This was years ago at a job I don’t add to my resume.

I was the incident. I worked at a plastic bottle factory as a packer, and I had gotten this job through a friend. The 2 of us got along with the manager pretty well. Had common interests and about the same mindset about being employed there. A few positions opened up and he came to us and asked if we’d like to move up to one of them. I chose to move up to forklift operator, he chose machine operator. We both liked the jobs a lot more after that. Of course with a promotion comes a raise right?

The manager that had us promoted actually found a new job shortly after we had been trained and were starting to handle our jobs independently, he brought us into the office along with his replacement that he was currently training and told us that we were due raises and he had started the ball rolling on that. The new manager said he was informed of everything and would follow up on it to make sure we were taken care of.

3 months go by, our old manager is long gone, and we were still making the same pay. We approached the new manager about this. “I just need you to bear with me, I’m still working on that”

Ok fine whatever…3 more months go by and we don’t see a dime. 6 months we’ve been making less than we should be now. Hell people are being hired at a higher rate than we make at this point. We confront him again. “Bear with me” he says again. I beared with him until about noon that day. I parked my forklift. I got in my car and left. All afternoon I’m getting calls and texts from people. My buddy tells me “you have no idea how many people days you just fucked up”.

I gently reminded him that we were getting taken advantage of. That we’ve been working for a lower wage than new hires after getting a promotion for 6 months. I also spilled these beans to other coworkers texting me about what happened. It didn’t take long…my buddy left mid day, 2 other machine operators left mid day. A string of packers stopped showing up, all but one daytime forklift driver either quit or walked out. They lost 10 people of varying positions in a month.

I couldn’t help but grin when my buddy told me he was done and one of my coworkers told me how many people quit before they left. I felt like my walkout made a difference that time.

The head of IT where I work quit on the spot during a meeting with the president of the company because the president wouldn’t agree with any security measure IT wanted to put in place because they were too expansive, and also because he was fedup of being micro-managed by someone who’s only achievement was being the child of the founder. That was a couple months after being hit with a ransomware that made us lose rougly 10 years of data. (IT had no budget to implement proper backups and everything)

Then the whole IT department left the company the same week.

That was a year ago. They tried hiring new IT staff, they keep leaving because the president still micro-manage them.

Edit : I still work there, I’m not in IT, and I never have to deal with the shenanigans of the president. Only thing that changed as far as I know is that they changed the structure of our file servers, and we are slightly more restricted than before, but we still all have access to way too much files on there and we still all have admin rights on our laptops, so anyone can install anything.

Someone asked a question about work-life balance during an all-hands meeting and the CEO laughed at him.

A couple weeks later my entire location started eating lunch together and discussing our job searches.

The full office being pulled into a meeting and lectured about how disheartening it was to see everyone leaving the office on time at the end of working hours. What we call good time management they apparently saw an laziness and a lack of commitment.

That and the message that discussing pay and bonuses wasn’t allowed (despite being protected by the Equalities Act here in the UK). This of course got us wondering why this would be discouraged and turns out our salaries seemed to have very little to do with length of service or performance.

Happened when management started treating the IT department like crap and demanding we work overtime with no extra pay. Almost all the experienced developers left in the spam of a year.

Before I left, I told them they would never be able to assemble such a good team again. Four years later and they are still struggling to keep the department running, according to a friend that chose to stay. The few developers they are able to hire are either terrible or quit after a while.

I get the feeling the same will happen in my current job :/

I am a union member so this isn’t a thing that happens. If management does something unacceptable, we do a strike authorization vote which, if passed by the membership, starts a clock ticking down to strike time and management knows that they are on notice and need to start negotiations.

All of which is just to say that unions are good for workers, regardless of what kind of bullshit you may have been led to believe.

I have a couple of these.

First one, I worked for a small engineering consulting firm. Maybe 8 people tops, including the President, who owns the company and our building.

We were renovating the second floor, and I overheard him tell his contractor that he shouldn’t put women’s restroom signs up, because only engineers will work on the second floor and therefore no women. I had an offer within 6 weeks, but disappointingly this did not slow the success of the company.

More recently, I left a position as the facility manager for a biotech manufacturer. My workload was immense, despite a <1yo child, and I was on call for emergencies 24/7.

Around September, I heard rumor that we were planning a plant shutdown over the Christmas to New Year holidays - this would give all manufacturing personnel a guaranteed 2 week paid vacation, while the facilities team of 20 people would be on vacation blackout and have the busiest two weeks of the year.

I brought up the rumor to my boss and begged him to advocate against it. He said he’d try, and within 24 hours told me that he decided to advocate in favor of the shutdown during that period because he doesn’t celebrate the holidays anyway and it’s a great time to get stuff done.

So I got to tell my team, who had family around the world and always agreed amongst themselves who got to travel and who stayed local, that nobody gets to travel for the holidays and we all get to work.

I got a new job very quickly, but unfortunately had to see the shutdown through and worked through Christmas. However, I took one tech with me and heard that the team dropped to under 8 people before we lost touch with current emoyees. They took my departure as writing on the wall and opted to get out before there was a repeat.

“We {company owners/founders} are excited to announce that {company} is partnering with {venture capital firm} to take {company to the next level}. {company owners/founders} will be moving to the board of directors and a new CEO is coming aboard. It’s a very exciting time for {company}.”

Received a few of those emails in my time… it’s always bad news and might as well get your resume together right then.

Worked for a shoe retailer where the head office was attached to the distribution center (DC) for the US.

The CFO fired the long-time and very popular DC manager. The rounded up the DC staff in our large meeting room with the CFO and the director of HR to discuss the change in management in the DC. The DC staff were already unhappy because they all liked the manager very much. After the spiel from CFO and HR, one of the DC staff asked if they would still be getting double time for all overtime. HR director, confused, asked what he meant. He explained the DC director would go and modify their timecards so they would get paid double for overtime instead of time and a half.

The HR director, without putting any thought into their answer or the consequences, immediately stated that would be ending immediately.

The DC damn near went on strike right there. Several of them left over the next few weeks, and the ones who didn’t leave worked much slower and were unavailable for overtime work. They ended up requiring all of us office staff to work 4-8 hours a week in the DC for a few months while they unfucked everything.

A couple executive-types gathered the more senior developers for an “open” discussion about recruitment and retention. They suggest multiple ideas that would destroy morale (like non-compete clauses, poorly designed work-role pipelines, etc), and all of us suggest against them, and provided alternatives instead (like a shift in direction of certain efforts, more autonomy and less micromanaging, etc). They end up accusing us of not supporting our company’s mission and tell us that if we don’t agree then they don’t want us there and we should just quit. I think after that meeting, only 2 people stayed out of about 30, and hiring numbers have significantly declined.

Big manager decided that our dept had been not using enough holiday days, so kinda forced all of us to take holiday. Then he got really angry with us that work wasn’t being done and he slashed our budget, meaning we couldn’t afford department essentials, meaning we couldn’t do our basic tasks, so big boss yelled at us even more.

Not me but a friend worked at a start up that was acquired by a bigger competitor. The new CEO stated in their first company wide meeting that he believes the ideal employee is a ‘unicorn’. One who eats, sleeps and lives in the office working long hours. CEO laughed at people who asked about their benefits which were being reduced to the minimum (this is the UK so we have minimums but the startup originally had unlimited holidays etc). The CEO took over the board with a misogynistic vibe, all women left and then the guys followed.

Probably the impetus for the mass exodus at my old job was the “We’ll Miss You” Zoom call we had for a beloved senior developer. The company had recently added a new manager role that hadnt existed before and things were fine. The new guy started micromanaging like crazy. The SD who was leaving basically went off during the call about how the company didn’t need NG’s role and how it was burning people out.

I stuck around for another year-ish, and NG managed to make a group of about 20 developers dwindle to 5-ish. Saw the writing on the wall after getting shafted, changed jobs and am now making double that salary along with far less stress.

Worked in supermarket. New manager came in and decided to change everything, everybody hated it. So as a good 23 year old I decided to start harassing him by ordering free magazines, free stuff, furniture, kitchens etc etc online and get it delivered to his house.

A very unqualified but very good at bullshitting for 5 minutes VP moved in to run my team. The old VP was great, we all loved her. My boss (Director level), I loved her too. She’s the reason I joined the team.

They moved the SVP head of the dept to a new area and brought in some marketing lackeys. Our department’s job was to analyze marketing and they were terrible at it. Not our fault the results were shit.

So new head of the dept, new head of our team. They were just stupid and sinister. A female friend of mine who worked with my new manager on a project referred to her as “That evil cunt”. My old manager 2 managers before that had her kicked off a project because she nearly ruined it

I tried to give her a chance but she was awful and a liar. We already lost 3 out of 6 people on my team who bailed. Dozens in the dept. I left before she could fire me for some made up shit she was planning (another manager clued me in)

Eventually the entire dept of 200 people was whittled down and absorbed into another group.