When you're working in a job with limited growth, hard hours, or a difficult clientele, a good boss can turn it all around and make showing up worthwhile. Similarly, even if you're paid generously and offered nice health insurance, a bad boss has the power to make every day feel like a never-ending and incredibly draining nightmare.
Recently, Redditor SethmAR15 wanted to know how far these tyrants are willing to go, so they asked other users: "What's the most unethical thing a boss has ever asked you to do?" Turns out, pretty far. Their post went viral and currently has nearly 2,000 comments, many of which prove that gaining power over someone can really mess with your head.
This post may include affiliate links.
I worked as a temp in a production factory in between permanent jobs.
I was on permanent 12hour night shifts making plastic fuel cans, they also made chemical bottles too for bleach and other things.
I had been on-site for about 2 weeks when I went out for a cigarette break the guys in the unit next door were part of the same company and as I was standing there I saw a guy hit the emergency stop button and open the safety gate to clear a blockage from the machine he was using. He cleared the blockage and the machine that shouldn't move once isolated decided to finish it's cycle which crushed the operator in the chest. I ran in managed to free him from the machine hit the emergency button to let the night manager know there was a problem. The supervisor came in first and panicked and ran for the manager.
When he came in I asked if they had called an ambulance, they looked at me like I was an alien and said we aren't allowed to call an ambulance because that could trigger a HSE visit (OSHA for you American folks).
I told them I'd call one myself and get the HSE involved, the old guy who'd got hurt was in agony and having a lot of pain when breathing. And these as***les didn't want to get him medical treatment.
I called the ambulance myself and as a qualified first responder I gave them the details of what I'd seen and also told the paramedic about them not wanting to call the ambulance because of the HSE (health and safety executive for anyone wondering),
The old guy had 3 broken ribs and a flail which is where a piece of rib is loose inside the chest cavity and potentially fatal.
I gave the old guy my contact information in case he wanted to make a claim against the as***les he worked for and went home.
I got a call the following day from the agency saying that the company didn't want me back on site, she asked me what had happened for them to say that, so I explained that an older guy had been crushed in a machine and they didn't want to call an ambulance for him and I had to treat him because they had nobody qualified on-site.
She asked if she could call me back, she rang me a couple of hours later to tell me that they had pulled all of the agency staff out of there and she had ring the HSE herself, which was totally unexpected for an agency.
The good news is that the old guy came through it ok. The company got a massive fine for the multiple breaches of HSE guidelines and shut down for 4 months while the safety gear was brought up to an acceptable level.
I worked for the largest property management in San Francisco and frequently the Manager would ask us to shred checks that came to us so they could file for eviction on tenants. I quit immediately.
Not me but my dad’s story. 1980’s. My dad worked at a small mid-western bank as an executive. One day a fellow executive comes in with several loan applications and says he needs them all approved. My dad looks over them quickly and immediately realizes none of the applicants qualified. If they approved them the loans would go into default within three months and these people would lose their farms. My dad said it wasn’t possible. The other exec says “well if you just fudge the numbers it is.” My father tells him that’s impossible because other exec never walked into his office and they never had this conversation. The other exec nods and takes the papers back. Six months later the FBI raids the bank. My father was the only exec who didn’t go to prison for fraud.
Told me to revoke the instruction for employees to take weekly covid tests as too many were testing positive.
This was during the Honduran caravan that was coming up to the US. A 19 year old girl from Guatemala fell off the wall and broke her leg. I was pulled off duty (Border Patrol) to take her to the hospital. Since they had to put a cast on, obviously her jeans couldn’t go back on and they put her in one of the hospital gowns, which as you can imagine, doesn’t insulate very well.
Driving back to the station, the supervisor calls me to let me know that her paperwork was done, and since at that time we were sending single adults back to Mexico with no court date, he said to bring her back to the POE (port of entry) and walk her across the bridge. Now, even though you might think it stays warm on the border, around December at midnight it gets f**king cold. Not Montana cold, but still around or just under freezing. So I asked the supervisor if we were going to at least let her stay in the detention facility so she could be returned in the morning when things had warmed up a little. After all, this was a 19 year old girl with a broken leg who had never been to Mexico, had no money, and now no pants.
“Nope. Just drop her at the POE and walk her back.”
Well, f**k.
Stopped by an ATM, pulled out $50, called one of my buddies who was from Mexico and asked him where a cheap motel was near the bridge. Gave her my WhatsApp info and walked her across, put the $50 in her pocket and told her where to go and to call me the next day.
Two days later me and the same buddy went into Mexico and put her on a bus to a different city (in Mexico) closer to where her aunt lived (on the U.S side). Not sure if she made it. She texted me when she got to the city in Mexico, so I have hopes she at least made contact with her aunt, but I don’t know if she made it into the U.S.
So yeah. Was ordered by a supervisor to drop a freezing girl with a broken leg in a foreign country at midnight.
I used to be a behavioral therapist for kids on the autism spectrum disorder & was a shadow aide at school for one of my clients. One day my kiddo’s classmate comes up to me and tells me how he has seen his dad hit his mom multiple times.. I end up calling my supervisor to inform him of what happened (I was 18 and had no idea of how mandated reporting worked). He told me next time to “mind my business” when I asked him the process for calling Child Protective Services … of course I called CPS and had the emergency hotline social worker walk me through the process.
Unethical & illegal.
What a (insert bad words here)! I despise people like her/his boss who "mind their business" when they are aware of abuse happening. I am happy the employee had enough sense to call CPS. I hope the mom and child were safe afterwards and the dad went to jail.
Back in a butcher shop portion of a grocery store I worked at. The supervisor asked me to change the date on some burger that wasn’t selling. The day she asked me to do this was the sell by date. I even asked her if that was safe/legal. She just tapped her name tag that said supervisor on it and said that was the only thing I needed to worry about. I put new tags on all of the packages while she was there but I didn’t put them on the shelves. After she left for the night I found the store manager and showed him. I showed him the old tags, which were just under the new tags so it was easy to pull them back and prove it. He had me toss the burger down the trash chute and my supervisor was gone from the store by the end of the week.
I was fresh out of high school and working at Blockbuster while the DC snipers were out killing people at random locations. For those not familiar, it was a period of I think a few weeks where these two guys were driving around shooting people while they pumped their gas, mowed lawns, went about their general business and so on. Some places were putting up tarps to keep customers safe, but they shot anyone who was convenient, really. It was a terrifying time to live in the area.
I was scheduled to go in the morning a child was shot at the school down the street from my house. My manager, in an absolute panic because we were so close by, refused to open the store.
I got a call from the district manager telling me that I still had to go in, and no, my neighborhood being on lockdown was not an excuse to miss work. As soon as I could leave, I was expected to show up. I assume she was trying to get the manager to come in as well.
I got to the store and my manager still wasn't there, so the DM said she would send me to another store. It didn't really occur to me at that point that she was doing it purely because she could, and that there was absolutely no reason since the store I actually worked at wasn't opening.
But what made it especially s***ty was that she sent me to a nearby store that was on the highway, with these tall, wide glass windows all around the length of the store. Exactly the kind of place that the snipers liked to hit, since they could shoot someone and then drive off down the highway. And the manager at that store proceeded to make me stand on a ladder and clean the windows out front.
In hindsight, I wonder if I wasn't just a sacrificial offering so they wouldn't get shot if that location was targeted.
Keep people at work when there was a chemical leak from the car painting shop next door, and people were getting sick.
The boss wasn't on site (almost never was), I tried calling him and got no answer, and I was the most senior worker on site so I sent everyone home.
When I was almost home (1h+ commute) he called me back. He had gotten my voicemail where I explained the situation and he was not happy. Apparently we should have waited it out or I should have arranged for everyone to work from home (not possible).
The guy was a dickhead but this one still makes me angry when I think about it.
Many, many years ago I was working as a part-time mechanic for a guy selling "restored cars". He called me in for an emergency brake repair on a TR-4. One of the rear wheel cylinders had failed and he needed it fixed ASAP. He had a buyer lined up with cash.
Instead of having me hone and rebuild the cylinder properly (I had the tools and the kit to do so) he wanted me to cut the pipe to the rear brakes and just crimp it over onto itself, enough to stop the leak. He was in a hurry and wanted it fixed before the customer saw anything.
I fixed it properly anyway, so that no one would die, and then rolled my toolbox out of there that very night.
Also at Dollar Tree, most of my cashiers were teenagers or dips**ts that never showed up for work so this older Korean woman kept getting called in to work the register. She was pretty much getting 40+ hours every week and open season for benefits was getting ready to start. My district manager called me and told me I had to convince her to not get any benefits or else. I told him that else better be him doing that s**t himself because I'm not about to do his dirty work.
I really hate it when the higher ups treat an employee dirty like this DM wanted. Then they don't understand why quality employees don't stick around. Assholes!
My old boss at dollar tree would make me drive her to the bank in my car every night. And she would have me park like 10 feet back from the ATM while she walked up to it. She told me that if someone ever tried to run up on her while she was depositing the money I had to run them over. She said if they were too close to her to just hit her as well. She was incredibly adamant that I absolutely HAD to do this and very serious.
Our boss asked the whole staff on Thursday if anyone wanted to “work overtime over the weekend”, hoping to complete an extra 500 orders. And if we completed said 500 orders, everyone would get a $500 bonus. I asked her “what happens if we don’t complete the 500 orders?”, she then said “no one gets paid”. So I said “so, in theory, we could complete 499 orders and we wouldn’t get a dime?” She said “correct”.
I promptly turned their offer down and realized I was working for idiots.
Sleep with a girl (with him) that he had just spiked with drugs.
Was a bouncer at a club & the other guy was head of security. I went straight down to the police, they didn’t seem interested, so I went back, watched him, worked out who the girl was before the drugs had taken effect, and got her friend to take her home before she f**ked out. Watched him the rest of the night to make sure he couldn’t do anything and reported him that next day to his bosses.
When I was 16 I worked at Spencer's in the mall. The store manager was a middle aged female who found out she was being demoted. She made the decision to instead quit. Her last day I happened to be closing the store with her. Nothing wierd, we had done it many times before. After everything was closed and locked up we were punching out in the back room. I went to open the door that led back into the store and she physically put her hand over it and closed it like a scene from a movie. Then she said "you know I make schedules right" I said "yea I understand that". She said "Do you think it's a coincidence that you and I are closing my last day? This is your opportunity to do anything that you want with me me." I was so Uncomfortable and I didn't know what to do, so I gave her a hug and she said really that's it.. All the while her husband and 2 kids were waiting in the car outside the mall to pick her up to pick her up.
I wish you would have reported her. I'm sorry this happened to you.
I was working at a Dollar Tree in Tennessee as a second job for some extra money and I was a key holder, big whoop, as my daughter was soon to be born.
It was the big day, I was at the hospital and the store manager wanted me to come to work and cover her so she could cheat on her husband with her boyfriend.
I obviously refused to leave the hospital, when I returned to work my next scheduled shift I was fired for insubordination.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a doctor's office after school and during the summers. The doctor was a total as***le, but for whatever reasons he liked me and was nice to me and the pay was really good.
Because he was an as***le, there was a lot of turnover in the office. This was 30 years ago now, so it was when you'd put ads in the paper to hire people. So, he would put ads in the paper to hire office staff and he had a separate phone number that he'd list in the ad for people to call.
He told me that only I should answer the line and when I took down the applicant's name and number I should mark candidates that "sounded black" with an asterisk as he "didn't want to hire blacks." Ummm, this was in 1989, not 1949. He'd done a lot of very questionable things during my time there, but this one took the cake. I didn't say a word though. I got tons of calls for the ad the first day it ran and didn't mark an asterisk next to any names at all, just wrote down the names and numbers.
At the end of the day, he asks if we got any calls and I said, "Yes, quite a few. Here's the list." He looks it over and goes "You didn't mark any of these." I just looked at him coyly and said, "Gee, I didn't really know what you meant by 'sounded black', and it's just really hard to tell that over a phone call, so I just took the names and numbers." I could tell he was piissseeeedddddd but didn't say a word.
Ironically, he ended up hiring a black woman for one of the office positions and she ended up working there for several years. Weird.
Branch Manager (Banking) asked me to pose in a picture, showing a lot of cleavage, to use on his construction loan website for his builders. He wanted them to ‘see’ who they would be working with in a daily basis so he could get more business.
I’m a tattoo apprentice and I got fired from my old shop because I didn’t come in to clean other peoples stations and do my duties because I had a horrible flu and couldn’t stop myself from vomiting every 20 min. You’d think a place that makes you get a certificate in blood-borne pathogens would understand but apparently that just gets you fired and told ‘You’re not committed enough’.
A boss I worked with asked me to help another manager in the financial department to do a homework he had to do as part of a master degree. The manager was doing a master in computer science management and took a dev class.
I’m an IT engineer. He wanted to pay me to code the work he had to do: a basic calculator program in Java.
I refused, for ethical reason.
I used to work over night as a department store stocker.
Not at all uncommon for me to have to work 12 to 15 hour days because they refused to hire more than a skeleton crew.
So it was equally not uncommon that I'd hit my 40 hours well before the work week was completed. At least once a month my boss would ask me to clock out at 40 hours and keep working with the promise they would provide paid days off to even the balance once the work load was lighter.
I absolutely refused and was met with the usual "You're not being a team player." nonsense.
"RUN it till it breaks."
Me standing there running a $11.5 million machine that uses liquid gold and computer parts for cars, telling bosses and technicians that it's making horrible rattling sounds.
It broke and cost them $8700 and three days down time, instead of $90 and one day's maintenance.
Seen this a few times, it comes down to having to explain why fixing is better than maintenance. Daily checks and repairs can be skipped, save maybe 30 mins and that is time that the machine is not earning. I worked somewhere once that would let machines work to destruction. Rather than shut them down and maintain them. But that comes out of the new machine budget rather than the maintainance budget. Utter madness.
While working at a fast food restaurant we were preparing for a corporate inspection and my job was to clean the walk-in cooler and freezer. My boss told me to wet mop both. When I mentioned to him that wet mopping the freezer would cause it to turn into an ice rink he told me to put a cap full of antifreeze in the water. I told him this is the freezer where we keep beef, chicken, and french fries and I was not going to do it. He threatened to write me up but I still refused. He did not last long as the manager.
I will not name the fast food restaurant because this happened almost 25 years ago.
I was told to clean the freezer floor Once. I swept it. Then like an idiot I tried to mop it. The mop was stuck to the spot I slapped it down on. Yikes.
No me but my brother was a quality control engineer for a major airline. He discovered that most of the seats were bolted down with bolts that were too small. Seats could potentially break loose if the plane had a hard landing. Boss told him to sign off on it anyway. Because it would cost millions to go back and fix it. My brother told him to sign it and quit on the spot.
I used to work in the bakery department of Sainsbury's as my first job when I turned 16. At first it was just stacking shelves, but eventually they wanted me to work in the bakery itself. They emphasised several times that under no circumstance was into use the bread slicer as I was not old enough.
This lasted about a week until I was on the closing shift in the bakery on my own. The shift manager came in and started shouting at me about why I hadn't sliced all of the bread. I told him exactly what I had been told by my supervisor and another manager. He told me he doesn't care and that I couldn't finish work until it was done. This being my first job I just agreed to do it.
About 3 months later the machine developed a fault and it ended up lightly electrocuting me. I raised the issue and put it into the accident book. When It was investigated I was blamed by the manager as I shouldn't have been using the machine to begin with. When I reminded him that he was the one who told me to use it he denied it and gave me a written warning. Once the machine had been fixed he still expected me to use it. When I refused he sent me home and didn't add me to the rota for another 3 weeks.
First job after I graduated college, boss called me into his office and had me sit next to his daughter while she took an online exam, told me to make sure she passed it.
She definitely wouldn’t have passed if I wasn’t in the room.
I worked as a personal trainer years ago and the owner of the gym i worked in told me to have my clients get results slower so they would buy more training
At Dunkin I was asked to go take product from our store to another one 15 minutes away. This was during my shift. She demanded I clocked out so that if I got in an accident, the company wouldn’t get booked.
I quit not too long after that.
I ran a report at work, it supported an initiative he was opposed to. So he set up a meeting and asked me to run a “what if” scenario that would make it look like his initiative was better—I told him I could however I’d have to let our department VP and the other department VP know it wasn’t a “real” report, just a made up one, so they wouldn’t make decisions based off of the analysis (which they were going to do which is why I was running the report to begin with).
He chewed me out for 30 minutes saying he decided what was real or not. Literally laid into me, called me every name in the book. So I sent two reports, both conflicting each other, and the two VPs held a meeting to ask WTF??? And we get in there and my boss starts it off by saying to me “Why did you send conflicting reports this makes no sense?” Completely threw me under the bus
I would have responded.."Because that's what you told me to do...make a "what if" report of made up stuff. I still had to send the real report."
I had a boss ask to me take a bunch of stock from the warehouse to his personal storage unit, and not to ask any questions …
I hope you told him where to shove it and then reported him to the police!
Note: this post originally had 83 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
From the outside, almost every situation here is a "report them to the authorities" but when it's your job, you've possibly already gotten used to some stuff that's less than ideal morally/legally, and you know that the report or refusal to follow the orders will be connected back to you and you'll loose your job - no one should be blaming the OPs who didn't do what seems like the obvious right thing. When you have to feed your family (and yourself) and keep a roof over your head, your mind works harder to justify the circumstances, entirely subconsciously. 'I told the manager no, I know someone else will do it, but it's something.' 'I didn't report it because I know no one will care anyway.' 'This can't be worse than no job at all.' 'If they're saying it's ok, maybe it's ok?' The pressure can be immense, and not everyone can afford, literally or metaphorically, to take the high ground every time. These are big problems that need to change.
You absolutely understand this. I had a situation at the job that I'm at right now. I fill out my own timesheet, and somehow missed a day that I was here. Instead of letting me know that, he asked the guy who is in charge of the computer system to change the logs to show that I wasn't here. That guy didn't feel comfortable with that, and came and told me. I knew if I confronted the boss, that guy would get in trouble. So I simply went into his office and told him I made a mistake on my timecard, and that I was actually there that day. He then went and told the guy to change it back. Crappy and unethical. But I get paid much more than the going wage in the area, as well as a really nice pension. I'm 61 and want to ride this job out until retirement. So, I kept my mouth shut.
Load More Replies...
"You don't need to tell them about this," when someone's blood test showed an abnormality that can indicate a certain cancer. Yeah, I do. I really do. No, we're not oncology, but they might want to get checked out, duh.
OMG!!! Just was reading a review a woman made about how a medical clinic misdiagnosed her mothers ovarian cancer as gall stones. Due to the delay of care her moms cancer got to Stage 4 rapidly, leaving the medical community no options to help this woman who had been begging and pleading for care only to have her concerns minimized, denied etc
Load More Replies... Didn't the candle factory in Kentucky that was just destroyed by the insane tornadoes, keep their employees from leaving?
Well, of course, the managers are denying that they forced people to stay and hunker down in a bathroom during the tornado after people were killed. But, yes, this situation came to mind when I started reading this thread.
Load More Replies...
From the outside, almost every situation here is a "report them to the authorities" but when it's your job, you've possibly already gotten used to some stuff that's less than ideal morally/legally, and you know that the report or refusal to follow the orders will be connected back to you and you'll loose your job - no one should be blaming the OPs who didn't do what seems like the obvious right thing. When you have to feed your family (and yourself) and keep a roof over your head, your mind works harder to justify the circumstances, entirely subconsciously. 'I told the manager no, I know someone else will do it, but it's something.' 'I didn't report it because I know no one will care anyway.' 'This can't be worse than no job at all.' 'If they're saying it's ok, maybe it's ok?' The pressure can be immense, and not everyone can afford, literally or metaphorically, to take the high ground every time. These are big problems that need to change.
You absolutely understand this. I had a situation at the job that I'm at right now. I fill out my own timesheet, and somehow missed a day that I was here. Instead of letting me know that, he asked the guy who is in charge of the computer system to change the logs to show that I wasn't here. That guy didn't feel comfortable with that, and came and told me. I knew if I confronted the boss, that guy would get in trouble. So I simply went into his office and told him I made a mistake on my timecard, and that I was actually there that day. He then went and told the guy to change it back. Crappy and unethical. But I get paid much more than the going wage in the area, as well as a really nice pension. I'm 61 and want to ride this job out until retirement. So, I kept my mouth shut.
Load More Replies... "You don't need to tell them about this," when someone's blood test showed an abnormality that can indicate a certain cancer. Yeah, I do. I really do. No, we're not oncology, but they might want to get checked out, duh.
OMG!!! Just was reading a review a woman made about how a medical clinic misdiagnosed her mothers ovarian cancer as gall stones. Due to the delay of care her moms cancer got to Stage 4 rapidly, leaving the medical community no options to help this woman who had been begging and pleading for care only to have her concerns minimized, denied etc
Load More Replies... Didn't the candle factory in Kentucky that was just destroyed by the insane tornadoes, keep their employees from leaving?
Well, of course, the managers are denying that they forced people to stay and hunker down in a bathroom during the tornado after people were killed. But, yes, this situation came to mind when I started reading this thread.
Load More Replies...