That Raise Would Have Meant Everything To Him
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“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 and realized they could pay one of the new guys half the salary of the experienced guy, so they fired the senior guy and promoted the junior dude. They weren’t aware of the warehouse dynamic and soon found out that no one liked him or wanted to work for or with a junior guy. Morale dropped a lot.
A week later, the senior guy committed suicide. Once the warehouse was informed and invited to the funeral, morale REALLY dropped and eventually, the junior guy became so ineffective trying to run the shop that he was fired. The next senior guy just kind of took over without management doing anything about it and everything began to run as it had before the senior guy was fired.”
The “One-Two Punch” Cleared Out The Best Workers
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“It was a one-two punch.
A 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.
This was a mid-sized manufacturing firm in the US around 2010. I moved on to what was the most lucrative job I have ever had as a result of this, so I don’t hold any resentment, I just remember it utterly destroyed employee morale that day. If it was the ownership/management’s plan to get people to quit, it was pretty stupid as only the mobile and capable talent moved on, while those incapable of finding another job or the lifers (who would probably stay on even if the company announced they planned to cut the oxygen supply to the building by 50% to save money) stayed on through it. I can understand the need for promotion to fill positions from vacancies, etc, I can understand the need to have a pay freeze (beats, layoffs right?), but doing the prior two right after each other and then saying, ‘Oh yeah, and no more Casual Fridays,’ just seemed really vindictive and malicious. If anything, they should have softened the blow of the pay freeze by saying Casual Friday is now every day and people would have left the meeting at least neutral if not slightly hopeful.”
Getting His Revenge One Bathroom Break At A Time
“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 wasn’t doing my job properly (this coworker’s known for micromanaging people she has no control over).
Instead of talking to me about it, my boss just says, ‘Oh I meant CONSTANTLY. CONSTANTLY walking, four to eight 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 obligated 15-minute break, I’m supposed to be hiking all day long and ‘asserting my presence’ to the dozen or so patrons we have.
I’m turning in my 2-week notice this week and in the meantime, I’ll just take VERY long bathroom breaks.”
It’s Almost Like They WANTED Everyone To Quit
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“We got a new warehouse manager. For a while, it was every day that there’d be some new change that killed morale. People dread coming to work now, because who knows what it will be today. I have a long list of grievances.
He thinks we’re Amazon. He came from Amazon and wants to make us Amazon. Amazon is the worst place in the world to work. He doesn’t seem to understand that we make things, not just ship things.
He makes us track all the things manually because eff you. He wants to know how many units we’re producing, by the hour, whether it counts as direct or indirect labor. He wants managers to plan for the day, a task which given the nature of our business may as well be planning on the weather. That means that I had to report my numbers twice: once at the end of the day from my actual machine logs and once so my manager could make her plan. There’s a ton of micromanaging in the middle about which orders I have or have not fulfilled. We could have proper warehouse tracking and automation software, but no. Instead of synced excel spreadsheets, he’d rather have people handwriting everything on paper.
He implemented more middle management. We had too much already, but now we have a ton of new, useless people trying to justify their jobs by making us do busy work for them. There are now training videos that don’t apply to us, emailing people to do the jobs we were already doing, and endless meetings. You can never find our actual middle-management (the people you need to get tasks done) because they’re always in meetings or taking the day off because no one wants to work here anymore.
When it came to tracking labor and productivity, we had to juggle staff around for no particular reason to make the numbers work on paper. They permanently took away two of my staff — the two I was training to be able to do my job. Somehow, they’re still expected to fill my extremely technical position when I’m not there, without me being able to teach them anything. The rest of the time, they’re floating around other departments, doing a task just long enough for someone to train them on it before floating somewhere else.
They moved my department across the warehouse. My physical location can’t move; it would cost a whole lot to move my machines, but now everyone I work with is on the other end of the warehouse for no particular reason.
There have been lots of changes to attendance policies. One of them lasted exactly a day: you get 24 paid personal hours per year on top of regular PTO, and if you’re late, you have to use them in one-hour blocks. So if you’re six minutes late, you might as well go get a coffee or something. When you run out of personal time, you’re fired. Half the staff was still working for a temp agency and didn’t get paid personal time at all, meaning they’d be fired if they were late once. Thankfully, everyone raised this issue to their managers and we got it retracted the next day.
There’s now a general attitude of ‘blame the employees.’ For instance, one of those middle management positions we have is a safety and facility inspector, but he’s not ever here, so instead we have a committee of know-nothing people with other actual jobs who go around and write up reports and complain at you to fix things that aren’t really your responsibility to fix. I’ve started kicking things back to the middle-management maintenance person whenever they complain.
For all of the problems, there’s no one to fix them. Like the above, we’ll get directives about things not in our power to fix. For instance, ‘all cartwheels must lock.’ Not a single cart in the building has locking wheels. Are you replacing them? Or are you just going to yell at me that my cartwheels don’t lock? Do you expect me to go out to Home Depot and buy locking wheels and/or carts with locking wheels? Have you allocated a budget for this? Are you giving me the company card? No.
We already had morning meetings, but they instituted a ‘chant’ requirement for them. The new rumor is that we’re going to be required to say the pledge of allegiance pretty soon.
There’s been a snowballing effect of old-timers quitting or being fired. All of the old leadership is disappearing and people are being asked to work jobs above their pay grade, but without the pay upgrade. Nobody in charge knows anything anymore, which leads to more people quitting.
Rumor has it, my warehouse is closing in less than a year. There’s a bunch of petty stuff I didn’t even mention. I think they’re trying to drive as many people out as they can, so they don’t have to pay unemployment. Suffice to say, I’ve been applying for jobs and going on interviews. One of the last ones I went on, they said they already had a half dozen applicants from my warehouse, and thought we were going under.”
“I’ve Never Seen People So Broken”
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“I worked at an auto parts plant. In order to hit our end of year projections for the last quarter, we could only use one pair of gloves per week. Now, I worked on a line with a brazing furnace and one of the stations was the poor sob who had to take the parts off the line as they came out. Some of the larger, denser, parts were so freaking hot. The gloves really helped to make an already miserable task a little less miserable. You’d go through a pair of gloves a day. By the time mid-week rolled around, the gloves were practically useless.
Another one was a change in how we did our quality control. I ran a station on the line that tested parts to make sure they didn’t leak (we made condensers for cars). Any part that leaked, I’d mark with a grease pencil and set it aside to go to repairs. Well, a certain model part came up and it just has an absolutely abysmal failure rate, we’re talking 90%+. We’d probably make more money selling the scrap than we would the actual part.
Our management couldn’t figure out how to fix the problem parts so they just told me not to bother marking them and to just send them directly to repair. The repair area was freaking inundated with these parts. About a week later, when whatever the issue seemed to have resolved itself, the line leader said we should still send that model part directly to repair ‘just to be safe.’ Those poor guys in the repair area were always working 7×10 repairing parts that don’t need to be repaired while the rest of us get our precious Sundays off.
I’ve never seen people just so broken.”
The Job Made Him “Genuinely Sick”
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“Back in April, I was working at Amazon as a Warehouse Associate. They paid me about $14.90 to start because I was on night shifts, which were from 6 pm-4:30 am. I may not look it, but I am pretty fit physically. I had no problem moving around as much as I did and when I wasn’t suffering from bad luck, I could get a lot of stuff done quickly. It was easily one of the easiest jobs I think I’ve ever done.
However, because of regulations, laws, etc., as well as just an unfortunate layout, we were pretty much isolated and in some cases, LITERALLY no one was in sight for a good while.
I would walk in and be on a station at 6 and speak to no one, hear nothing but the machines, and do incredibly repetitive motions the entire time until it was 9:30, when we got our first 30 minute break and then again for a half hour at 1, which was our unpaid break.
I literally had to quit the easiest job I’ve ever had because I was LITERALLY becoming mentally sick. With the shifts going until 4:30 am, I’d be up late, usually until like 6 or 7 AM at least. When I’d think about my next shift when I woke up, I literally began to hyperventilate. When I was at work, the only things I could think about was how I could sprain an ankle, break a leg, force myself to throw up, or whatever just to get me out of there.
As easy as a job could be, if it’s boring 24/7 every shift, it can REALLY get to people. It was enough to make me genuinely sick whenever I would think of my next shift coming up.”
Everyone’s Just Waiting To Jump Ship
“I’m an electrical contractor of 35 years (27 of which were 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 has a drinking problem, which is known to all other field techs. Word made 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. The owner denied his PTO claim and he drove into the office to have a shouting match with the owner.
The very next day, a company-wide email was sent stating that PTO will be indefinitely suspended because it was being abused. I’m 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 and morale dropped instantly. Most field techs started showing up late, playing around on their phones, and leaving early. A couple guys have already jumped ship and it 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.”
It Was Too Hard To Follow All Those New Rules
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“I worked at an old folks’ home in the kitchen. There were 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 than 9 or 10-hour shifts were forbidden from taking 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 only 15 minutes long.
- Any communication with management was seen as inappropriate. Staff and management were to be kept separate at all times. A manager messed around with a staff member and it made a big deal. That’s why this was made.
- You will not be paid overtime but will still be expected to work. If you were to clock out by 8 pm but are still needed, you must clock out then return to work. Complaints to HR or the labor board are fireable offenses. Yes, people complained. Yes, the place was investigated.
My ex-boss was sued by employees, but they 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. My ex-boss announced a sudden retirement at the end of the year and the kitchen will be taken over by all new people.
I jumped ship early on. I do NOT miss that place.”
All They Wanted Was To Watch The World Cup
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“I was working 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 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 outperformed quota (they were based on orders and the line could outpace the orders if needed). So normally the line reached the weekly quota by sometime late Thursday or early Friday.
We 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 came and the line was on pace to finish quota that afternoon (so we had Friday to work extra/cut off early). The whole factory staff showed up to watch the game, eat food, and relax for a bit. Morale was high as a bunch of East Tennessee folk were hooting and hollering over a soccer match, of all things.
Out of nowhere, the plant manager strolled by and said, ‘I thought we were here to work.’ The room was emptied in about 10 seconds. We were all so angry and hid in the warehouse, watching the second half on one of our phones.
That guy can eat a can of beans and choke.”
“A Lot Of People Were Angry, But I Didn’t Stick Around For The Fall Out”
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“I used to work as a helicopter mechanic for a company primarily in the oil patch. We’d do 28 days on, 14 days off rotation in the middle of nowhere, getting up before dawn to prep the helicopter to be flying as soon as the sun came up, fly as needed all day until sundown, and then tie down the machine. Typically the day was pretty easy in between, maybe three or four hours of flying so you’d refuel a couple times and take care of incidental stuff like making sure you had enough fuel or maybe going back to camp to grab hot lunches for yourself and the pilot. Overtime was paid out as straight time and the extra 0.5 was banked as paid vacation. It wasn’t unusual to work double a standard week for the duration and it was the only thing that really made the travel and long shift rotation worthwhile.
Anyway, after I’d been with the company a few months, they announced that they weren’t paying overtime anymore except for rare special instances like staying up all night to do a 100-hour inspection. We were expected to basically work a split shift early morning and late evening, and spend the days just sitting in camp doing nothing.
I guess a lot of people were pretty angry, but I didn’t stick around for the fallout. I gave my two-week notice, which coincided with my two weeks of earned vacation, and said goodbye.”
Trying To Cut Costs Isn’t Cutting It
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“My mum is the cafeteria/kitchen manager at a school. For the past decade, the administration has been trying to find a way to fire the entire kitchen staff and hire new people for minimum wage. They currently make great money and the benefits are better than my dad’s, who works at a Dow 30 company. She’s union, for the record.
Yet, they haven’t been able to let anyone go without there being a serious lapse in responsibilities. They had to let one person go because suddenly all of the dairy in the fridge is expired because the new, $8 an hour person has zero training and doesn’t know when things need to be pitched and re-ordered. Surprise! Sorry kids, no milk or cheese for the next two weeks! Bring on the parental complaints.
Their most recent strategy was to hire the sister-in-law of a high-ranking administrator who is a ‘nutritionist.’ I researched her; her only ‘qualifications’ are a decades-old two-year degree in hospitality management, and an ‘approval’ from an unaccredited, unrecognized nonprofit. She got hired making $150,000 a year. Thanks, public records.
The most recent strategy to oust the current employees was a massive testing program of terrible people working for the school for 20+ years have never had to know. Every employee but one passed the three different weed-out tests.
Apparently, nutrition-witch stormed out of the meeting yelling when she found this out.”
What Really Happened To The Christmas Bonus Money
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“I used to work at a plumbing shop.
The new owners were a married couple who had worked there for years and bought out the original owner. A few months later, as we were 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 broken a mirror in a customers bathroom and it had cost $200 to replace. And they just couldn’t afford to pay any bonuses, even though I brought in over $500,000 worth of business that year.
The 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 since. No one from when I worked there ( ’94-08) is still there.”
Counting Down The Days Until The Union Job
“I’m a plumber. I generate $1,000 a day in sales (so probably $600 a day in profit for my boss) and the vans are paid off. My boss doesn’t own a shop, works out of his home, and has a storage locker as a warehouse, so there are minimal expenses.
He pays me $26.50 an hour and complains about my times and invoices. He hangs my lack of school over my head then gets upset when I used the company credit card to book my last two levels.
Every time I threaten to quit, for some reason I get a raise. The real kicker lately is that my work van is constantly breaking down and I’ve wasted probably 16 hours unpaid dealing with it. He then gets upset when I treat myself to lunch because I have to sit in a freaking food court.
My van is still messed up with the same issue. It has stalled twice while moving at 50 MPH and I lose brakes and steering.
He also complains about me needing time off. Even if it’s for medical reasons (service plumbing and constant 10 hour days killed my health). I have to fight tooth and nail to get to my appointments on time with tons of notice.
I can’t wait until I start working at the union and begin doing refrigeration.”