warehouse was informed/invited to the funeral, morale reaaalllly dropped and eventually junior guy became so ineffective trying to run the shop that he was fired and the next senior guy just kind of took over without management doing anything about it everything began to run as it had before senior guy was fired.
Thomas Turnbull 7 years ago
So sad for the senior guy who must of thought life was not worth living. The entire management should have been sacked.
Stannous Flouride 7 years ago
Sadly, for many senior-aged workers, their job is all they have. It's a surrogate family and they see their roles in it as a measure of their self-worth. And almost always, workers have a misplaced loyalty to their employers that is never reciprocated. The beancounters in management don't see them as people, only as profit and loss numbers. If their job is taken away they have nothing to fall back on.
#42
Gave a regular customer a $2 discount off his usual order (he was moving & this would be his last time dinning there, this was the first time he's ever gotten a discount) My boss proceeds to flip out on me, said I was self-righteous, stealing from her, and I was "the reason her business was failing" and took the money out of my paycheck. Nobody used coupons/gave a discount for the next few days. They were all scared. I grabbed my paycheck & put in my two weeks the day after.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
While technically it would be stealing if you didn't have the authority to make such decisions your boss certainly didn't need to flip her lid about it. Minor discounts here and there are usually not a problem since, unless it only goes to self-entitled people, it will build a loyal customer base.
Abby Rexroth 7 years ago
I wouldn't have even given that "see you next Tuesday" two weeks notice...
#43
I told the hiring manager that I was disappointed in one of his hires because he knew literally NOTHING about our job and asked him "doesn't that cheapen my knowledge and expertise?" His response: "Well, let's be honest, you job doesn't really need all that, does it?" There were four other people my level, with varying fields of expertise, at that meeting, and it got real quiet after that.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
This happens in schools too. My son is autistic and went to a special needs class most of his time in school There was a public pool in the area and every Friday, the special meeds kids were put on a bus and sent over to the pool to get much needed exercise and stress relief therapy. They often had the pool all to themselves and parents of the special needs kids were invited to participate. The principal walked into my sons classroom and announced that, due to budget cuts, they'd no longer be able to keep the swim program. Much to his dismay, the teacher pointed out that the pool time was donated by the city, the TA's got paid whether they were at the pool or at school and that the only cost was the gallon of diesel a month that the buses used to transport kids to and from school. When I told him I'd be happy to donate the diesel money, he left disappointed. Find out who is funding what first before cutting programs.
Laugh Fan 7 years ago
If he hadn't checked where the funding was coming from he must have had another motive. Dreadful whatever the reason!
Load More Replies... Laugh Fan 7 years ago
Shame you couldn't have borrowed some monkeys from a zoo and watched them try.
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#44
I worked at a club in Miami and the owner was out of his f*cking mind (years of drug abuse).. when the housing market crashed obviously people were spending far less going out but he insisted we were all stealing. We had meetings once a week with all kinds of threats. Finally he put in an automatic pouring system for 50k+, it basically looks like you're pouring drinks from a soda gun, super boring. The fun vibe and flair we had was totally gone which made sales drop even more. He ripped the system out two weeks later.
Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
People go to favorite clubs because of the PEOPLE there. No one returns to a club where the staff are all b****y
Carol Emory 7 years ago
Yeah..he ripped the system out because he realized the employees weren't stealing after all....dumbass.
#45
To cut costs, they started a policy that only certain departments had internet access - it basically started a class system that bred resentment across departments, and caused an exodus from the non-internet teams.
Catherine Spencer-Mills 7 years ago
This makes no sense. I worked in a health district, and the manager wanted to put in nanny ware to prevent inappropriate surfing. So how are the public health nurses supposed to look up breast cancer and other sexually transmitted disease info? Fortunately, it didn't get implemented when one of the nurses pointed out that STI info included images of the affected parts.
#46
Sh*t like that kills me. I was an engineering intern at a factory owned by a German company, but located in the US South. It happened to be the summer of the World Cup and US-Germany were playing on like a Thursday. The factory had engineers, fabricators, and line workers. The engineers worked on long term timelines, but the fabricators and the line workers had weekly quotas. In general the line out performed quota (they were based on orders and the line could out pace the orders if needed). So normally the line reached the weekly quota by sometime late Thursday or early Friday. The engineering interns brought up that we wanted to watch part of the game during our lunch break on the big projector in one of the conference rooms. The HR guy in charge of scheduling the room ran with the idea and ordered pizza for the entire factory to sit and watch the game. Thursday comes and the line is on pace to finish quota that afternoon (so had Friday to work extra/cut off early). The whole factory staff shows up to watch the game, eat food, and relax for a bit. Morale is high as a bunch of East Tennessee folk are hooting and hollering over a soccer match of all things. Out of nowhere the plant manager strolls by and says “I thought we were here to work”. Room was empty in about 100 seconds. The interns were all pissed and hid in the warehouse watching the second half on one of our phones. F*ck that guy
Gareth Graham 7 years ago
In England, if their is an international match during a work day, every boss I've ever had has allowed us to bring in a tv or radio to enjoy the match. It's morale boosting as not all debilitating to output
diane a 7 years ago
I am guilty of taking a radio into work to listen to the news about the Falklands war - cos I had a relative there
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Mixedupste 7 years ago
In our office we have 2 screens for calls. When the world cup was on we could switch one of the screens to watch the football. Funny thing was that out of 11 of in the office on 2 liked football!!!
Kori K. Warriner 7 years ago
Ah yes, I know exactly what plant you are talking about. A lot of my friends who have worked there have shared horror stories about demerits, and other ridiculous policies the company follows.
Ryo Bakura 7 years ago
During the 2002 WC, my school opened early to show the England games, and they made a breakfast menu so we didn't have to miss any of the games en route to school. It was fun, until Brazil eliminated them from the tournament. We watched all the other games on a friend's mini TV. 6 of us crowded around a smartphone-sized screen during our breaks between classes.
#47
Started firing people by lining two up at a time and seeing which one they prefer to keep on. Didn't matter if you were there for 20 years or 2. Also hiring management from outside and not promoting within which means the new managers have no knowledge of anything that company does in terms of ethics, procedures, or employee status. It has turned this 'clique' type environment into every person for themselves. Very toxic.
Emme Garcia 7 years ago
Sounds like what happened to the work culture at Sears. And look at how well they're doing.
#48
I was working in a restaurant that switched from fast food to half full service, so I would refill water, bus dishes, etc, but customers would order food at the counter and carry the tray to their table. Once we switched, customers would occasionally leave tips out on the tables for us which was awesome since we were doing twice as much work with no pay raise, but then the manager put signs on all the tables saying "no tipping". Maybe it had something to do with taxes or payroll, I don't know, but at the time it just felt like huge d*ck move...
Alexandra Smith 7 years ago
Probably because only the people clearing table got tips, not the people working registers, cooking, etc. Should have probably instituted tip sharing instead
Stannous Flouride 7 years ago
What is the manager going to do if a customer disobeys? Fire them? That sign would only make me be more discreet.
Load More Replies... #49
Worked as a cleaner for dentist offices as a second job. Boss sent her boyfriend to come pick up her check and then the very next day (pay day) she apparently 'went on vacation for a week' and didn't bother to pay any of her employees. She lost a lot of workers when she came back from vacation.
Daria B 7 years ago
Couldn't she just set the computer to send the pay automatically at a specified date and time? My company does that...
Jace 7 years ago
Not if she is the one that submits payroll to the payroll company.
Load More Replies... SirWriteALot 7 years ago
And that is why the rest of the world uses ELECTRONIC BANKING instead of an 18th century invention called "check" or "cheque" or "chec"
#50
Restructuring bonuses every month because employees were hitting the bonuses...despite the company making near a million in revenue a month.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
While technically just because they make a million in revenue doesn't mean they have the money to give out as bonus (that would come from profits) restructuring bonuses so you don't have to pay them at all is a really s****y thing to do.
Thomas Turnbull 7 years ago
I was sacked for saying yes to a customer. I phoned the customer up to tell her that she had a refund she said is this about my store card I said yes before confirming her details thus I broke the data protection act and was fired.
Silvia Silviutza 7 years ago
Same here! I used to work for a small outdoor business, and when we had enough clients and no harness left, we had something like a 5% of our monthly salary bonus on that day. All of us. We worked hard for that and had them almost everyday for the summer months. But then my boss' girfriend ( my mom's cousin !!!) said we don't deserve all this bonuses so she cut them off. She made a lot of money, and not all the money were declared.
#51
My company stopped giving bonuses, lowered the Christmas bonus and doesn't give raises. Yet somehow our company can afford to have TWO private jets, yet always talking about how broke we are.
Cherry Warr 7 years ago
MY company requires us to give them $5 a week to put into the bonus fund...and at the end of the year we get a bonus. so basically we pay for our OWN bonuses while they collect interest on it
Chris Sprucefield 7 years ago
In Malta, This would be considered "Withholding of wages", and be a criminal act, for which they can get prosecuted.
Azure Adams 7 years ago
quit the company and publich everything you jsut said with evidence publically
#52
I worked at a restaurant with a sh*t tipped minimum-- $2.63 an hour. We'd be penalized for being even 5 minutes late so lots of us showed up 20-30 min early to make sure we'd avoid the penalty (this is Boston, so that was an appropriate gamble, I've gotten stuck on the T for 10-20 min on NUMEROUS occasions), and we'd just get right to work-- and there's plenty to do when opening a big restaurant. So we'd clock in and start working-- no one was clocking in and failing to work. In fact I liked getting there early because the kitchen would get up to 113, most of the morning prep occurred in the kitchen and was fairly rigorous, we didn't really air condition and had to wear long sleeved shirts and pants. So I could knock everything out in a tank and shorts, change into my uniform, and not start my shift a sweaty mess. The manager gave us a big lecture about how it adds up, even if it IS only $2.63 an hour. She made a new rule that we couldn't clock in more than 10 minutes before our shift began, EVEN IF WE WERE WORKING. By the way, that's a 15-minute window of appropriate clocking in time, in Boston, with a notoriously unreliably public transportation system, crazy weather, and over-clogged roads. F*ck Grafton Street and f*ck you, Ashley.
EvilDinosaur 7 years ago
What do they mean by ‘s**t tipped minimum——’? It sounds like it’s set by the restaurant but that’s not minimum wage? Minimum wage is set by the government? Also that’s super low. Minimum wage here is practically double that for under 16s let alone living adults.
Amanda Rose 7 years ago
most jobs here (US) if you can get tips, they can pay way below minimum
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#53
At a company wide meeting (45 people) called the employees an expense, did not go over well at all. Two people actually stood up and threatened to quit on the spot if the boss didn't reevaluate his statement and could explain what was wrong with it. And he made it pretty clear by tone of voice and overall feel that he only thought of the employees as an expense and not at resource, that yes costs money, but also is the reason the company actually earns money as well. And if he could he would do it all by himself to save on the expenses of having employees. We are talking about engineers with years, some cases decades, of experience, and he thought he could replace them if only he had the time. That's what the b*tching was about.
Katinka Min 7 years ago
Well, yes, employes are listed under expenses. But without them you have no f*cking company!!
Catherine Spencer-Mills 7 years ago
If you have zero costs, you have zero revenue - just saying.
#54
I was a hard worker, like an extremely hard worker. One day a supervisor asked why I wasn’t working at my usual pace, so I told him I was facing homelessness if I couldn’t find somewhere to live. He said "Heyyy well I really need my superstar out here! I depend on you getting a lot done for me." He couldn’t care any less about my problem...I was an employee who made him look good because I got results, and not a human being. I never worked hard again, and personally undermined the work ethic of everyone I came in contact with. I didn’t have to learn that particular lesson a second time.
Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
I work because I prefer to be busy not bored. What the boss expects doesn't enter into it. By coincidence, I'm one of the top producers, but it's for my benefit, not theirs.
Phil Vaive 7 years ago
Or maybe the landlord was kicking this person out for other reasons other than not being able to pay the rent, and it's a tight rental market?
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BlackestDawn 7 years ago
Don't think she/he wanted to be loved but rather just having their problem recognized, especially when it could affect their usefulness even more than it already did.
Load More Replies... #55
Me personally, I'm a security guard at a library. My boss said she wanted me moving around a lot, which is cool. I would get up every 15 minutes, patrol the entire building, then sit back down for another 15 minutes. It's not the busiest place so it seems to work out fine, especially since my coworkers always know how to get a hold of me. However, apparently a coworker told my supervisor I was slacking off (and this coworker's known for micromanaging people she has no control over) and wasn't doing my job properly. But instead of talking to me about it, my boss just says, "Oh I meant CONSTANTLY. CONSTANTLY walking, 4 to 8 hours straight, no sitting down AT ALL. Also we fired the only other security guard so you gotta take his shifts too." So other than a legally obliged 15 minute break, I'm supposed to be hiking all day long and "assert my presence" to the dozen or so patrons we have. I'm turning in my 2 week notice on Wednesday, and in the meantime I just take VERY long bathroom breaks....
Jace 7 years ago
So it's basically: "Your job looks to me (and therefore must look to everyone) like you don't actually do any work. So I'm giving you an arbitrary requirement that makes it look like you do something, to justify your job (to myself and the one micromanaging a*****e that makes me feel like I need to assert my dominance over the workplace by coming down hard on whatever complaint they made)." F*****g clueless bosses.
arjelio mas 7 years ago
Sounds like Las Cruces. Brannigan Library. They have people who are ugly on the inside and anxious to share it.
#56
New general manager came in, fired all the best people (I was really good but had only been there for 3 years so I wasn't making a lot) because they were "making too much money" and replaced them with base pay workers who didn't give a sh*t. Then that increased the workload on everyone else that wasn't fired so they all quit. Then the hotel was stuck with half a sh*tty staff. Funny thing is that we made in the ballpark of 20 million dollars the year before my original GM left and the year the new GM took over I heard from one of the few people that still worked there (there were 2 originals out of a 60 person staff) that they were projected to barely clear 2 mil. We were in the top 5 Hiltons in the entire Midwest for years and there were only a handful of nights like Christmas when we wouldn't sell all 140 rooms. Why that dumb sh*t tried to change everything when the place ran itself and was kicking serious ass I will never know, but he's out of a job now. My old GM would literally leave halfway through the day if he wanted (rarely) because our managers were so good and everyone actually cared about the place.
Chris Sprucefield 7 years ago
Make people WANT to work, then focus on making the business better, when you have the resources that want to go work with you...
#57
Worked at a Insurance company that focused on processing applications and underwriting. Less than a few months into them having mass hiring and site opening they implemented "quiet hours". Twice a day (once in morning and other in afternoon) for 3 hour blocks you were not allowed to talk to other coworkers. You couldn't even message them on the internal instant messenger and had to switch your status to "Busy". If your manager saw your status was not in "busy" they would message you about it. Also you were highly discouraged from asking necessary work related questions during this period. If you were observed talking to a fellow coworker for assistance with something you would get weird stares from management and sometimes have to explain that we are not having casual conversation. All this for the sake of "productivity" the morale killing word of every business. People went from initially thinking this company and job were so great to hating the place. As you would suspect other changes further contributed to the shift.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
Yeah, increase "productivity" by denying people necessary information for them to continue with what they are doing.
SirWriteALot 7 years ago
Interesting. In Europe a lot of companies start what they call "american standards" which means pampering employees and giving them stuff ... because silicone valley does it. And some companies are still really strict and count every pencil. Didn't know there were still companies like this left "over there" in the US.
Jace 7 years ago
"Silicon", not "silicone". They're different things :-) Also: There may be tons of stories about how great Silicon Valley employees have it, but those are generally a minority of "high value" employees. Most American corporations are not treating all their employees well at all.
Load More Replies... #58
Plumbing shop. Newer owners came in. They were a married couple who had worked there for years and bought out the original owner. A few months later has we are heading into Christmas, they called each employee in one at a time to explain how they (the employee) weren’t getting a holiday bonus because the employee had messed something up earlier in the year. My reason was that I had broke a mirror in a customers bathroom and it had cost $200 to replace. And they just couldn’t afford to pay any bonuses. (I brought in over $500,000 worth of business that year. ) Next week they drove up in a new sports car. Someone asked what it was and another plumber said it was a 2007 Christmas Bonus. They’ve had a huge turnover in employees now. No one from when I worked there ( ‘94-08) is still there.
#59
I used to work at a gas station/convenience store. Our manager was definitely cheap, but he brought it to a whole new level after he bought another gas station over 50 miles away. He started scheduling his pre-existing staff from my store to work in his other store, over 50 miles away. Some of us were still in high school, but he didn't give a sh*t. He refused to hire more people.
Jace 7 years ago
Might want to investigate the state labor laws to see if there's a law requiring this boss to pay employees for extra travel time.
Chris Sprucefield 7 years ago
,,,, or you travel inside work hours. company's choice.
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Tim Douglass 7 years ago
During times of high unemployment desperation is pretty much a constant.
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#60
Head of department realised that we weren’t about to meet our targets for the financial year. Completely banned annual leave for 3 months, forced anyone who didn’t fill in their timesheet on time to attend disciplinary meeting (despite problems with the system meaning that some didn’t get filled in) and generally had lower management terrified, causing a massive blame culture and several people to be signed off with mental health issues. In the end, the employee survey which went to his bosses was hilariously bad, and he’s now somewhere else making some other people’s lives a misery. The best part was when his replacement came in and fired his right hand man who was also a d*ck.
#61
I knew someone who worked at a factory (in West Virginia or Ohio) that was purchased by a Japanese firm. On day one, they took away everyone's stools and said everyone had to stand for their entire work day. What a stupid way to get every person to hate you on day 1, with no benefit! Of course, many of the employees had back problems and other health issues that made it painful or impossible to continue in their jobs.
Magdalina777 7 years ago
Ooo that sounds oddly familiar. Except I don't think we had a japanese guy, just a bunch of idiots up there XD
#62
I worked for a 'natural health' company that was basically a pyramid scheme. I was a well liked phone/bill monkey as I did chat with the most important money spenders for some time [something we were told to do BTW]. However for some reason, the receipts that I needed to get when someone called went missing a lot once in the hands of accounts. Something that really stopped my work and it was a little suspicious as it happened too often. None of my business, instead I did something clever and photo copied every receipt, putting them in my drawer in case they went missing and it worked a treat. I was so proud I even told everyone and they said it was a really good idea. I must have been onto something though as one day I got called into the boss and she said that they found the missing receipts in my drawer!!!!!!!!!!! I was so gobsmacked, I laughed. I told them that they were clearly photo copies [all the same size, some a bit wonky, all black and white etc]. I still got the sack. The only thing I can come up with is that there was dodgy stuff going on in accounts and my 'evidence' was getting in their way.
Final score:
19points
Jace 7 years ago
A lot of scam products abuse the word "natural", but it's not a given.
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#63
Telling employees that they are going to fire you if you don't make more sales. Then when someone quits tell them naww that was just motivation. We were never going to fire you.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
I hope they mean "motivation to seek other employment" because otherwise that is so demotivational.
Catherine Spencer-Mills 7 years ago
Took an "Organizational Psychology" course which was all about motivation. I was not a popular student as I kept telling the instructor it was BS.
#64
I had a boss who would pick pairs of people he thought should get to know each other better and strongly suggest that we go out to lunch together. For some reason he matched me with one of our younger and more opinionated engineers, who spent the entire lunch ranting about how all taxation is theft and how our support for Israel was stupid, that if the Jews wanted to run around in the desert we should just give them Arizona. It was certainly a learning experience for me, though not in the way my boss was hoping. I stayed as far away from that guy as I could for the rest of his (thankfully brief) employment with is.
Jace 7 years ago
If only it weren't real. These crazy attitudes are scarily common among technical people. It seems to go along with social skills deficits that correlate to their increased technical aptitudes (various reasons for the correlation). They start with a clumsy set of social skills, then these get compounded or mutated into antisocial ideologies when they discover ideologies that prop up their antisocial traits (rather than improving themselves to fit into society better). They might then get into anti-feminist ideologies as their social skills continue to cause them problems with others (like with dating). If their technical skills reward them with increased income and power at work, these ideologies calcify because they feel like their way of life has been rewarded. If they fail to advance in the working world, they'll start to look for scapegoats (bigotry), rather than looking inward at their own deficits. American capitalism DOES reward antisocial behavior and tech has taken over.
Load More Replies... Jaded Queen 7 years ago
My principal used to do this to us(still does) . He would ask teachers to monitor kids and their friends. And separate them into different sections at the start of new class, so we would learn to make more friends/live alone. In 7th std I had 3 amazing friends. In 8th he shifted me to a section with not so nice kids, with no friends. I sat alone, did everything alone for the entire year. Resulted in severe self esteem issues. I had always been shy, but that was just not my crowd. So f**k you, you discriminating s**t.
karen snyder 7 years ago
I totally understand separating friends during class time, but this sounds Draconian. The school had different sections for kids the same age? Was it really big? That's just sounds so creepy. More like a prison
Load More Replies... 
#65
I worked at a dog daycare center as the assistant manager for a few months. We just started a training class so you would tell us what commands you would like us to teach your dog and we would pull them aside for 1 hour and teach that command with a certified trainer. The service usually cost an extra $45+ on top of your day care visit. Well our trainer quit unexpectedly and the owner asked myself and the other manager to step in as the trainers. We informed him that we did not have the proper certifications and our program promised the customers a certified trainer. He then told us to bring them in for an hour and have the dog hang out with us in the office and he would tell the parents what they worked on for the day. Needless to say we refused to do so and we were blamed for being non-loyal good for nothing millennials. Well he received six two week notices within one week after I revealed this conversation with the employees. This place only had 10 employees in total.
#66
My company had an (anonymous) employee suvey this past year and when the results (which reflected negatively on the GM/Manager) were revealed, everyone had to sit through a four hour meeting where, line by line, our GM asked "why do 50% of you feel this way" or "60% of you not like this"? No one really spoke up (it was supposed to be anonymous) so we just got told how if we felt that way, this is why our feelings were wrong. By the end of the four hours most of us were like "was that supposed to deter us from rating negatively next year... So we don't have to sit through a 4 hour meeting about how we're not right in feeling the way we did"
Zenozenobee 7 years ago
I guess the managers totally understand what an employee suvey is made for and how to use the result to improve things
serena 7 years ago
I went through the same exact thing!! We had to do an anonymous survey every year. One year we scored really negatively. We had weekly meetings where our manager yelled at us for scoring him so badly. When we would not speak up, because we didn't want to implicate ourselves, he got mad and said we were acting like children.
#67
I once had a retail manager who sent out a memo that we worked so hard and did such a great job this month that she gets a bonus. That went over like a lead balloon.
ispeak catanese 7 years ago
We had a lazy and useless Supervisor announce that she'd been made Director. She then had the ovaries to add that the promotion had been for her position, not for her. Of course.
#68
Bought a manufacturing plant. Fired everyone. Tried to hire them back for $2 less
Jace 7 years ago
Sounds like most of corporate America at this point, doesn't it?
Load More Replies... Chris Sprucefield 7 years ago
That would not fly in the EU where they have something called TUPE - Transfer of Undertaking - Protected employment.
#69
Changed up the metrics that determined people's bonuses. And included things that were important for the business to know, but completely beyond the control of the people who's bonuses were impacted. For example, we had a "right party contact" rate -- how many times you actually got the person you were calling vs the number of calls you actually made. The problem was the phone number list came from elsewhere, and the people making the calls were just given a list of numbers, and you had to call them all. No leeway. So you're calling blind from a list you don't control... and get penalized if the list is sh*t. Oddly enough, the people in charge of making the phone number lists, their bonuses were not influenced by right party contact rate.
#70
Was working for EB Games when GameStop bought them. 20% of any warranty, and $1 for every subscription sold went into your paycheck as commission. And you'd never feel dirty selling the things, because Edge Magazine (EB's answer to Game Informer) and their extended warranties were legit, and fairly priced. GameStop buys the company. First thing they do? Nix the commissions. You still have to sell the stuff, of course. I'll never forget the first meeting I had with GameStop as a manager. They really drilled how profitable those things are to the company. Soon after came the threats of reduced hours if you didn't hit quotas, mandated by corporate. Yeah. F*ck Gamestop.
Jace 7 years ago
That's exactly what corporate buyouts are all about: take over a competitor, force it to be run like the buyer company (robbing it of any actual value it might have had other than being a competitor to be killed off), p**s off the existing employees so that they leave and cheap replacements can be hired for much less (and they don't know what was changed, so they're a lot less likely to resist anything), then run those locations into the f*****g ground, while collecting all the profits (without investing anything back into the business itself) and getting whatever extra value they can get from the Wall Street befuckery.
Markus McCloud 7 years ago
Here's hoping digital distribution (Steam, Nintendo eShop, etc.) runs them the F**K outta town!
#71
Being given a list of websites to write positive reviews for the restaurant on our own time or get fired.
David Martin 7 years ago
And that list would immediately go to everyone I knew, to flood the sites with negative reviews
#72
There was going to be a $1,500 bonus if the company landed a certain client. I'd been working there about 6 weeks. They had replaced 4 full time software testers with me, a 20 hours/week student who wrote automated tests and was well on my way to run more tests than the 4 full time employees could do. I didn't get the bonus because I was just a part-time employee. From then on I felt like if I wasn't important enough to get a $1,500 bonus, my job must not be important enough to care about too much.
#73
I used to work for Microsoft. When Google was first growing really rapidly, they were becoming famous for their perks including free food. At a company meeting, someone asked Steve Ballmer (CEO at the time) if we were going to get free food too. Ballmer famously answered something like "would you rather have free food, or get paid $10,000/year more?" That argument might have held water if Microsoft paid more, but in addition to not having free food they actually paid a fair bit less.
#74
Casually said the best employee was X and everyone, including X, knew that X was among those who did the least amount of work.
ispeak catanese 7 years ago
OMG, what is about people like this? They know nothing and do nothing and have leadership snowed.
#75
I worked at a grocery store and booked a day off 3 months prior, because it was my high school grad. I was told that "graduations can't be on a Tuesday and if I didn't show up to work, I would be fired." The same guy also texted me after I called in sick the first time saying "Nice try faking being sick. I better see a doctor's note on Monday". I got a doctor's note and had to spend $20 on it.
Shana 7 years ago
Worked a grocery store too, boss lady (horrible person) didn't trust anyone if they called in sick and would call work-doctor to check in on us. She even sent one to me on a saturday, which is even more expensive, so joke was on her. (I couldn't even talk that day, so doctor came in, asked how I was doing and went "oh you're clearly ill, stay home for the next few days" :P .)
Jaded Queen 7 years ago
Wouldn't work with me. My family is full of doctors. I never needed a official appointment to Know what to do with myself if I got sick. They likely wouldn't believe me thinking my family is helping me cover up.
Load More Replies... #76
Layoffs. 73 people lost their jobs because a huge project lost money instead of making money. Another 73 or so lost their jobs because the company was moving in a different direction and didn't need as many people with their skill set. These were by and large very talented people, as opposed to deadwood or shiftless morons. You get rid of deadwood and morons, and it gets the rest of the deadwood and morons to work harder. You get rid of talented people, and everyone else gets angry, fears for their own job, and/or starts looking for a new job.
#77
Worked at a trading shop where up to 80% of yearly comp was in the form of an end-of-year bonus. One year they decided that before the bonus was paid out, every employee had to sign a draconian non-compete agreement banning employment for 12 months at any competing firm. Oh - and you had to sign blind. Some folks signed and then were told they didn't get a bonus.
Ryan Paigey 7 years ago
I was offered a job recently, and I had accepted until I saw their non-compete said that I couldn’t work in the field for two years after leaving their firm. I didn’t take the job almost solely because of that clause, and I can’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily agree to two years unemployment if they were ever laid off or wanted to quit and move on. It was an insane power grab.
Chon Unca 7 years ago
don't know for US, but in my country, non compete agreement is just here to scare you, because if they want this agreement valid the law say they have to give you half the time of this agreement as payment at same rate than your last wage in once when you leave. if you have a 12 months agreement, they have to give you 6 month of salary, 24 months? 12 months of salary. I sign this kind of agreement once and when i quit the HR said to me with smiling : - "remember your non compete agreement?" I answered: - "i don't see the 25K in the final account balance...is it an oversight?" he grind and said: - "i tried... usually it work fine..We have a Smart A*s here" I quit his office saying - "and whe have an a*****e here, be sure i'll talk about what law say to your employees" In add this kind of agreement must (for the law) have a little geographical area limit to be valid, without it this kind of agreement is recognized as void by law.
Load More Replies... #78
Fired the three most likable/productive people in the department to bring in there own people under the guise of down sizing and restructuring. The entire department quit with in a month.
#79
I work part time at a university library while I attend school. I sit at the checkout desk/information desk. My boss, after one of us not saying goodbye to her one night, decided that us college students don't know how to sit at a desk and answer basic library questions. So now she sits down there every other hour and criticizes our every move. When it's the middle of summer and only 7 people are in the library, sh*t like this makes me want to quit my f*cking job. We can't even read a f*cking book at the desk AT THE LIBRARY! It made me realize that she takes this sh*t way too seriously, and that has made me care even less.
#80
A grocery store I worked at for just about 4 weeks or so in 2000 did that. The manager, who primary employed high school seniors like myself, would state "your employer is your number one priority. You work for them, not the other way around. I don't care about whatever teenager/highschool things you have going on. If you can't work the shifts i want you to, I don't want you to work for me." Only job I straight up walked out on after he told me I couldn't get off for my own graduation.
karen snyder 7 years ago
"...Something So Stupid It Instantly Made Workers Quit."
Load More Replies... #81
We were once in the middle of a very stressful period of work, and everyone was feeling it. However, one afternoon, an off-hand comment turned into a conversation that we all got involved with and led to a few laughs. My manager, returning from a meeting, piped up "Oh we've finished tomorrow's work, have we? What's all this about (insert subject matter)". Entire team instantly deflated. Unnecessary. Every employee needs time to blow off a little steam.
Jace 7 years ago
More managers graduating from the school of "how to be a sociopathic a*****e"...
Stannous Flouride 7 years ago
Some of them are clearly getting school credit for on-the-job practice.
Load More Replies... #82
They got rid of their night cleaning crew the week after I started and we had to learn how to clean the whole department on our own before close. I work in a meat department so this meant taking apart and cleaning 2 meat grinders and a band saw that were covered with meat goop. Almost the whole department quit because of this, but I stuck around and got the hang of it. After about 3 months though they hired the cleaning crew back. Now closing is a breeze.
Isabel Care 7 years ago
Worked at a garage, they fired the cleaner and asked me to clean the place for x per week. 45 minutes a day (cleaner took an hour and a half) saw everything done. They refused to pay me what they said, as they wanted to pay per hour now since I was fast. Stopped that day.
#83
I, along with 9 other coworkers, did a Kaizen project where we cut customer complaints from over 100/month to single digits due to streamlining our process. The plant manager sent out a company wide e-mail essentially taking credit for the whole thing. He noted how he put together this team and under his direct supervision he got the project done without even mentioning our names. That pissed all of us off until the Continuous Improvement manager sent a reply thanking all of us in a big f*ck you to the plant manager. I was just happy that the CI manager was a no bullsh*t guy. I left that job a few months after we completed it and still use it on my resume.
Jace 7 years ago
I had an employer lay me off of an exempt design specialist position, offer me a job in the call center working hourly, at a rate that equaled my eliminated position... and then HR asked me to keep doing design work every few weeks (you know, the job they didn't need, because they laid me off from it). I played along for a while. Then I realized I was being abused because treatment of hourly employees was WAY different (for many reasons) and they had basically lied about eliminating my position. I asked them why they eliminated my position but kept needing me to do that work. I got the usual victim-blaming b******t about not being a team player, yadda yadda... The call center manager went to HR and said "What you're doing is unethical. Leave him alone or give him his design specialist job." Things were reliable for a while then. But this call center manager left the company. A few weeks (or a month later, they trumped up some b******t reason to fire me.
#84
My best friend and I worked at a "gourmet" grocery store with a coked up boss and owner. My friend was the donut fryer for their bakery and would often come in at 4 in the morning to find the owner and the bakery manager having sex on top of the bakery table. Both were married to other people.
Final score:
13points
David Martin 7 years ago
“Hello, Local Health Inspector? Yeaaaa... can you just come by tomorrow morning? You are NOT gonna believe this”
Gerry Higgins 7 years ago
Owner got some hot buns on the bakery table, huh? Good for him but I'm not eating there
#85
I told her that my arm gets pain from husking corn and that all the other managers don't make me do it because they know it gives me pain. And she proceeded to tell me that she's a different person. Meaning, she could careless if I was in pain, the corn needed to be done. And I was refusing to do as they said. She kept telling me they don't need me repeatedly. And she clearly knew it was one week from my last day but originally she wanted it to be my last day. So, after being forced by her repeating that If I stay I need to do the corn or I have to leave, I left. But then called HR on her and my store manager because she apparently asked him if she could do so, but actually didn't. Got my full day's pay and never have to go back there again.
#86
I worked at an out-bound call center. The center was paid by the company per head they hired, so they did a massive hiring spree to the point where there weren't enough calls to go around. Those who had good call times and ran out of calls were lectured, saying they needed to slow down to avoid running out of work. Shortly after, they made a rule where we couldn't have ANY personal items in our cubicles. Just the blank cubicle wall. Nothing to distract us from the mind numbing work that we now had to complete at a strategically slow pace. My friend was written up because she put a sticker of a cat on her binder, as it constituted a 'personal' item.
Jace 7 years ago
What's with it is that they don't see these employees as people. They see them as machines that can be made "more efficient" if certain tweaks are made to avoid "undesirable traits" (I.E.: being human).
Load More Replies... #87
I worked in telesales for a little bit (don't do it) and each morning we would have a "pep talk" where the very obnoxious manger would complain about sales because he wanted more money in his pocket that week. One pep talk, 3, weeks before Christmas he ended it by saying " You all need to step up your game, I don't care about firing you, I dont care if your Christmas is ruined, that's on you for not getting enough sales" Safe to say I stopped giving a sh*t after that and I was let go a week before Christmas. Telesales is the devil.
#88
An executive stated in writing that, "Engineers are like paper clips. I'm going to buy them for the cheapest possible price."
Doc Thissen 7 years ago
(in Lumberg voice): Yea... I'm gonna need you to go watch Office Space...
Jace 7 years ago
That executive is going to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to that business.
Jace 7 years ago
Of course, it will probably not hurt HIM, because he will get a bonus for increasing profit (and maybe stock prices) by a few bucks, and will move on to the same position in another company that wants to commit suicide by Wall Street.
Load More Replies... #89
I used to work at a sports clothing store. This store has several branches in the country. I heard that the management asked an employee to go to one of the sports stores during her free time and try to steal an item while the employees on their shift weren’t looking. This girl succeeded to steal a gym towel. The sales girls working that day got into so much sh*t. That is just low. I can’t believe management resorted to that. Everyone was super pissed off after that.
#90
Electrical contractor of 35 (27 of which are out in the field), we earn PTO hours based upon the number of hours worked in a given week. Full time employees earn what is equal to about 6 extra paid days off in a year., which is typically used for errands, sick days, taking care of children and so on. One of the field employees is a known (to all other field techs) alcoholic, word makes it to office personnel that this individual was using his PTO because he had tipped too many back the night before and couldn’t make it to work on time. Owner denied his PTO claim and he drove into the office to have a shouting match with the owner. Very next day a company wide email is sent stating that PTO will be indefinitely suspended because it is being abused. Not even sure if what they did is legal. But instead of dealing with this one employee, they decided to use it as a way to save paying out around 180 earned days off throughout the entire company. This happened about a week ago, morale dropped instantly. Most field techs started showing up late playing around on their phones and leaving early. Couple guys have already jumped ship and sounds like a large number of others are about to follow. I’m going to wait it out a couple months as I’m owed a yeti cooler and vacation time on my anniversary.
Jace 7 years ago
Makes me wonder what legal loophole the drunk guy presented that "forced" them to penalize everyone (to the management's benefit), instead of dealing with the one problem person. Maybe it was a situation where they hated dealing with employees so much that even ONE problem person made them hateful of ALL employees. Businesses act like employees were the worst thing to happen to capitalism and money-making...
#91
Worked in a deli years ago and the manager promised us a no-holds-barred BBQ at his place if he got his bonus for the deli performing well. He got his bonus and, surprise surprise, we got nothing. Apparently the wife wanted the bonus for their kids private school fees. Doug - you suck.
#92
Employers can ban their employees from anything— I got fired from a factory for violating their smoke-free workplace policy, which extended to tobacco use at home. To aid in enforcement, employees were also banned from off-site lunch breaks. This was in Illinois in 2014/15
Carol Emory 7 years ago
I was actually forced to sign a document that said I would not smoke while employed at a cardiac clinic because they wanted to refrain from upsetting patients that were told to quit smoking for health reasons. I was told if I smoked on my own personal time at home, I could be fired as well. Yet this same cardiac clinic had weekly lunch parties in which the food was usually fried chicken, burgers, pizza...did I mention the weekly birthday cakes? And the nurses would load up plates to be paraded trough the clinic in front of the patients. Hey..aren't you telling them to reduce their fat and cholesterol intake too? Hypocrites.
Nikki D 7 years ago
Weekly birthday cakes? With so much food and no smoking, I wonder how many people gained weight working there.
Load More Replies... #93
Used to work as a part time waiter in college, most of the other waiters were also college students Boss decided that it took to much effort to ask us all individually when we were available to do shifts and started scheduling all our shifts randomly without consulting us first Then got super annoyed when 10 people were complaining to him that they couldn't do the shifts he had arranged. He was so stubborn that he wouldn't organise the shifts and eventually just told us that we could either come at the times he had decided or we would be fired A bunch of people quit
Carol Emory 7 years ago
I hate employers that think that no one has a life outside of work..like family, college or personal goals. I think it's probably because they can't relate because all they have is their job and nothing else. It's quite sad really.
#94
Removed COLA raises each year for all employees and implemented a “raise when promoted or take on more responsibility” model. However promotions are very rare and raises are never approved. So everyone is losing money to inflation each year and they tried to sell it As a big ‘win’ for the employees. We aren’t stupid people.
Isabel Care 7 years ago
What's a pay rise? Never had one. Had bosses turn up with a Daimler (with everything) and a Jeep Grand Cherokee after trying to not pay overtime. They were upset when everyone clocked out on time even though there was work waiting to be done. Christmas bonuses are fictional too
#95
Regular wage theft, lies to employees about their expected hours, illegal conduct like forcing us to sign contracts under duress, general crap attitude and rampant gossip. I used to love my job, now I'm debating legal action.
#96
Had a big fight with his wife in front of everybody. I don't think you should run a restaurant with your family members unless you're really solid with each other.
Caroline Murphy 7 years ago
Not really.. Might be a one off. I mean my neighbours have lived next door for over a year we've hardly ever heard them argue. They seemed the perfect couple. Yet on the weekend they had a massive fight where 2 police cars, an ambulance and fire engine were called out.
Load More Replies... #97
Used to work at panera. Usually managers would help in the kitchen/register/ dining room if there was a need. One of the managers would sit outside by the trash cans and smoke his cigs. People were not happy with it. How do you expect you employee to do good work if ur being lazy?
Noemi Rios 7 years ago
I'm currently working at a panera as a food prepper, I have three managers who do the same thing. No orgainzation what so ever. Its so bad that corporate is involved.
#98
She stole tips to par the safe since she sucked at math. Only reason it was noticed because the shift supervisors starting a secret tip notebook behind her back
#99
Making performance reviews monthly, and insanely hard. I’m talking at least half the staff at any given moment are in “developing” They have a spreadsheet you have to fill out. It automatically calculates your score. For each category you have the options of developing, good and very good. You could tick very good for each category in any section but if you get one developing you are marked as developing overall. Working in a warehouse we are marked on safety. While this is important, the way they have gone about it is stupid. We were all encouraged to watch each other’s manual handling and coach each other if we see someone doing something incorrectly. This worked great and we now have a warehouse of people who use great manual handling skills. The issue? They added this coaching to review. You have to get two people a month, one each fortnight. If you don’t, you are in developing. If you get coached you are in developing. But you now have a warehouse full of people being very safe. So it’s hard to genuinely get anyone. So people are lying, doing “swaps” etc to get good. And the people doing the right thing are being put in developing. Some of the questions are downright stupid. For teamwork, you cannot get a very good unless you have gone “above and beyond to repair and mend relationships” you cannot get this if you get along well with everyone. So you HAVE to have had a falling out and “repair” it to do well. Another question marks you on having unplanned leave. You get a developing if you have a genuine sick day, despite calling in sick, despite having a doctors note. Last question marks you down or up 8% for consistency. If you have previously been in developing for 2 months or more, you have to mark no. Even if say you started at 40% and have gone up to 60%. Doesn’t matter. The worst part? They took our pictures and put them up on the wall according to how “well” we are doing. So everyone can see how sh*t you are. Used to be a great place to work. Not so much anymore.
BlackestDawn 7 years ago
Asinine judgement criteria combined with public "shaming", yeah no wonder it's not longer a great place to work at.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
I was told by one Amazon call center employee that, on the survey after the call, I needed to answer at least one question with a 4 instead of a 5 because..if the answers were all 5's giving the employee a perfect score, management assumes the customer was just doing it to get through the survey quickly and not because the employee actually did well. So the management is calling the customers liars. Here's the thing management..if we wanted to get through the survey quickly..we'd just hang up before it started....
#100
My current manager didn't particularly "instantly" kill morale, but he swears. A lot. At the employees, at me, at the customers. So often that I'm too scared to ask him questions, or come to him with an update on the work he assigned, and even some of my co-workers don't even look in his direction anymore. They'll hand me their work and tell me to talk to the manager because they're too scared. Not to mention the workplace is extremely segregated. They pretty much ban any socializing, and you're not allowed to help each other out. No matter how slow it is. I work in an automotive shop. There have been days where there were only 2 people working, me and another co-worker. The shop is clean, I have no work, want to help my co-worker, get yelled at.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
I lived in an apartment complex for 8 years. The manager was not approachable, she was constantly whining and bitching if anyone asked her to do anything beyond regular daily duties, including maintenance. It would take weeks to get problems fixed. I started asking other tenants if they had issues with their apartments. The answers were very similar.."Yeah..we had 'X' problem, but we were afraid to tell the manager..she seems angry a lot." When, during our last yelling match, she says.."You complain more than any other tenant." I responded with "Because I'm not afraid of you. They are afraid because they said you seem angry constantly." She got quiet. After that, she was the perfect manager and let stuff roll. She apologized to me later for not listening. We were good friends after that.
#101
Our contract was up for bid at the end of it's cycle. The company was afraid of losing the contract, and other related contracts, to a lower bid. They underbid their current price by around 30%, at which point said contract was deep in the red. They tried to minimized the loss by doing performance evaluations and cutting individual pay according to the results. Everyone got cut to some extent and I happen to know one employee had about 15k taken off his salary. People steadily took up positions in other companies or just retired. For the last year, we have had the bare minimum amount of people, and are chronically understaffed and overtasked, on top of being paid significantly less than the industry standard.
#102
Huge layoff. Went from 4-10's to 5-8's. Options to stay and take your chances or take a severance package and get more money for longer. After the layoffs we got so overwhelmed with work that we needed so much OT to make up for the loss of bodies. Then new people were hired about 6 months after the layoffs. About a year later and we're on a hiring freeze. With little work to go around for a solid 5 days straight. Some areas are so busy though, we're backlogged over 48hrs on some of the work and they still ask people to go home early. It's awful.
#103
Moved us to a sh*tty office in the boonies and took away free coffee.
Carol Emory 7 years ago
We had a company that was sold to new owners and moved 40 miles away from where all of the employees lived. The owner then hired temps to come in to beef up how good the company was doing so he could have promotional pictures takes to be placed in all the business magazines. The only problem is, he never cleared it with the employees. One of the employees was an actor doing professional commercials. Another was in hiding from an abusive ex that was also worked in business and marketing. When these issues were brought up to management, they at first said that we had no choice but to participate or be fired. When I told them that, by law, they could not force us to participate because it was a private business that required key card access and, if they fired me, I'd sue for wrongful termination. I even presented them with the links to prove I was right. Suddenly they announced that anyone who did not want to be in the picture was on break and should leave the office. LOL
#104
My manager forced us to stay behind because people slacked off, I did a 10 hour night shift at McDonald's and the day shift never cleaned up or restocked before we came in so the first hours of the shift was running around serving people while cleaning up, then after 10 hours we would clean up a 2nd time and re stock, one time the day crew came on early and the night Manager who was going home orded them to clean half the kitchen since we the night shift were understaffed and he said we could all go home early once our side was done as we had a really brutal understaffed night, he told the day Manager this to her face when she came in Infront of us and the day shift, then he left. The day shift looked at the day Manager, then they got coffee and went to the break room, then we got screamed at for being lazy and not doing the side they were ordered to, she hasld been told what was going on, watched the day crew ingore a direct order, then attack us for it not doing there job, we had to stay an extra hour meaning most people missed important busses, oh and when we got done we asked if it was cool if we got some breakfast (we always free breakfast because night shifts are hell), she said no, and that we should think about that before slacking off, we got breakfast anyway and I quit two weeks later. We also made sure to put our food through the tills so the they couldn't attack us for stealing.
#105
The last job I had was great except the boss felt entitled to pour out her bad mood on the four of us. Her favourite strategy was to say that everything is great when you're 1-on-1, but once someone else joins the meeting, suddenly you could find out that 'you never did anything good, you're a waste of money, we're going to fire you tomorrow' (obviously, nothing ever happened). The last such meeting was 45 min of her disparaging everything I ever did and then suddenly she... bursts into tears and says that it's all my fault as she doesn't want to say these things because all she wants is to be a good MOTHER. Literally, the only thought running through my mind was WTF; I mentally checked out from the meeting and I started composing my resignation letter. My current boss (and boss' boss) is a woman but I can't even imagine her doing this thing.
Final score:
5points
#106
Worked at a wing stop last year. There were Bluetooth speakers that employees brought in so we could blast music in the back while we were making orders. Then there was a change in ownership and the new rules forbade music. On top of that, more things changed. All the cool people quit within a couple of months. I dipped out too (for personal reasons).
Stina Kolling 7 years ago
Look, I know different things mean different things to different people, but not being able to have a speaker at your job pales mightily compared to some of the other stories on here.
Jace 7 years ago
Ah yes, the commentator with zero sympathy for workers who want a positive work environment...
Load More Replies... #107
I had a boss who threw a glass across the back room in a reasturant. Oh then another day it was a knife. Because she was a spaz and stressed too easy. ... So I mean ... That wasn't great for the environment
#108
I was a hard worker, like an extremely hard worker. One day a supervisor asked why I wasn’t working at my usual pace, so I told him I was facing homelessness if I couldn’t find somewhere to live. He said "Heyyy well I really need my superstar out here! I depend on you getting a lot done for me." He couldn’t care any less about my problem...I was an employee who made him look good because I got results, and not a human being. I never worked hard again, and personally undermined the work ethic of everyone I came in contact with. I didn’t have to learn that particular lesson a second time.
#109
I worked for a 'natural health' company that was basically a pyramid scheme. I was a well liked phone/bill monkey as I did chat with the most important money spenders for some time [something we were told to do BTW]. However for some reason, the receipts that I needed to get when someone called went missing a lot once in the hands of accounts. Something that really stopped my work and it was a little suspicious as it happened too often. None of my business, instead I did something clever and photo copied every receipt, putting them in my drawer in case they went missing and it worked a treat. I was so proud I even told everyone and they said it was a really good idea. I must have been onto something though as one day I got called into the boss and she said that they found the missing receipts in my drawer!!!!!!!!!!! I was so gobsmacked, I laughed. I told them that they were clearly photo copies [all the same size, some a bit wonky, all black and white etc]. I still got the sack. The only thing I can come up with is that there was dodgy stuff going on in accounts and my 'evidence' was getting in their way.
Final score:
-4points
Little Menace (Submission author) 7 years ago
I love how I got downvoted for being mistreated at work. Ah well.
Mademoiselle Mirage 7 years ago
Dear it's really not your fault it's simply that your post got uploaded twice so people are downvoting it the second time they read it, Hope you found a better place!
Load More Replies...
In light of some of the humorous, yet contentious marketing strategies seen at McDonald's Japan, it seems that finding a balance in management and creative marketing is crucial.
Delve deeper into how unexpected campaign outcomes can humorously lead to viral content, as was the case with some unique cup designs. It's a testament to how corporate decisions can sometimes go awry in unexpected and often amusing ways.
What do you think ?
Katinka Min 7 years ago
God, I am SO GLAD that I live in Europe where most of this sh*t would be totally illegal!!!
Magpie 7 years ago
And in Australia. Thank god for Unions that made it so.
Load More Replies... diane a 7 years ago
Made my Father -inl-Law redundant 3 months before he would have made 50 years working for them and retired - he did get a good pay-out though - but that wasnt the point - he had worked there since age 14
Jean-luc Picard 7 years ago
Didn't Trump do this to one of those people he sacked? Guy only had days or a couple of weeks until retirement?
Load More Replies... Night Owl 7 years ago
So many cruel or bad managements. At least some of the stories got a (relatively) happy endings involving karma.
diane a 7 years ago
think i traumatised a custmen one - when i worked for TASCO - he complained every week that his met was short dated - - to get the refund - I made the call informing him that the driver would be coming with fresher meat to replace the meat that wous spoil - he refused the offer - saying he haad already frozen it = and liked the refund
Load More Replies... 
Anežka Kalužová 7 years ago
Worked at a business hotel. We had a couple conference rooms and there was this company that would rent them out often. Once in a while, they had their company parties in there and it was always messy, but this one time one of the guy puked into the urinal, clogging it into oblivion. The cleaning girl discovered it the morning after, and you can imagine the stench. After she realised the urinal is clogged, she reported it to the GM and asked her to call the technician - he had some sort of stuff for clogged pipes, which would make the job significantly easier. But it was Saturday and the technician was not at the hotel. GM refused to call him and forced the 16 years old to put on gloves and pull the remainders of the incident from the urinal with her hands. Girl couldnt stomach it, ran to the bathroom herself and they had to call the technician anyway. Never seen the girl so upset, needless to say I have never seen the girl at all after that.
Lauren Gisel 7 years ago
My CEO berated the controller and production manager to call one of our sales guys while AT HIS MOTHER'S FUNERAL over the status of a $700 deposit. Of course, he wouldn't do it himself.
Katinka Min 7 years ago
God, I am SO GLAD that I live in Europe where most of this sh*t would be totally illegal!!!
Magpie 7 years ago
And in Australia. Thank god for Unions that made it so.
Load More Replies... diane a 7 years ago
Made my Father -inl-Law redundant 3 months before he would have made 50 years working for them and retired - he did get a good pay-out though - but that wasnt the point - he had worked there since age 14
Jean-luc Picard 7 years ago
Didn't Trump do this to one of those people he sacked? Guy only had days or a couple of weeks until retirement?
Load More Replies... Night Owl 7 years ago
So many cruel or bad managements. At least some of the stories got a (relatively) happy endings involving karma.
diane a 7 years ago
think i traumatised a custmen one - when i worked for TASCO - he complained every week that his met was short dated - - to get the refund - I made the call informing him that the driver would be coming with fresher meat to replace the meat that wous spoil - he refused the offer - saying he haad already frozen it = and liked the refund
Load More Replies... Anežka Kalužová 7 years ago
Worked at a business hotel. We had a couple conference rooms and there was this company that would rent them out often. Once in a while, they had their company parties in there and it was always messy, but this one time one of the guy puked into the urinal, clogging it into oblivion. The cleaning girl discovered it the morning after, and you can imagine the stench. After she realised the urinal is clogged, she reported it to the GM and asked her to call the technician - he had some sort of stuff for clogged pipes, which would make the job significantly easier. But it was Saturday and the technician was not at the hotel. GM refused to call him and forced the 16 years old to put on gloves and pull the remainders of the incident from the urinal with her hands. Girl couldnt stomach it, ran to the bathroom herself and they had to call the technician anyway. Never seen the girl so upset, needless to say I have never seen the girl at all after that.
Lauren Gisel 7 years ago
My CEO berated the controller and production manager to call one of our sales guys while AT HIS MOTHER'S FUNERAL over the status of a $700 deposit. Of course, he wouldn't do it himself.
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