Okay, now I curious about the schools. I’m well aware that there are all sorts of problems, discontents and poor judgments going on in the school system, but what was so unethical?
When I was a freelance writer in 2001 or so, I wrote an article about telemarketing scams. The research for this involved me working for a couple of days at a company claiming to raise money for the widows and orphans of Tennessee police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty. Every single thing about that company was crooked, and I felt physically ill at the lies I was having to tell the (mostly old) rubes we were targeting. I left after about two days and shredded the check I got from them for the work.
Definitely not the most unethical, but…
I worked for a temp agency for a little over a year. They had a policy that if you worked 1500 hours or more in a year, you’d get two weeks vacation pay. That sounded great to me, and I was putting in plenty of hours. I wouldn’t take jobs from other temp agancies, because I wanted to build up hours at this one.
When I got up to about 1496 hours, suddenly they had no more work. I called several times a day, but there was just nothing for me to do. Being that that was my only source of income, and that I was barely scraping by as it was, that hit me hard.
As soon as I passed the one year mark of working for them, suddenly a job became available to me. That soon turned into full-time work, working directly for the company (Kodak). When I called the temp agency to ask for my vacation pay, they informed me that since I didn’t work my more than 1500 hours in a calendar year, I wouldn’t be getting that pay.
The worst of that was that they tried to frame it as me being a slacker who was unwilling to follow the rules. They actually told me that I should have read the fine print before becoming so lazy and unwilling to work.
A couple of really angry phone calls fixed that. 
…I find it odd that people who are listing their government jobs as shady…don’t find any necessity in explaining why.
I worked for a lawyer for about a year while I was in college. He was a maritime lawyer but supplemented his income with slip-and-fall cases. My first job for him was driving around the city to have other lawyers sign a petition to have him reinstated to the bar. I guess that should have been my first warning.
One day he meets with a guy in a hotel room to try to convince the guy to accept a settlement instead of going to court. He requests that I come over to “take care of something”. When I got to the room it was obvious that the client was really drunk and my boss handed me some money and told me to go to the gift shop and buy a fifth of Wild Turkey. Well, I did what I was told but, being only 19 at the time, was refused the liquor and went back to the office. I later found out that the guy was a recovering alcoholic and, as a result of this incident, lost custody of his child. The client sued the attorney and I had to testify in front of a grand jury. I don’t know what the outcome was as I quit not long after.
My first job out of college was working as a lackey for a small boutique management consulting firm. Their ideal client was a supermarket or retail chain in financial trouble (already in Chapter 11 or close), and the intent was to tighten the ship by staffing according to business volume - a good excuse to cut from the bottom, which client management loved. Cutting one staff member from every store in a chain was a nice chunk o’ change, even if that person was at the bottom of the totem pole.
The theory in a nutshell; department head (e.g. meat dept. manager) makes a dollar prediction for the coming week, based upon previous years’ and previous week’s sales. Dollars are converted to items, items to time, and staff is scheduled accordingly. So, most of my job was timing folks stocking shelves, moving items through the register, and the like.
The initial two week sales analysis pitch was “Give us your best store, your worst, and maybe one in the middle, and we’ll see how much we can save”. Another part of my job was to draw the pie charts and graphs at the end of the two weeks for the big presentation, using the time stats I collected. Typically, it always showed savings potential, as no store has everyone going all out for their entire shift, right? One client’s numbers, however, didn’t provide any room for improvement. My boss’s answer? "Fudge the numbers, we’ll get the sale. Another team comes out to do the work anyway ".
The epiphany was that we were cutting troubled companies looking for help to the bone, taking their last dollars before they went under. Most stores need that extra employee as a floater, to cover unexpected business surges. I quit within the month.
I work in Government defense contracting, which itself can be pretty corrupt, though not as bad as most people think. A standard ploy used is to bid senior, experienced people for a job with knock-out resumes. When they win the job, the first day the work begins, the senior guy is shadowed by a junior, just out of college guy, with virtually no experience. Within about a month, junior guy is doing the job, but the Government is still getting billed the senior guy rate. In some ways, the Government brings this on themselves by requiring companies to have published rates and limiting the profit they are allowed to put in their proposals, so they make it up through this back channel method. That’s how high end consulting firms bill 7% profit on projects yet have end of year returns of 20-25%. I always wondered why the Government doesn’t question that.
Most of my stories are mundane relative to the stories presented here. I worked for the CEO of one small company that hired people away from established larger companies using offers of large salary increases. After they were hired, he conveniently lowered their salaries and put them on a commission system, with commissions that used elaborate metrics making them unobtainable in all but perfect circumstances. He would get people to leave good jobs to ultimately make less money and work their asses off to try and get back to where they were at the higher salary at which they started, only to never get the commissions. This strategy was surprisingly effective and really messed with people’s self esteem, because they were winning him tons of money, yet felt like failures. Everyone who ever left the job spoke poorly about the company, and they recently lost about half their work to a competitor because their reputation is so bad.
Where should I start?
Worked for MVA.
My supervisor came to work every day with a bag of pot strapped to one leg and a bag of coke strapped to the other. He would lock us out of the office while he made his drug deals, most were to other employees. The assistant director sat at his desk all day drinking beer. One of the other supervisors lied on his time sheet every day accruing enough comp time to take off the entire month of December. There were 7 of us in the office where I worked, each of us doing at most 2 hours worth of work a day. The guys I worked with were supposed to work 5am til 1pm, they would stroll in around 9 or so, knock out their work, and leave. We women couldn’t get away with it because like my boss said, if a man comes in late or needs to leave early it’s for something important like a flat tire. If it’s a woman it’s for a stupid reason like she has to fix her hair or got a run in her stockings. On any given day at least a third of our department was stoned. One day I was the only one of 7 who showed up and when the 3rd boss up asked how I was doing I said I could use some help. He said his job was to see that the work gets out, not to do the work himself. Didn’t matter how short handed or behind we were none of management did anything besides sign time cards. During tag rush we had to work 12 hour days, and the guys would sit around trying to drag it out to make more overtime pay.
You think it sucks going to the MVA, try working there.
I delivered newspapers and our agents kept our tips. The paper encouraged them to so they didn’t have to pay the agents as much. Most customers were livid to find out that the tips weren’t going to the carriers, but if you got caught telling them you were fired. I was easily being cheated out of $4000 a year, multiply that by 16 routes in the agency and our agent had 2 agencies.
I did programming for a large national chain. I did a lot of the legal programming and the company was in trouble in every state they did business. Mostly for illegal collection practices, but also for racial and sexual discrimination. They would tell me they were thinking of a number and I had to capture enough people who would be affected by the class action. If I pulled too many records or too few they would change the criteria until the number was what they wanted it to be.
I found out after I started there that my uncle had been fired from there years ago on Christmas Eve because he refused to participate in their illegal collection practices.
I’ve done work for AIG.
“I was having whisky with Boesky and cookies with Milken.”
One of these folks hit me up while I was doing the lawn last weekend. I’m trying to figure out how much gullibility it takes to believe a random guy in a pickup truck has better meat than the butcher at the store. :rolleyes:
I put on my best hillbilly act and told him “Ah kill all mah own meat, son. Fridge is full 'o venison; doan need no more.” (Actually a true statement)
As to the OP, In college I worked at a medical provider who fired people for using the wrong type of pen. They had soft pens (like Flairs) and would freak out if you used a ballpoint. Turns out the soft pens didn’t write on all 5 of the carbons in the form, and they were changing the amounts billed to the government on the last two copies. The owners are still guests of the feds, as far is I know.
One of my brothers used to work for that company who’d like to interest you in a very exciting business opportunity (that I’m not naming lest I be sued or something).
He tried for months to get me involved and I wouldn’t have anything to do with it - I’d been lectured at by another worker a few years earlier and smelled a rat, subsequently the internet arrived and I was able to look up ***** and had all me fears confirmed. I tried to point my brother to the sites I’d found but he wouldn’t hear or read a bad word against the company. He even got the guy who’d gotten him hooked to try to rope me in.
Several years later my brother left the company and you won’t find a more rabid hater of them and their business practices.
I think I already mentioned on here a supermarket near me that used to belong to a guy who would re-use days old French bread to make French bread pizzas, garlic bread and breadcrumbs - all sold as “freshly made”. And would recycle sponge cakes by scraping the cream off and reapplying fresh, then using them to make trifles.
Those all strike me as perfectly reasonable and acceptable things to do with old bread, particularly the bread crumbs.
Back when boxes were still white, I worked for a “white box” PC wholesaler. We sold computers with counterfeit copies of Windows and if you wanted to pay extra, we’d sell you a counterfeit copy of Office. After I left, the company got cease and desist orders from Microsoft, which the owners ignored. Not long after that, Microsoft sued them and the company went out of business.
I didn’t blow the whistle, but I figured it was only a matter of time. The owners were actually nice people, other than being really greedy. The business would have struggled, and maybe failed anyway, through the transformation of the computer reseller market, but really? Who the fuck ignores a cease and desist from Microsoft when they’re actually guilty?
When I was very young and naive (I was 18), I worked for a couple of telemarketing companies. They promised easy money and lots of it. The ethics of the companies, though…well, I still have a bad taste in my mouth, over 30 years later.
Most of my electrical apprenticeship was spent working for an electrician that rarely did any work. Sometimes he’d show up at the start of the day at the job site to talk with the customers but after that he’d head to the bar.
I wrote out the bills and everything billing out 100 bucks an hour for a licensed electrician.
It was such a good racket for him he got me an apprentice. I walked away shortly after that. I really didn’t want to be responsible when the high school kid got hurt at an industrial site.
Bit unethical for both of us I guess.
I had a friend who ironically did well out of such a policy.
She had worked for years as a temp for a BigNational railroad, while trying to get hired to a full time job. The union contract had a provision that if you worked more than X hours in a month, you became a fulltime employee, eligible to join the union, and protected by the contract. (Obviously, this was in the contract because the railroad had a past history of trying to use temp workers instead of hiring fulltime employees.)
In fact the company even had computer programs that tracked the hours put in by temp employees, and warned supervisors if any of them was approaching the trigger number of hours. In that case, they would not give than any more work hours for the rest of the month.
She had a supervisor who was quite unethical. In addition to other shady practices, he would fiddle hours, having temp workers charge time to a different task, to make his yard performance look better than other ones. And toward the end of the year, he would ‘lose’ time cards for temp workers, so the hours worked on certain days weren’t entered onto the computer until the next pay period. So they appeared only after the yearly reports were run, showing his yearly totals looking better than other supervisors. He even boasted about this within employees’ hearing.
One December, my friend was approaching X hours, and expected that she would soon be unscheduled for the rest of the month. But because her supervisor had been holding back her timecards, she didn’t show on the report as being near X hours. So he asked her to work extra days over the holidays. She accepted, knowing that this would put her well over the X hours limit.
Then in January, after her supervisor had finally entered all her hours into the computer system, she went to the union steward, pointed out the number of hours she had worked in December, and asked to enroll in the union and pay her first months’ dues. And said “Oh, now can you notify the supervisor that according to the contract, I am now a full-time, union-contract employee?” Which the union steward really enjoyed doing. And enjoyed the supervisor screaming & ranting and trying to find a loophole in the contract. Which he couldn’t, since the union negotiators had made the language pretty tight. And he couldn’t mention the holding time cards back, because it would make his bosses aware of how he had been fiddling hours to inflate his job performance stats.
My friend recently retired from the railroad, with a pension, after 20-some years on the job. That supervisor has been gone a long time. It’s nice when management’s unethical actions come back to bite them.
I agree, if it was a case of I bought the bread and several days later recycled it. But not in a situation where someone is charging people full price for supposedly fresh produce, that is actually stale days old bread.
Most shops put yesterdays “fresh baked in store” bread out on a separate stand at half price.
Yeah, same here. I worked there for about ten days before I finally managed to figure out what a scam it was. The first warning sign I should’ve picked up on was the fact that the receptionist always answered the phone with “Hello…?” instead of the company name. They didn’t want applicants to know where they’d be working, because so many people have been screwed over by Kirby.
I worked for a time on a boat giving short 1.5 hour long tours for tourists. I got back to the shop after one such trip to find my truck was gone.
Just as I was ready to call the police a co-worker pulled up in my truck. Seems the boss wanted him to do a business related errand so the boss went into my locker and took my keys out of my bag to give to my coworker.
The company truck was not available to do the errand because the boss had sent her husband (who did work there) out in the company truck for personal business.
My duped coworker and I are no longer employed there. The manager is still in charge.