Most of us hope that we work for someone who does more good than evil in the world. But the truth is that the phrase “it’s not personal, it’s business” has stuck around for a reason.
Many employers are out for themselves, but it can be a shocker to realize that your bosses are actually doing shady stuff after hours – and these 16 people can tell you firsthand that it’s not the best.
1. The day idealism died.
My coworkers always forging the signs on the financial reports (the document for the upper ups). The admins know, the bosses know.
If there are new projects, definitely there will be some percents cut “for tax”, and that “tax” went into those people’s private pockets.
They said that it’s how things are (work in a university funded by government, in a corrupted country). My naive & fresh from university a$$ really am afraid. My idealism is not ready for this kind of reality.
2. Insurance fraud is bad.
I was working in a lab and observed that we were charging for chem7 and chem 14 and just running the chem14 that covers everything in the chem 7. Basically charging the insurance company and patient for labs that were only done once.
There was other stuff I noticed like this but I always felt like that was bad insurance fraud. Fortunately the place got sold. Just hope they stopped doing that crap.
3. Well I hate this.
An employee was grooming vulnerable teenage girls. Was caught in his car with more than one.
This is at Children’s Aid.
He was the brother in law of one of the directors.
4. It caught up with them eventually.
They told us we were not allowed to put in overtime regardless of how many hours we worked and denied it if anyone tried.
They ended up having to pay out 2 years of back overtime and then switched everyone to exempt employees.
5. That’s…not a thing.
A few years ago I was working/living at a McDonald’s in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The area manager decided to “save” the store so she became very… involved… in its day to day micromanagement.
One payday morning she made an announcement that, because everyone kept coming in asking for their checks and bothering her, she would be giving them to us when she felt we deserved them.
I called the local Department of Labor, who referred me to the state, who referred me back to local, who then told me they just didn’t care and weren’t looking into it. It eventually resolved itself anyway when she handed checks out the next day.
6. That must be ill-advised.
Overbill the government.
A previous employer was successfully sued by the government when his secretary made a whistleblower complaint about his billing practices.
The secretary ended up with over 400k from the government as her reward. This was about 20 years ago when 400k was worth a lot more.
7. He wasn’t even sick.
I used to work at a place that was owned by an organization with some political affiliations. There was a rich Middle Eastern investor who owed my employer money. Literally millions from a contract that they simply never paid. It was quite a sensitive issue and one that everyone really wanted to keep out of court. Some negotiations took place and the investor agreed to pay but in return, wanted a spot on the board.
Everything was agreed, the guy would pay and then there would be a big party event, with some press, for his appointment to the board. At any rate, a few weeks before this was supposed to happen, the head of my organization became very ill and needed surgery and was gone for several weeks…the big party where the investor would become a member of the board had to be delayed.
It turns out, our big boss wasn’t actually sick at all and did not need to have surgery. Actually what happened was, the head of the organization that owned my employer was running for political office and was worried about the optics of the whole event (only being able to get this rich middle eastern dude to pay us what he owed by putting him on the board and granting him a bunch of power over the organization) and basically ordered our boss to feign a long illness that would require the event to be delayed until after the election.
8. Kids should have to earn their grades.
This year I passed grade 10 which in Nepal is known as an iron gate(very important) but due to the coronavirus exam got canceled and the government decided to evaluate us by internal evaluation (basically by teachers giving marks to students according to the past performance).
I was the best performing student in the school in the terminal and extracurricular activities well. I got a 3.9 GPA out of 4, I was satisfied because I used to get the same GPA in real physical exams. but my friends who failed in previous exams also got marks in the range of 3.80 to3.90 with the lowest being 3.60.
then I learned that the school was selling marks for rs 15000(150 us$).the school had asked my parents for money but my parents being confident of me they denied the offer, I am proud of them but now my marks are also regarded as corrupt by colleges and it’s getting harder to find colleges.
9. Lying to their employee’s faces.
Not as bad as some others in this thread, but it still really pissed me off.
I worked for a very large telecom company. They would do things around election time like ask for donations to the Super PAC that they were a part of for the good of the company or send a recommended list of people/topics that we should vote for in the elections (in so many words), but what really got me pissed off was when net neutrality was becoming a huge topic.
They sent everyone an email explicitly stating that they were in favor of net neutrality and that we had nothing to worry about if we heard the company name mentioned on the news or in court when it came to that topic and that they were on the side of the consumer and being free to visit the sites you wanted to visit with no catch.
Of course that was a lie because when numbers came out for what companies were lobbying and spending how much money for what side of the argument, they were one of the top contributors against net neutrality. It’s one thing to be a greedy corporation and not tell your employees how you’re being greedy and underhanded; it’s a completely different level to straight up lie to their faces about it in a company-wide email.
10. Good for her.
The owner of our company suggested that one of our female employees take one for the team. About as corrupt as it can get. (She did not, however.)
11. That’s life and death.
I work underground in the mines. One place started having, what the workers found out later, was asbestos type rock in the ore. The company took samples of it and then said it’s kind of like asbestos, but it’s not old enough to harm you.
Later after a bit of more concern from the workers, it was found out that the sample they took came back as inconclusive due to something else. They lied and allowed their workforce exposure to asbestos.
I quit after that and found work elsewhere.
12. Lunatic is one word for it.
I worked for IBM. I made 30k less than the opposite gender doing the same job. Additionally- My VP once yelled, like the screaming kind, at one of my co supervisors in a meeting for hiring a pregnant woman once he found out. Called him a fucking idiot because “Now they had to pay for her to go on a 2 month free vacation” and “it was a waste of everyones time to bother training her” and “we shouldn’t even hire women if they plan on getting pregnant” and “how can we term her out before the baby is born without getting in trouble because we won’t be able to after it’s born.”
He was a joooy to work for. The real reason I left was because he was a lunatic and I couldn’t take it anymore.
More on him just for fun- He once asked me to get a poster board made up for some department event. I told him I needed a red marker for the thermometer part and that we didn’t have one. He looked at me and said “can’t you just make red with the other colors?” I was like, “no?” Him, “well why not” me- “it is a primary color” him- “so?”.
I had to get a colorwheel and to explain colors to a man with 3 kids. He got mad, then eventually came back having bought what had to be every pack of red sharpies the store had when he went and tossed the bag on my desk spilling boxes everywhere and walked off. He would also say super inappropriate things to women.
He would get you alone in a room and awkwardly flirt or talk about what he looked for in a woman, like very specific details “i like it when they have just a little bit of a pooch in the belly” and described it with hand motions. He looked like the quintessential sleazy used car salesman.
He had one very wonky eye, never knew where it was looking, was working on his 3rd failed marriage and for a time was living out of his van in the parking lot and showering at work. He was a real gem.
13. Why would anyone volunteer to close?
Cinemark Theaters used to force employees in the snack bar to work overtime until the cleaning was complete, but then would go back and retroactively change timecards so that everyone clocked out right at 11:15 for closing, as closing was only supposed to take 30 minutes after the last showtime starts at 10:45. I was a weekend closer for a few years, and occasionally would be there until 1am+ on really busy nights when management wanted thing detailed. All of those hours went into the nether. They’d hide the fact that you weren’t getting overtime by lying on your paystub.
They also used to fudge lunch breaks, saying that it was “too busy” to send employees on their lunch at a proper time, so you’d occasionally show up to work and go on lunch 15-30 minutes after arriving, or you’d go on “lunch” after 7.5 hours in your shift and just end 30 minutes early, but with an expectation that you’d hang around for 30 minutes until you your shift was over.
I do my best to avoid their theaters, despite them being everywhere.
14. This is so super common.
I worked 30 minutes after closing because we still had customers in our store shopping. The next day, I found out my manager cut 30 minutes off because I “didn’t clock out on time.”
I argued saying that there was still customers shopping and I still had to ring them up. He then proceeds to say, “We do not do overtime here. So we’re still overriding it anyways.”
15. Good for him.
Hide political contributions, I was CFO and warned the board that this was illegal, I resigned over it. A few months the SEC auditor caught it and they were heavily fined, they blamed me for ratting on them.
I didn’t, but I suspect that one of my subordinates did for a reward, good for him.
16. Technically illegal.
I worked for a company that managed parking meters. They would hand out tickets if you didn’t pay or exceeded your time on the parking meters.
I worked in “customer service”. This meant answering calls and letters from people who wanted to contest their ticket.
The problem was we could not help people who called in. We were advised to tell them they had to write a letter and that, only then, could we review their dispute.
The second problem was, not once were we able to approve a dispute. Every single dispute was refused. No matter the circumstances.
We would have older people call who went to a hospital for a procedure that lasted 10 minutes longer then expected so they were issued a ticket. They would be on the phone crying that they were unable to pay for the ticket, couldn’t we have compassion. I do. But, I wasn’t allowed to show any. They would ask to speak to a manager and my manager absolutely REFUSED to take any call. We were not allowed to send any calls to her.
The corrupt part: at the time I was working there, it was illegal to issue tickets for parking meters by privately owned companies, which this was. The management team was constantly going to court to fight this but it was still illegal. So, we had to tell every caller they had to pay their ticket, write in a worthless letter that would be rejected or pay a fine that was technically illegal (and of course couldn’t say any of that).
I lasted a month.
17. Why would they use his name?
I got a call from a car rental company and few months after I left a job asking when I was going to pay for the damages to my rental car.
After a few phone calls, I was able to determine that my company credit card had never been canceled and my boss had used it to rent a car in my name for another employee that hit a deer outside of area the car was limited to.
18. An awful person.
When I used to housekeep at a hotel, our head housekeeper would go into all of our checkouts and steal our tips before we could get to them. I remember a few times seeing tips in my rooms and foolishly not thinking to pick them up before they disappeared. A few of my other coworkers witnessed similar instances.
At one point, a guest came up to me and said she’d leave a big tip in her room for me bc it was a mess. I found out later that the head housekeeper cleaned the room herself.
She walked out like a year later bc our GM demoted her to regular housekeeper bc everyone had complaints about her. She was a very awful person in general.
19. Missing money.
Growing up my father always told me to save my pay stubs and time receipts.
I ended up working a job in my early 20 ‘s at an airport moving cars. I get my paycheck one day and i realize that it’s not right.
So i do a little digging, and a lot of math, and i figure out that the company was taking hours from me.
I ask around and it turns out that they were taking hours from literally everyone at the job site. After doing more math we figured out that over the six months we all worked together, the company had stolen a combined 400 hours from eight people.
20. No one should work for free.
I’ve had a couple that try to pressure you to work off the clock, without actually asking you to do so in order not to get sued. Suckered some people into doing it, if they complained after the fact they got canned. And by that I mean they got all hours cut until they were forced to quit so they couldn’t file for unemployment.
I just made it clear I wasnt playing their games in the first place. First time they tried me I was like “isnt that working off the clock?” And they were like “ohhh no no, of course not! We’re not asking that at all, just looking for volunteers!”
“I can’t volunteer. Do you want me to stay, clocked in, or go home since my shift is over?”
“Oh well… I suppose you can go home. We’ll figure it out”
Needless to say, they did not like me much after that and made working there a living hell. Cut my hours to low numbers, but not altogether. But I had already asked my old boss if they’d take me back, which they welcomed me back with open arms. Only reason I took the new job was they paid like, 3 bucks an hour more. But obvs not worth it if I’m expected to work for free.
21. That might be actual fraud.
Had a job out of college selling yellow pages advertising. A big part of the job was just renewing the old ads in the book and we had to call each business to have them renew their ad. But as the yellow pages book became more and more obsolete more customers would cancel their ads.
So the company changed the policy of having us call each business and instead put in a policy that any customer who didn’t specifically call to cancel would be auto renewed. Then they would purposefully send out the renewal notices late enough that the customers couldn’t cancel in time to avoid the following years charges.
If one of us did actually get a call from a customer looking to cancel and with time to legitimately do so and we actually cancelled them….fired.
22. This is so icky.
I was working at a high volume upscale jewelry store and liked working in the warehouse.
They really wanted me working sales because I was a young fit female. They figured that I could upsell men buying jewelry for women.
First they tried to get me to switch by implying that I made mistakes by switching a packing label on me. They sent a baby shower gift to a new (very NOT pregnant) bride and blamed it on me. They agreed to “forgive” me if I switched to sales. When I still didn’t want to switch they cut my hours.
Incidentally the store is still in business but is in no way considered upscale any longer. I guess their business practices caught up with them.
23. Definitely shady.
Worked in a restaurant that didn’t allow employees to work over 40 hours as they did not want to pay any overtime. Instead of you wanted to work extra or if they asked you to work extra they would delete hours off of your time card to keep it under 40.
They always asked you when they did that in a kind of hush hushed way so it wasn’t exactly without permission but I think it was bs all the same.
24. How is this a thing?
Worked for a bookstore and our dead part of the year kicked in. This was back in 2008-2010 ish and jobs were hard to come by in my area. So I kept working minimum wage at 8-14 hours a week. We were going to starve soon.
I filed partial unemployment and after 2 payments , suddenly my company could give me 32-40 hour weeks. Crazy how they could suddenly afford to work me full time. They would only do this for 2 weeks tho cuz after so many weeks of full time they would have to offer benefits.
So every 3rd week would be less than 20. Whatever we made it through the skinny times at least. I refiled every time I went more than 2 weeks without full hours.
They filed bankruptcy about 10 years ago and died. I loved that job but the company was just sad.
25. His own personal enjoyment.
The CEO was using company money to fund his lavish lifestyle. It went on for a long time because hey, there’s a fine line between using a private jet because you need to travel to business meetings on time vs. using it for your own personal enjoyment.
All the employees knew about it so it was no surprise when he was finally forced to step down by the shareholders once one of the larger ones complained about it publicly.
26. Don’t pay your dues.
I’ve been through several jobs where you’re expected to pay your dues to earn a more desirable position.
I’ve learned that the more they expect you to pay your dues at a crappy job, the less likely you are to have any upward mobility. If a company cares about investing in its employees, they usually start with decent base pay and benefits.
Otherwise they’re likely just looking for cheap disposable labor which they lure in with fake promises.
27. Stealing tips.
I was working at a small brewery / bar, and caught the owner dipping into the tip jar at the end of big nights.
It was a new place that just opened and was kind of struggling during the off season. We literally had a staff of two bartenders and the owners (husband and wife), so the bar staff would pool and split that days tips.
Come to find out that he was taking a cut of the tips because “he worked there too”. When I confronted him, I explained that its actually a violation of the FLSA. In fact it’s even an exact example listed as illegal things to do with tips. He argued that it was his right as owner and fired me, so I reported him to Dept of Labor
28. Completely egregious.
One time when I was a chef in college, I worked 14 days straight, with half of those days being 12 hour days. This all fell in one pay period too. It was rough but it was summer and I was gushing over the amount over overtime I was about to get. It came out to like over 70 hours overtime. I was supposed get almost an additional $1000 dollars on my paycheck. I calculated the math with tax and everything and couldn’t wait to pick up my paycheck the next week for that pay period.
I pick it up, and the paycheck is quite larger than I’m used to given I normally only worked 25 hours a week, but there is ZERO overtime on it. It was short almost a a thousand bucks. I got to the HR office the next day (it was located at a different casino) and ask, and they go “yeah so in Nevada, you only qualify for overtime if you average 40 hours a week normally.”
That sounded like bs to me, but I asked my mom who used to run finances for our family business, and she says that IS in fact 100% bs. She pulled up the statute online and it clearly said if you exceed 8 hours in a day, you get overtime. It said nothing about a weekly average.
So printed that bitch out and drove right back down to the HR office, and showed it to them. The lady at the desk who just told me that lie calls out the head of HR. She would frequent the different locations to check in with people and was always nice, but you could always tell she was shady as heck. They both seem to get very nervous and in a stuttering voice “okay we will reevaluate”
I never heard anything or got any apology, but when the next paycheck came, the exact amount of overtime I calculated was put on that paycheck down to the penny.
I tell some of the other guys in the kitchen what happened, and apparently the family who owned the casino our restaurant was located in was known for pulling s*%t like this. Making “accounting errors” knowing a lot of people who do direct deposit don’t even look at their paystubs.
Funny how these accounting “errors” always ended up in saving the company money, and never gave the employee extra cash lol. A server no more than a few months later had the same exact thing happen to him. Rat bastards.
29. Definitely not normal.
My girlfriend used to work at a deli where the owner was taking half the tips. She’s never worked food, so she suspected it was wrong, but didn’t know for sure.
She asked me like “hey is this normal?” as I was a chef for a couple years, and I explained how taking tips as the owner is probably the most frowned upon thing you can do in the food service industry.
30. Quite a kicker.
At the first company I worked at the general manager had all his personal expenses paid by the company. His wife also had a company credit card and was paid a salary but she didn’t work. The company paid for things like their groceries, house mortgage, car payments and family vacations.
The kicker is he wasn’t the owner of the company. He had a creative accountant that hid these expenses but the owners became suspicious and they hired an auditor. It took them about 4 years to figure it out.
He was fired and his family fled the country so I am not sure what happened to him.
31. This makes me so mad.
I was a mechanic that found out that the company was not letting me fix customers cars that had oil leaks when the customers had paid for a 200k mile warranty.
The manager would tell the service writer to say that the warranty company declined it and eventually started making me take a photo to him so that he could tell me that the leak wasn’t bad enough to fix.
The customer paid for a warranty and the company wasn’t holding up their end of the deal because it was costing them money. They are one of the most profitable car dealerships in my town and now have 3 dealerships and are expanding.
I wish I was more surprised, y’all, but I mean…
If you’ve had a moment like this, tell us about it in the comments!
