I used to work IT at a company that leased electronic stuff to the general public. Oh boy were they shitty. Keep in mind, this is in a Western European country where employees and customers have actual rights.

There was a general policy of harassment and intimidation. Sexual harassment obviously. The female staff was constantly “ranked”, outfits were loudly commented. By management.

Sometimes you manager came next to you at 6:25PM. You’ve already been doing free overtime by then but utterly stupid management means sudden, unpredictable and hard deadlines. He would lit up a cigarette in your face and keep you until 10PM. Sometimes the deadline was so short and “important” people had to work until 5AM. For free (well, pizzas). And show up the next morning at 10 (instead of 9, woo).

Managers kept threatening you to cancel your holidays the day before leaving if you didn’t do this and that. Sometimes people had to connect from their vacations to do stuff because they were “critical” for something.

Money was a funny thing. We were constantly paid late. Sometimes more than 2 weeks late. Everyone who wasn’t an employee wasn’t paid at all. Not the rent, not the building staff (the toilets were FILTHY), not the contractors who remodeled the floor when we moved in, not the suppliers and especially not the IT contractors. I came in on day and found that I lost my entire team because their employers has never been paid.

One day, they lost a major investor because they lent money to purchase stuff to lease, not burning it in massive management salaries. As a collateral, the investor left with the customer database. So they were back to square one. So, as a get-new-customers-quick tactic, they created dozens of too-good-to-be-true promotions, like giving out electric scooters for new subscriptions and the like. With of course zero intention of honoring them out, since there was no money.

I could go on and on. Everyday there was new, shitty, borderline illegal stuff going on.

Once had a manager instruct me to block an emergency exit with an extremely large piece of machinery. While the building was still full of customers.

I worked at a construction company for only one day. The owner kept on doing lines of coke in the office. He thought he was discreet but he was not.

Daily pouring chemicals that require special disposal just down the sink instead.

Another one: inadequate ventilation for hazardous, carcinogenic chemicals that you are exposed to for the entiety of your shift every single day

I’m sure this isn’t the biggest thing, but I used to work at a big chain grocery store and “accidentally forget” to scan certain items. Old woman with a food stamp in her hand vs. u/spez-level arrogant billionaire CEO? You pay me $10/hr you fuckers, if you want me to notice the toilet paper in the bottom of the cart you’d better up my pay or help that chick out. I was far from the only one.

Installed pirated versions of Windows on all employee and customer computers. We charged the customer for an os install and just used a cracker to activate it.

Almost every employer I’ve had in the last 10 years, has fliers and banners and all sorts of things dissuading you from talking about or forming a union. Which is at least illegal in my state. IDK about federally.

A former employer committed tens of millions of dollars of wage theft across more than a decade. They settled a class action lawsuit last year with a payout of ~$6 million and a guy I worked with took them on directly and won $65,000.

Asking me to say that I screwed up an analysis so that the company wouldn’t have to log an Out Of Specification result. It was Patheon Softgels, a company that made softgel capsules with painkillers, fish oil etc.

Medicine meant for people and they treated quality as a joke.

I really should have reported them but I was too young and naive about that. I regret not having done that, however the company was well on its way to collapse thankfully…

Fortunately the company collapsed and was eventually bought over by some other big pharma company. I’ve heard it’s been heavily reformed.

They told me as a 16 year old that I need to be careful because if I hurt myself they don’t cover it. This was subway in 2012. I was unaware of workman comp laws.

I once worked as a direct support specialist to support people with mental illness in the community. A hard job because a lot of clients would test how “loyal” you are to them (spoiler alert: I’m gonna support you 'til the end!)

I was just starting out and learning the ropes from these 2 people that had been helping out clients for a while. Some of the things they were saying they did with clients didn’t seem to add up (not anything too alarming, but situations where I thought the client would need support and the DSS decided not to assist). But I was still learning so I didn’t press the matter or report them.

But then after about a month I found I was the only DSS left. Turns out the 2 people I was learning from were taking part in all sorts of horrible abuse with the clients. Stuff like turning on the car’s AC and radio full blast because it’s “their car” (the client had paranoid schizophrenia, PTSD, and major trust issues before this happened).

So if you ever have family or friends who are working with DSS’s, go ahead and let them help, but be mindful of anything that sounds “off.” Talk to the organization about it. The right DSS will be glad you investigated.

Thankfully, my supervisor hired on 2 new DSS’s who were absolute legends and whom I was able to learn from.

I mentioned before that I worked for a guy who was high 24/7. It was a recording studio and he lived above it. There was always a bong in the kitchen surrounded by ground up weed. And law enforcement people would come in on occasion to record PSAs. He’s damn lucky they never suspected he was high as fuck.

EDIT: This was Indiana in the 90s when weed was even more illegal here than it is now.

I worked for a popular VoIP who violated tons of my rights with my disability. My manager would get nosey, then he’d dock my pay when I took my paid FMLA. They were always harassing me about coming in despite my job being pretty much 100% remote. I got a doctor’s note for it, and I would get harassed daily about if I was coming in

When I went to HR to complain, the next day my desk was trashed.

I sued them, but lost on a technicality because my lawyer moved office and they didn’t get a piece of paperwork in time, despite putting in a proper change of address

So I pretty much got screwed

my old boss would pocket sales tax customers paid. In quickbooks you could just have check mark to say customer is taxable or not per invoice. he’d invoice the customers with sales tax, and they’d pay it. and before the end of the month he’d go in and turn all the check marks for the invoices off. company is gone now.

1 guy used a pirated piece of software and added it to a server which was then used to make an image for more servers so that pirated software was then proliferated out onto about half the servers in a Fortune 500 company.