Jobs from Hell.

[king mob]

Holy crap...that sounds like a workers comp claim here if it happened.

This was about 91 before UK and EU health and safety law ensured that this sort of this is now thankfully a thing of the past, unless it's a shonky operation.

[Charles RB]

My brother did the box-packing job at Walkers for a summer, I remember being amazed at how greasy he got without being anywhere near the actual crisp production line.

How the heck did that happen?

[king mob]

How the heck did that happen?

The air basically. The factory I worked in was in Leicester and we were at the end of a big production line that kept going all day long. However the amount of grease in the air from constantly frying crisps was ridiculous and the nearer the actual production line you were, the greasier you were. I was lucky in that I managed to blag being the bloke loading up the trucks so was as far away from the line as possible. Still smelled like a chippy though for 14 quid an hour (that was 94 or so) it was worth it.

[Paradox]

Grease in the air does that. I'd come home every day from Chi-Chi's REEKING of spicy grease, and I was only the busboy.

[Melanieshaman]

Gamestop- now before you laugh, hear me out. I was a manager in training, and before my training was complete, they fired a manager (from a different store than the one I trained at), and tossed me in. About the same time as she was getting fired, her assistant went out on maternity leave, one key holder went back to school (out of town), and the other walked out. I was left to run the store on my own. I had a handful of part timers, one one of which could work mornings. So I worked 6 sometimes 7 days a week (got help on sundays from a key holder or manager from other stores), but i pretty much worked open to close 6 days a week. SALARIED! I was making less per hour than my part timers.

My boss had no sympathy for me, and said "this is what managers do." Meanwhile we were having huge issues with a neighbor in our apartment complex-who happened to be the maintenance guy for the complex. He was a drinker and would sit on his patio (below us) and scream at us if he heard a peep...we couldn't have our windows open for fear he'd hear the tv and file a complaint. The stress at work and the stress at home was too much for myself and my wife...so one morning, I went into work and received a voicemail the guy I wanted to promote to my assistant failed his drug test and the other prospect was no good. Which meant more 80 hour work weeks. I called my wife and told her, and she said you're miserable there why don't you leave? (We had been considering moving back to california anyway). So that's what I did, she came and picked me up-i loved up the store, we drove to the training store and i dropped my keys in the store managers hand and said "Tell Brian (the district manager) I quit."

As I walked out of the mall i felt a HUGE weight lifted off my shoulders.

I was thrilled to get away from GS once and for all... that and all the crooked practices they have- I hated it.

[RDMacQ]

I once had a job that had set hours, but the management expected their employees to stay behind after work to finish all their tasks for the day. Normally, this wouldn't be out of line, if it were 15 minutes here or there, every once in a while. But in many cases, this was two to three hours after the employees shift would be over by the time they would be finished their work, every single day. And I heard of even worse cases from other parts of the company, with some people working 12 hour days, five days a week. Management also made it very clear that there was to be NO overtime. This could mean that a person could end up working 50 to 60 hours a week, but only get paid for 40.

Management also "encouraged" people to eat at their desk (i.e. work through lunch) and could not take any breaks during our shifts.

I was also shifted over to night shift against my will (I was told I had to work the night shift or they would "accept" me turning down the position as my two weeks notice) and found out that I was expected to work 12 hours straight without any breaks at all.

This may not seem all that bad, but the thing of it is, these actions are illegal. An employee is entitled by the government in my area to get two fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch if they work eight hours. If they work over 12, they are obligated to get at least an hour for lunch. And if they work over 40 hours, they are entitled to overtime pay. So the company was willing to break the law and drive their employees to exhaustion in order to save a buck.

Needless to say, I didn't stay long there.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

I once had a job that had set hours, but the management expected their employees to stay behind after work to finish all their tasks for the day. Normally, this wouldn't be out of line, if it were 15 minutes here or there, every once in a while. But in many cases, this was two to three hours after the employees shift would be over by the time they would be finished their work, every single day. And I heard of even worse cases from other parts of the company, with some people working 12 hour days, five days a week. Management also made it very clear that there was to be NO overtime. This could mean that a person could end up working 50 to 60 hours a week, but only get paid for 40.

Management also "encouraged" people to eat at their desk (i.e. work through lunch) and could not take any breaks during our shifts.

I was also shifted over to night shift against my will (I was told I had to work the night shift or they would "accept" me turning down the position as my two weeks notice) and found out that I was expected to work 12 hours straight without any breaks at all.

This may not seem all that bad, but the thing of it is, these actions are illegal. An employee is entitled by the government in my area to get two fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch if they work eight hours. If they work over 12, they are obligated to get at least an hour for lunch. And if they work over 40 hours, they are entitled to overtime pay. So the company was willing to break the law and drive their employees to exhaustion in order to save a buck.

Needless to say, I didn't stay long there.

Really the moment the employer started forcing employees to work 50-60 hour work weeks without OT pay , they should have been turned in.

[RDMacQ]

Really the moment the employer started forcing employees to work 50-60 hour work weeks without OT pay , they should have been turned in.

Thing of it is, it's way easier to just quit and go work someplace else. It's sort of a perfect storm situation in that the people who are being manipulated don't regard this position as a career and are usually just there to pay the bills. I myself only worked there because I was laid off a few months before and I needed a job badly. Reporting them to the Labor Board of Canada would take a while to really see any change take place, and I and many others had no desire to stick around for the long haul. It was simply less hassle to just find another place to work. I myself didn't last longer than six months. And there was a high turnover rate in other positions as well. Very few people stuck around to be "promoted."

[Phelpzy]

My last job, every two weeks we rotated shifts, for 7a to 3p for two weeks, ten 3p to 11p for two, the 11p to 7a for two weeks, then start back over, I was a "mixer" which involved carrying and slicing open 100-150lbs over a shoot 3ft off the ground into a mixer which blended everything together, these were 3500lb to 4000lb "batches" mostly for the company "Chick-Fil-A"

[sHayden]

The job itself wasn't awful but what happened was. I worked at a "non-secure treatment facility for troubled juvenile females".
Christmas day there was an incident with a resident and she had to be physically restrained. The state has VERY strict guidelines about what is allowed to be done in these situations. A female staff member gets the girl in question on the ground on her stomach, then sits on her. A. Sitting on them is a huge huge no-no and putting them on their stomach is not allowed if they're an asthmatic like this girl was. B. The girl is maybe 5'1 and 110 lbs, while the staff member is 375 minimum, she also verbally insults the girl.
Now, this staff member had 10 years tenure in a place where most people last 2. She was also fond of saying "I can do what I want. Black staff are valuable cause these kids don't really listen to white people like the rest of you." She basically acted like some petty warlord among staff and residents.
This though, where she could have seriously hurt that kid, she shouldn't have gotten away with. This incident was witnessed by myself and 4 other people. The staff member who committed the act worked in my unit so I reported it to my supervisor. She informed me that she needed to look into it. When questioned only one other person said they saw anything happen. A month later there were "reasons" to fire the staff member and I who said we witnessed the incident.

[mikekerrIII]

Really the moment the employer started forcing employees to work 50-60 hour work weeks without OT pay , they should have been turned in.

When those employee's are management and on salary finding a legal issue to turn them in over is hard

[Shellhead]

Then there was the one where my boss threatened to beat me up. He was a big guy. But so am I. Just looked him in the eye and started laughing. Wish had thrown a punch, that would have been a fun lawsuit.

On my one-year anniversary at an accounting job, I was trying to figure out how to ask for a raise from my mean boss. He called me into his office just after lunch, not to discuss my raise, but to accuse me of stealing $180,000 worth of hearing aid parts. Then he fired me. He was a foot shorter than me but had a bully personality. I was still surprised by his next words. "If I had a gun, I would shoot you right now."

Three months after I was fired, they finally caught the real thieves. The head of the inventory department and one of the customer service reps were running a little side business, directly selling replacement parts to our customers at discount prices. I just had the bad luck of running the last full physical inventory count before they started stealing.

[Shellhead]

Other hellish jobs that I've had:

1. Opening shift at McDonalds, working in the grill area. Hot, greasy, hard work, with hours that killed my social life at the time.

2. My last summer working construction for my dad. I was only 5'11", 165 pounds at the time. The two-story building with high ceilings had a working elevator, but nobody was allowed to use it because the general contractor didn't want it to get scratched up. I periodically was required to move boxes weighing about 120 pounds up the stairs without any help. I used a hand truck to wrestle the boxes up the steps, one difficult step at a time, and took a long break at the landing and at the top. Also, it was August in Indiana, and there was no air conditioning.

3. Nine years ago, I was doing accounting for a company that was in a lot of trouble. The core business was re-selling CAD software, and their main supplier was squeezing all the distributors in preparation for taking over the whole distribution network, so incoming cash flows became slow and unreliable. The owner was wasting company money on personal crap, and 25% of our "employees" were his worthless friends and family. And we stopped paying payroll taxes, so I was very worried about the IRS and losing my CPA license. Then the paychecks became irregular, and I was eventually spending most of each day talking to angry vendors and collection companies. The day that I quit, the company still owed me more than $3,000 in back pay.

[DebkoX]

Work for my dad, at the age of 8 he made us clean toilets (Females, males and disabled, surely kids shouldn't be cleaning that!) made us sweep the floors, clean his flat.....It wasn't the work that was horrible, it was the gratitude, he wouldn't show no appreciation whatsoever, holiday my ass!

[Paradox]

mikekerrIII got a weird idea:

When those employee's are management and on salary finding a legal issue to turn them in over is hard

Yes, it is. Not that it applies because the poster didn't mention management at all except as "management told us". He was obviously just a grunt and, yes, making grunts work unpaid OT is illegal. Even paying them straight time would be illegal.

Hee, I got a check a couple of years ago out of the blue for a bit over a hundred bucks from my employer. See, they hadn't been using a 40 hr/wk method for OT that was required. They didn't pay unless you went over 80 hrs/2 wks, which is illegal. Someone turned them in and they had to go back through 10 years of payroll and pay everyone correctly.