From the CEO contantly throwing hissy fits, to the cupcake shop firing its employees for complaining about working conditions, Professionals share the one incident at their job that caused mass firing/ quitting.
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
I used to work at a pickle factory in Michigan. When the new owners took over they insisted they change the recipe that had been the same for over 50 years without consulting the workers. Some of the employees parents and grandparents had worked there and apparently felt so strongly about the recipe that 13 people quit and the majority else were outside with signs the next days until eventually they switched it [almost] all the way back. None of those who quit came back.
PoolsidePirate
I work in local Government for an urban county. One of the IT Departments, reclassified all their employees as Exempt (a designation designed for political appointments), fired them all (only Exempt employees can be fired without cause), and asked them to submit resumes if they wanted their jobs back. Their goal was to get rid of some employees they felt were dead weight. But it turns out, the most valued employees, the ones with readily marketable skills in the prime of their careers, just shook their heads and had jobs elsewhere by the end of the week. Furthermore, when you pull a stunt like that, word gets out, and resumes don’t come flooding in. They are still trying to recover.
FalstaffsMind
All the engineers at one job I was in had their contracts changed to that they had to buy their own tools, Due to the specialist nature of our jobs we were all looking at over 4000 per engineer.
10 walked and the rest threatened to strike. The boss had to give in and buy the tools himself.
W00jie
Worked at a cupcake shop that did dodgy stuff with money and fired anyone that complained about terrible working conditions. Found out they never paid anyone their superannuation (which is super illegal in Australia) including me. Owner fired me because her manager was worried I was doing a better job than her, and told the owner I was causing tension. Two hours after I left I contacted the tax office about their illegal practices, and their intentions to open the business up to investors. Tax office contacted me a month later telling me they need to use my name in the course of their audit, I said fine. Find out the company is fined $60,000 for tax evasion, and six months after they go under. So I guess I indirectly caused a mass firing? I mean it was a cupcake shop, I think I was doing society a favour.
Ummerruhhno
I worked at a Dave and busters in a fairly low income area. We had parties of 8 or more come in regularly, and they would run up $200 checks which was fine since they had an automatic 18% gratuity for being such a large party. They decided to eliminate the large party gratuity option in hopes that it would inspire servers to work harder. Instead we all started getting regularly stiffed on these massive checks. Within three weeks over a third of our staff quit.
flamingopinknutsack
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I was the lead cook in a million dollar kitchen at a multi-million dollar high end restaurant. The executive chef had been there since they opened and worked his way from the bottom to the top in 4 years. That place was his whole life and he was completely dedicated to it. The absentee owners had hired a “do nothing, know nothing” manager. After weeks of complaining, the owners had a meeting with the manager and gave him a week to get on top of his job. The chef went on vacation that week, the manager saw that as an opportunity to buddy up with owners. A week and 2 rounds of golf later the chef comes back to work to a pink slip. 27/30 employees came in and resigned immediately after.
awelldressedman
My company has had a pay freeze for over 7 years. We’ve had 10+ employees quit in our office due to this. The work is rather hard and we are expected to work up to states standards yet we are paid near minimum wage. We have patients lives in our hands!
imboredsohereiam
A friend of mine quit his job a year ago after the company was bought out by a place in Ohio that announced several things. Engineers would receive no raises in the foreseeable future because engineering was not the company’s sole purpose, they slashed health care to the bone, and they changed dental plans to Delta Ohio (friend lives in MA, where nearly nothing was covered). His leaving was followed by nearly 1/4 of the engineering staff.
abhikavi
The CEO constantly would throw hissy fits. Yelling, screaming, questioning your motives and keeping people she didn’t trust at arms length. She wouldn’t respond to emails, had no idea what was going on with management, and had to be in the limelight at all costs. It was truly bizarre. After a couple of attempts at intervening, a few times softly and once very firmly, people started to drop like flies. And we’re talking highly skilled employees that could find work anywhere. We weren’t ‘McDonald’s’ in the sense that the positions could be filled easily. It was really sad and infuriating at the same time. A shining example of incompetence.
hulksmashokayiwill
After 2 years of belt tightening, wage reductions and broken promises, myself and a few others who remained on the job were told that the company didn’t have any money. Then the owner’s prick son rented a villa in Tuscany for three weeks, and his father used miles he accumulated on the company’s dime (he flies first class from Florida to NY for meetings that could be done with a phone call, now we know why) to fly the entire family there. Currently one partner is gearing up for a lawsuit (contract fraud) and myself and other former employees are gearing up to sue for wage theft. If you’re crying poverty don’t vacation in a Tuscan villa.
thesynod
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I was in school, a pretty big football school. One of the football players got hurt. The following week, admin ran a system check to see who had accessed said-player’s medical record and wasn’t on the care team. About 30 medical students were kicked out of the program, as well as a smattering of other people. One girl in my graduate program, who was in her FIFTH year, got booted. If you make a HIPAA violation like that, you don’t recover. No other program is going to take you.
iluvweiners
Our general manager was fired (everyone loved him) and they brought in a new GM who took away ending times to shifts (we had to stay until he said we could go while most of us were college students trying to schedule classes) and all of the employee perks (we even had to pay full price on dollar sub day). Everyone quit. There was only 2 of the same people working there 2 months later.
sometimesballerina
Our company was bought by a larger company. The sales and marketing team got a new boss. Within a week of the first meeting with the new boss 75% of the team quit. No one outside of the team knew why. A few months later I met the new head of sales and marketing, he was weird. When one of the top sales guys put his 2 weeks notice in, he was escorted off of company property within an hour. The next guy who resigned was told he had to work the rest of the week with no pay so he could transfer his accounts over. Someone in HR had to explain to him that is slavery and illegal.
ilivlife
Last year, I briefly worked as a caterer. I only managed to work 3 gigs before I quit. The reason being that my “boss” tried to fit in 12 people into one minivan. He did this because he was charging everyone $10 so he benefitted from it. At one point we all decided that it was stupid and reckless for 12 people to be inside a minivan, especially since we were all sitting in the back. After arguing with him to get another car, we still went to work. After that day, me and a bunch of other people decided never to work there again.
Alejandro4891
I worked at Wendy’s. One of the shift managers quit for personal reasons so the regional manager had all the other shift managers cover the now open shifts. The shift managers were now working overtime and didn’t want to. They gave the regional manager a deadline of a month to get a new shift manager.
A month goes by and the shift managers confront the regional manager because there’s been no replacement. Turns out he hasn’t even posted a job listing yet. They were so livid that all of them quit on the same day.
Now the regional manager had to take all the shifts until he could hire new people and he did a terrible job too. Normally 4-6 people were working at a time at our location because it wasn’t dead slow but wasn’t a hot spot. 6 usually only hitting for a few hour overlap during expected rushes. With him as manager he expected 7 people to be working always. This means he increased all of our hours as well and had no respect for the hours people usually worked.
This caused another mass exodus of normal workers including me because I didn’t want to work full time while going to school.
QZip
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In the early 90s I worked for a large construction company in Florida. I was on the road crew. One of the machines we used was called a mixer. The objective of this machine was to mix up the subgrade of a road. It has giant teeth that spin insanely fast. Well my crew had laid down the dirt,limerock and clay and now had to run the mixer over it. Well someone set the blades too low and ripped an international fiber optic cable out of the ground. A clean cut would have been bad but this cable was shredded beyond belief. It cost $100,000 per hour that this cable was down. Luckily I wasn’t at work that day. When I came in the next day anyone who was even near the incident got fired. My whole crew was extinct. To put into perspective,the cable was fatter than your upper leg and composed of thousands of glass strands. Every strand had to be fused back together. It cost the company millions. Total about 40 people were fired and I was put on another crew.
bocefusly
I worked in the corporate headquarters for a large national retailer. After 20 years in business, the company was sold to an arrogant billionaire who put his son in charge (his first job after completing his MBA). The son decided to relocate headquarters 500 miles away, close to his daddy’s headquarters. He gave us 30-days notice to move with no moving compensation or lose our jobs.
Out of 300 employees, one moved.
I had already been looking for a job, the writing was on the wall. I accepted a new position the day after the announcement and gave two weeks notice. My boss went ballistic, said ‘what are we supported to do!? No one can fill your job here and we won’t have anyone new until we move. You’re not a team player!’
Bonus: The company was out of business within 60 days after the move, four months after the acquisition. They had spent $50 million to buy it.
Altarocks
Worked in a bar in a nightclub. Restaurant by day, club by night. 5 bartenders behind the bar on any given Friday and Saturday, plus barbacks. Thought something was weird about our credit card tips – went to bar manager. We collect receipts and checkouts plus paychecks for a few weeks, examine them. Someone is withholding quite a bit of our tips. Fast forward to a busy Friday night. Owner comes in to see how things are going, bar manager confronts him. Owner denies wrongdoing, claims what he’s doing is legal (it wasn’t, he was pocketing the withheld tips).
Bar manager signals for me to come over, threatens to quit if the owner doesn’t return the money he stole. Owner more or less says “Oh well,” bar manager walks out. I lean into the bar long enough to tell one of the other bartenders what happened, give the owner a snarky wave, and follow him out. 5 minutes later, the rest of the bar staff joins us, and we wander down the road to another bar to commiserate over this ridiculousness. Left over 500 people in the club with no bar staff. Found out a few days later that the daytime serving staff heard what happened and quit too. Last I heard, they had to shut down for a few weeks to restaff.
Still overly proud of myself for that.
Stahrk
I work at a corporation that deals with wholesale furniture. When the economy tanked, we took a hit. Like, 1 in two people was let go and the locations we service in the nation were close to halved. Yearly raises were ceased for the next seven years. Just this past August, we all received word that raises were going to be brought back. Now we still only service about 1/2 of what we originally worked with, but that’s also due to today’s consumer, who wants it off the internet, not out of a store.
cmcrom
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In the summer of 2012 I was working at a Boy Scout camp when one of the senior counselors (who had worked at the camp for years, I think 5-7) came out as gay and was immediately fired by the council. This caused a massive uproar at the camp, and about half the staff ended up quitting in solidarity, including many of the area directors and the program director. The rest of the summer was definitely interesting, because we had to run a proper summer camp with 50-75% of our normal staff, even after new people were hired on to fill some of the emptied positions.
aimanti
I worked in a tech support call center for some very terrible online backup software.
The supervisors treat you like computers, they don’t care about your feelings or work load, they just wanted short call times.
They didn’t care that you were snowed in or bed ridden, if you call out you’re written up.
The place had a 155% turnover rate one year from people having enough. This year is on track for being the same.
Personally, I quit when they tried to stop my wedding by calling me two days before my wedding and saying my time off wasn’t approved. The time that had been put into the system and approved 6 months prior.
What sucks is that the business probably won’t go under anytime soon. The product rips people off so much that the company is making bank, and the economy is so bad that they know for every call center rep that quits, there’s a poor sap that needs to pay rent to take their place.
chrisman01
My team of 5 was asked to replace a major piece of software that was critical to a large revenue generating department in 11 months. Normal timeline for implementation is 18-24 months, and we were on the larger side of facilities going to his software.
We were already understaffed, and over the year we worked countless overtime hours, traveled to the software vendor for training many times and god the project ready on time. Go-live was a mess of 12 straight 16+ hour days, but eventually we had the system in and stable and it started to make the department better. The staff were promised bonuses for meeting the deadline and not slipping the date, to be paid out from unused project funds.
Despite hitting the go-live date and having more than 1 million dollars left in the project pot, the IT team was criticized for most of the issues that happened during the 12 day go-live. The team lead was dismissed and no bonuses were paid out. Within 3 months, three of the four remaining members left, and all the positions are still unfilled. The one who was fired got multiple job offers the same day, and the three who left all got multiple offers within a month of the project ending.
The team lost 30 years of experience in a week, simply because management wasn’t willing to protect them. Ironically, the manager who threw the team lead under the bus was canned six weeks later.
jorshrod
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I worked at a locally owned pizza shop and I can say a combination of poor management and me quitting caused the business to go under completely. When I worked there (this was years ago), I was maybe 15-16. I got paid $5.35 an hour. I worked almost every day after school plus the “rush” nights (thurs-sun) every week. I worked hard in there, in a sweaty, hot, smelly environment to get things right and get it to the customers. I came in early on days when I didn’t have school to make sauce, make dough, do kitchen prep, etc.
After a while of this I went to my lazy boss and said “Hey Pat, I do an awful lot of the work around here and I think I deserve a raise.” Pat said, “ok we’ll see what we can do.” Fast forward to next paycheck, sure enough, I got a raise — 5 cents per hour. FIVE CENTS.
I said alright, went to Pat again to put in my 2 weeks. She told me how entitled I was acting and how my job title of “line cook” was a minimum wage position. I might as well have been the manager considering she took off promptly at 6pm every night (her 8 hours were 10-6 weekdays, didn’t work weekends) and left me and the crew to handle dinner rush. Anyway, long story short, I quit on the spot after the “entitlement” comment, walked inside to grab my stuff, told the rest of the crew what happened, and everyone else walked out with me. Everyone. Both her drivers, both the other line cooks, and even the drunk who was our dishwasher. Within 6 months that pizza shop, which had been in my town for at least a decade, possibly longer, was a hair salon with a new owner.
omfghi2u
I used to be a senior staff member at a web agency where the owner was completely bonkers. She’d already managed to run a previous agency into the ground and was in the process of doing the same to her current one.
We were at crisis stage.
We’d just about made staff wages for the month, I and another senior staff member had deferred ours to make sure all the regular staff got theirs.
We had one big client who was providing about 90% of our revenue
That client was getting pissed as we were behind on a couple of projects as idiot owner lady had promised them unreasonable deadlines without consulting the team
So I have everyone working flat out. Weekend plans are cancelled, this is real crunch time we need to keep this client!
So boss lady shows up, late as always and SENDS ALL THE STAFF HOME WITH FULL PAY! This is at 11am. She wants to have an urgent planning meeting with just the senior staff. Of course we had to do this on the studio floor not the board room as the studio had the big whiteboard. So she sent everyone home as it required total privacy.
We’re 15 mins into the meeting, I kid you not, all she had currently written on the board was “Synergie, Ideas, Excitment” when she declared that “Whoops she’d forgotten she had a hair appointment” and left!
Oh and as a parting gift she asked the senior staff members to spend the rest of the day moving around the office furniture into a new layout (most of which was screwed to the floor!) as she thought it would “Energise” and “Mix things up” when the guys came back to work the next day.
As soon as she left the entire senior management staff decided to quit. We checked the incomings for that month, made sure everyone got paid and then resigned.
60% of the agency resigned on the same day.
Ibuildwebstuff
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