19 Workers Share The Shadiest Tactics HR Has Ever Used At Their Jobs

As sad as it may be, sometimes HR engages in some very unsavory behavior to help a corrupt company succeed at the expense of the employee. From questionable firing tactics to major legal violations and everything in between, read on to check out these worker's disturbing stories of the shady tactics HR used at their jobs.

It’s Legendary.

“OOOOHHHH!!!! This one is legend! It didn’t happen at my employer, but one nearby. Here’s the basics: Control Data Corporation was on the rocks in the early ’80s. They started laying folks off. But they didn’t do it publicly. Instead they ‘disappeared’ them. Here’s how it worked:

1) An employee was instructed to keep quiet about the fact that he’d been transferred to the Roseville, Mn. Plant across town.

2) He (it was mostly a he in those days) was to pack up his gear & personal stuff late Friday afternoon & the box(es) would be picked up & transferred over the weekend to his new job site.

3) He was then given an address at the new plant where he was to report first thing Monday morning.

4) Monday he showed up, was escorted into a room with a table, a chair, a guard, and an HR person.

5) The HR person gave him his walking papers & allowed him to sort out & collect his private stuff from the box(es). He was then escorted out the door to the parking lot” (Source).

When Power Gets To Your Head.

“Here’s one with a happy karmic ending. Power mad HR lady loves screwing people over using vague job requirements. She cost me thousands of dollars over 5 years by denying my supervisor’s requests for me to be promoted.

Finally she was given a project, update the requirements and duties for all positions. She ups the requirements and duties for most positions while the pay stays the same. She makes her own position look insanely important. Management approves the revisions, points out that she no longer qualifies for her own job and tells her she will be demoted. She quits in disgrace. She was replaced by a woman that actually cares” (Source).

Health [Don’t] Care.

“My dad was consistently the highest performing employee in his department. A department with several dozen employees. He regularly received excellent reviews from customers and co-workers alike. The he developed cancer, and was very, very ill. The company health insurance was vital for his very survival. Within a few weeks he was laid off. HR claimed it of course had nothing to do with his condition, that lay offs had been in the works already and he was already slated to be included, etc.

He absolutely could’ve sued, but HR informed him the company, a multinational conglomerate with a name everyone would recognize, would always have better lawyers than he could afford and it would be a waste of their time and his. I still would’ve sued the pants off of them if it had been up to me. Over $150,000 of debt that he’s still trying to pay off 15 years later rather than sensibly declaring bankruptcy. But the good part of that is that he’s still alive and doing well” (Source).

Your Tax Dollars At Work.

“I was the CFO of a company and I oversaw HR. I ended up in a meeting with some consultant who promised we could cut costs. His program was simple. Most of our employees were paid $12 hourly. The consultant suggested we fire everyone at the $12 level and then offer to rehire them at minimum wage or $7.25 per hour. I pointed out that these people couldn’t accept such a cut in pay due to potential hardship. No problem as the consultancy had a team that would help our employees get food stamps, housing subsidies and other government assistance. The CEO was sold and loved the idea. It took me a week to talk the CEO out of it by pointing out that the team we had was excellent and dedicated. They made our company work and screwing them over would be nothing but bad. Sadly, many companies use this program to get US taxpayers to subsidize their payroll” (Source).

Who HR Is Really Working For.

“I learned once, in a previous job, that the existence of HR is designed to support not the needs of the employees, but the needs of the management. A corollary: if a manager makes a stupid decision, that decision must be defended, even if it’s wrong.

Case in point: I’m colorblind. My boss assigned me a work task once that was color coded in a way that I couldn’t see. When I identified my condition and asked for accommodation, I was accused of lying to get out of work, and I was written up accordingly.

My next step was to file a complaint with HR. It didn’t help. The HR person offered me what she thought was a generous solution: I could use the company’s tuition reimbursement program to go take a remedial art class: ‘So that you can finally learn your colors,’ she said. Only then could I have the write-up removed.

This was one of about two or three equally ridiculous events that happened within short order. I left just as soon as I could find a replacement job” (Source).

Don’t Go To Yoga!

“At my last job, the company offered on-site yoga classes 2x per week. I never went as I dislike yoga, but I think the classes were offered around lunchtime and / or after 5pm.

The HR director told me that they were instructed to keep a list of the names of the people that attended the yoga classes regularly and that if layoffs were required in the future, the regular yoga-attenders would be first on the list to be cut. Because if they had time to go to yoga, they didn’t have enough work to do and thus were dispensable” (Source).

The Amazon Warehouse…

“Amazon HR doesn’t let people quit, at least the warehouse I worked at didn’t. You can try, but in the systems it will say that you were fired due to ‘Job Abandonment’ by keeping you in the system for a month and having it show that you haven’t been showing up. After you quit, or ‘abandon’ your job, they blacklist you. You can’t even get a job at a fast food place or anywhere that does a background check unless you’re lucky enough to have the hiring manager understand how Amazon works” (Source).

Don’t Read, Just Sign.

“It was late and I was already packing my stuff to leave the office and HR came to me and asked to me sign some papers. It was about 3–4 pages. I tried to read but she was like ‘That’s not important, sign it because I’m in hurry.’ I got suspicious and said I wouldn’t sign a paper without reading it completely. Then I find out it’s an additional NDA that asked me very ridiculous things like:

1) Whenever I leave the company to join another one, I need get a written permission from them.

2) I and my extended family including uncles and cousins shouldn’t work or use a service of a competitor. Which company is a competitor? They decide.

3) I should give them a $25,000 check for keeping until one year after I left the company.

I already had plans to move out of the country in 6 months and as I was working part time, my salary in the following months was less than the $25,000 that they demanded. She got upset that her tactic of asking someone to sign it when they’re leaving and probably won’t have time to read it failed in my case. They finally accepted that I continue to work without signing the required papers as they knew finding another iOS developer would be hard” (Source).

Fat Shaming.

“While working in the recruiting department of a trucking company, I was called into the head of HR and told my arms were too ‘large’ to wear short sleeves. The HR woman proceeded to tell me ‘people are complaining about the fat they could see on my arms.’ I wanted to die. I left work that day in tears. My husband was livid, but I didn’t want to rock the boat. So I was so careful to cover my arms and legs, due to ‘fat’ showing- I about passed out on hot days. But I kept my mouth shut, I had career goals. I was going to prove myself. Yet I quickly realized, unless I was a size 2 and sleeping around, I was going nowhere in this company.

One of the long time recruiters one day showed me a secret hiring criteria they follow. We received the applications of 100’s of truck drivers and if they are ‘fat pigs’ according to the weight on their driver’s licenses, we just toss those applications right into the garbage (mostly people over 200lbs no matter their height). I was in shock, one, because these people weighed less than me, and two, these were highly qualified drivers. I was sick. I couldn’t go to the Head of HR, because I realized they had chosen this system together. The boss of the department was an old drunk, who used to love to get the new employees to cry, so couldn’t go there either.

The company ended up getting sued by a ‘FAT’ driver for horrible discrimination. The head of HR was fired, oh I mean ‘retired’ after that. I remember the people in the office joking that the driver wasn’t fat when we hired him and he should have quit stuffing his face. I should have quit then, but I was pregnant with our second and needed the insurance. I quit after I left on maternity leave. The head of the company, a large greasy fat man, cheated on his wife and lost everything! I guess what comes around goes around” (Source).

Screwing Over The Employee Any Way They Can.

“1) Make a policy that hourly workers only get holiday pay if they also work the day before and the day after the holiday (perfectly legal, at least in Florida). Punish managers who write their schedule so people who work holidays get holiday pay.

2) Force anyone who files a workers comp claim to quit within 6 months of their return to work. Huge company I worked for, that had many legitimate workers comp claims, did this (probably still doing it).

3) Not sure if this is HR, but it sure is shady. Open a credit card for the employee using their social security number (so it’s the employee’s card, not the company’s). Require paper copies of all receipts to be mailed in to accounting. Claim they never received the paper copies, and refuse to pay any of the expenses on that report, until the employee pays the bill to keep their credit rating intact. Even registered mail or FedEx doesn’t help because they just claim one of the receipts wasn’t received” (Source).

The Navy Pension Sabotage.

“Even the Navy has an HR department. They are periodically tasked with saving hundreds of millions of dollars by forcing out people before retirement so they do not have to pay their pension for life. One well known case involved a former Marine SGT that fought in Vietnam and climbed to be a helo squadron XO as a Major. He had been in for 19 years and 9 months and was known to have been one of the best officers that they squadron had ever had.

HR offered him a one-time cash payment to get out or they would reduce him to SGT and then kick him out – both choices without a retirement pension. The problem was that he was only a few weeks away from a magic date for time-on-active-duty after which, the Navy had to allow him to retire and get a pension.

Every person leaving the service is given a physical to confirm that they do or do not have any military related disability. During his exit physical, the Master Chief Corpsman at the hospital found out about what the HR department was trying to do. It was soon ‘discovered’ that the Marine Major had to be placed in observation to confirm his mental status in case he had PTSD. The Master Chief kept signing extensions and sent letters to HR to extend his observations and delaying his discharge until he had been on active duty long enough to qualify for retirement and get a guaranteed pension for the rest of his life. Then he was suddenly confirmed as NOT having PTSD and was allowed to be further processed out of the service.

All the services do this kind of shady and unethical treatment to guys approaching retirement when Congress mandates a huge cut in DoD funding. It is unfortunate that the services will opt to fire and discharge people rather than buy one less F-35″ (Source).

When Trying To Help Takes A Turn For The Worst.

“I was a manager at a major ad agency. One of my best team members was having problems with alcohol addiction. I was worried about him – in part, selfishly, because he was a great contributor. Thinking I could leverage the size of our organization and good health insurance plans, I went to my boss looking for rehab options. I was completely unprepared for what happened next.

He quickly shut the door, making sure that no one had overheard me. He put me on the line with HR for detailed instructions on how to fire this employee. Files had to be pulled. Excuses had to be made. Loopholes had to be found in his last evaluations. I was sick. In my attempt to help this guy, I got him fired, lost a valuable employee, and realized that this company would chew me up and spit me out as fast as him if I screwed up.

I wish I could say I told them off, that I couldn’t work for a greedy and shameless corporate pimp that disposed of unwanted workers in that way. But I needed my job too badly to do that. Unbelievably, he later shot his wife and then himself. Maybe it was not related to alcohol, but probably it was. Which, by extension, means that the already horrific HR policy of my former employer is now responsible for a murder-suicide” (Source).

The UK Way Vs. The US Way.

“Here in the UK there is stringent employment legislation. It seems that US employers are not regulated in such a manner and employees are not afforded the same basic rights, such as reasonable paid annual, compassionate, sickness, adoption, dependency, maternity and paternity leave. If you miss a day’s work because a metre of snow fell overnight and blocked your route, boo-hoo – your problem, no pay. People can be and are sacked for reasons that should be illegal, e.g. because they are gay or pregnant. There is no culture of trade unionism so there is no-one to fight for basic employee rights, and accordingly people are treated like insentient cogs in a machine.

To put this into perspective, I have 30 days’ paid annual leave per year plus 11 days’ paid public holidays. Which rises to 12 if a royal decides to get married, die, etc. If I am sick I am given full pay for (up to) six months, and then half-pay for another six. I am also eligible for 28 weeks’ statutory sick pay. If I need to take ’emergency’ or ‘dependent’ leave – e.g. if I’m bereaved, if my child is unwell, if my boiler explodes – I am entitled to five days’ paid leave per annum, though each case is considered on its merits. American conservatives think these basic employee rights reward laziness, waste taxes, etc. That is why we cannot and do not want to understand American conservatives” (Source).

Someone Should Definitely Report This…

“I worked for a medical courier service that is violating every OSHA, DOT, HIPAA, hazmat and other law I can think of. But that is not what they do that is shady. What is, is this: Trainees are trained once by another driver – never by an official trainer and never by a company exec and there are also ZERO written training materials. Why? BECAUSE newly hired drivers cannot tell each other how many laws are being broken. Training consists of routes, how to fill out a waybill, and that’s all.

There is no hazmat training. So no instructions on how such specimens are meant to be shipped – i.e. NOT in ziplock bags in cardboard boxes with no refrigerants. I’ve seen a specimen driven five hours in a brown lunch bag in the passenger seat of a private car. I had NO idea that the bare minimum of packaging involved five containers nested inside each other on dry ice with a maximum delivery time of an hour until I looked this up myself.

There are no spill kits, no biohazard placards, no OSHA training at all. No HIPAA training either.

We used our own cars – which also do not come with any ID stickers, placards, or magnets with company info, and we were not licensed, bonded, or insured by the company as it is itself is not licensed, bonded or insured. We are not supplied any lighting beacons or company IDs. We paid our own gas. We drove 14–16 hours nonstop with no sleep or rest stops allowed during a delivery cycle. Drivers regularly eat, drink and smoke in the cars – another blatant HIPAA violation. Sometimes food and blood deliveries (company does both) traveled in the same car.

Packages almost never contained invoices. There are no biohazard stickers, address stickers or labels, period, on the boxes, usually just a scrawled hospital initial in sharpie. And we were usually only asked to get a nurse’s signature for receipt, not the full name/date/chain of delivery my research says is bare minimum for a TV much less human blood, drugs, organs, or stem cells.

Drivers have no protective gloves, masks, or anything. Drivers also regularly cross state lines with dangerous materials. Drivers are also regularly encouraged to speed.

So yes, your next organ may arrive in an unrefrigerated lunch sack covered in Cheetos dust delivered by an untrained man or woman in a soccer mom van. And you can’t blame the driver it’s HR’s POLICY that no driver be informed of any of these violations so that if they are ever pulled over or made to answer to an authority figure they can truthfully say they did not know, and the company can claim plausible deniability. Being a medical student on top of a courier really made me question all this so I looked it up myself…and promptly quit working for this company” (Source).

HR Isn’t Always There To Help You.

“I witnessed a situation where an employee wanted to leave but keep their reason private – wanted to leave and not stir the pot. During the exit interview process, the HR Generalist basically coaxed the employee to ‘spill the beans.’ The employee thought they were in a ‘safe’ spot and began to reveal all the unethical and unprofessional things that happened to include now the reason they were out the door. A few years had passed and it was discovered that said HR Generalist had noted the unfavorable points and used it when other companies had called for references to not give a favorable validation of their employment. Mind you, the now former employee was a good worker but because of comments made, it was held against them.

It backfired – former employee found out and sued – they had to settle out of court.

Lesson: If you are going to leave a company with ‘grace,’ keep your mouth shut” (Source).

“You’ll Be Hearing From My Lawyer.”

“This was at my last job, but it illustrates why I decided to end my relationship with them. The company was becoming quite the s–t show. It was a Union company and being that I was manager meant that I would regularly get my a– chewed on by the Union Stewards and The Union VP when something beyond my control pissed in the Union associates’ coffee, so to speak. Then when the Union was finished having their fun at my expense, HR would call to yell at me some more. It was a constant back and forth, mostly stuff I couldn’t control anyway.

I watched my fellow Managers get put on the Hit List. Once you cross the wrong people, usually inadvertently, your days are pretty much numbered. I got to the point where one day I said, ‘I’m not playing anymore and I’m taking my toys home with me.’ I found a better job and gave my two weeks notice.

I was at my new job when I received my last paycheck and I expected to receive payment for the 4 weeks of vacation I had saved up when I left, only I didn’t. Furious I called the old HR number and inquired calmly why I didn’t receive the 4 weeks vacation reimbursement. They told me that I didn’t serve out my two weeks notice. I said I did and they said, ‘No, it says here that you left early one night.’

Then I remembered one night during the two weeks my wife called me to say that the house had no heat. It was an hour before I was to clock out, but it was a 0°F out and we had two small children. I followed proper procedure and got clearance to go home early from higher management. I said, ‘you will be hearing from my lawyer.’ I received the check very soon after they received the letter our lawyer drafted admonishing them for their petty behavior” (Source).

Read The Rules.

‘”You have to take leave.’ My boss sat down at the corner of my desk and looked me in the eye when he said this. ‘HR has demanded it. All your staff have to do it too.’

‘No, I don’t have to take leave. I only have 20 days. I’m entitled to have 30 before you can force me to take leave and I need additional time off next year, and the company agreed to it,’ I responded. I had negotiated leave earlier that year with HR already. ‘Dave, you’re sticking your neck out here, don’t make me take this to HR.’ Seeing no other way out, I escalated it, ‘Do it. Call them now. Let’s resolve this.’

‘It’s not going to go well Dave, just take the leave. They will otherwise force you to take leave and you’ll have a black mark against your name.’

I stood my ground. HR listened, said ‘Uhuh’ once, then added, ‘Dave’s correct. He doesn’t need to take leave. The company absolutely supports his position. We only encourage staff to keep a low leave balance. Is there anything else?’

‘Uhhh, no,’ my boss said. We got off the phone and he was incredibly apologetic. ‘Dave, I don’t understand it. HR told us to force you to take leave. They really did. It wasn’t at all like it sounded there.’ I then explained to him that if HR could successfully get the managers to bully us, they weren’t responsible for the outcomes. If it ever went to court, the manager would be found to be the one committing the offence, would be fired and HR and the company were never be at fault. HR had worked out how to convince the managers to do all the dirty stuff: breaking laws and forcing unpaid work, leave that didn’t have to be taken, loss of entitlements, common law contracts that were pushed onto people who had no obligation to sign them. It was pretty dirty in all, since if anything went wrong, the managers would have acted outside of written company policy. Where was the company policy? Locked up in HR, available only on request. Of all the managers, I was the only one in the company who had ever read it and I looked after my staff in accordance with the real policy—the one they would defend themselves with if ever sued by an employee” (Source).

Laying On The Pressure.

“This was an internal HR policy that was used on employees that had been suspended for whatever reason: First, they were suspended without pay. This was not a common procedure in this corporation, just at this particular unit, under this particular head of HR. Suspension without pay, of course, puts an immense amount of financial pressure on the employee —- they’re no longer making any money!

Next, the employee is told that they may come back to work tomorrow, if they sign ‘the agreement.’ Unfortunately, the agreement states that the employee agrees to give up all of their union protection, and that they may be fired without cause or review! Now this type of agreement is probably not even legal, since the employee is definitely under (financial) duress, but the entire process is kept confidential, so no one really knows about it except the employee and HR.

So you can imagine that if an employee was unfortunate enough to actually sign the agreement, the head of HR probably just smiled at them, and said ‘You’re fired!’ Case closed. An employee in HR informed me that a number of cases ended in just that way” (Source).

The Review Process.

“I worked for a very large technology company, Fortune 100, household name. We had yearly performance reviews where you were ranked 1–5, with 1 being the best. The rule was nobody gets a 1 (Well, maybe ~3%, very tough, any 1 had to be justified way up the line…). The number of 2’s was dictated by a standard deviation curve. Most people got 3’s, and 4’s were also dictated by standard deviation. If anyone got a 5, managers were expected to move them out. This was the HR policy.

I was an outstanding performer. I have a desk littered with award trophies, including 2 of the most highly sought after executive-level awards. When it came to my performance review my boss literally told me, ‘you’re getting a 3; HR decided that all of the 2’s should go to lower job grade employees to ‘motivate them’.’ Wonderful. He said that my performance was easily a 2 and he would have fought for me to get a 1.

I said thank you, I understand that is the company policy. I interviewed the following Friday and accepted a job outside the company. At this point, more than a dozen VPs and high level executives called me to plead with me to stay. They expressed how much they needed my skills and how I was a critical part of the company. I said thank you, but the time to acknowledge my value to the company was with my performance review and this is the exact disconnect that caused me to leave” (Source).