On August 15, 2015, The New York Times published a devastating expose on Amazon's workplace practices. It revealed a "winner takes all" culture where employees are encouraged to knife one another in the back. Where getting cancer or having a miscarriage can result in disciplinary action. Where people are taken in, ground down into nothing, and then spat out by a lethal corporate machine. No wonder former employees have claimed that being homeless is better than working for the retail giant.
Yet Amazon is far from alone in the way they treat their employees. Across the corporate world, CEOs are leading companies into territory so despicable that they're indistinguishable from supervillains.
10. Family Dollar - Unpaid Overtime And Backbreaking Work
Ever since the Great Recession hit, there's been an explosion in dollar stores. Family Dollar, Dollar General, Dollar Tree . . . how can all these places stay in business with such low prices? Easy—they punish their employees.
Since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, companies have been forced to pay their hourly employees time and a half for overtime. This means that most stores have an incentive to cap a worker's week at 40 hours. Not so at the dollar stores. Instead, ordinary workers are promoted to "managers," given fixed salaries, then forced to work so many hours that they wind up just as poor as before their promotions.
Rather than get extra responsibilities, managers are often in charge in name only. In practice, they do all the backbreaking grunt work they would normally do, only now they have to do it longer. In 2013, 14 Family Dollar "managers" sued the company for making them mop floors and stack shelves for over 60 hours each week with no overtime. One plaintiff worked such long hours that he was required to sleep at the store three nights a week. Another who accidentally sliced his finger open was refused medical attention until his shift was over.
Just as shocking was Family Dollar's policy regarding shoplifters. According to former "managers," it was company policy to challenge thieves. Unsurprisingly, this often resulted in employees getting attacked. In one instance, a guy who was injured confronting a shoplifter had his contract terminated because he could no longer handle heavy work.
9. Target - Union Busting, Incessant Propaganda
Target has a good reputation among liberals who are too ethical to shop at Walmart but too poor to shop anywhere else. Billed as "one of the world's most ethical companies," it's supposed to be friendly, fast, and fun. Unless you're a member of a union, in which case they want your blood.
In the last five years, Target has gone to hilarious and often-illegal lengths to stop its employees from unionizing. In every store, workers are forced to take "training days" which consist of nothing more than watching antiunion propaganda. In some cases, these sessions have been followed by veiled threats against union organizers. One store issued a pamphlet ominously titled "Will the store close if the union gets in?"
They've followed up on these threats. When a store in Valley Stream, New York, nearly voted to unionize, Target shut the place for seven months, suspending workers without pay. Although they claimed that the store was being "remodeled," others reported the closure as a convenient excuse to fire pro-union employees. A judge found that managers at Valley Stream had unlawfully threatened and interrogated employees prior to the union vote.
8. Microsoft - Corporate Undermining And Backstabbing
One of the major criticisms of Amazon in The New York Times piece was its use of "stack ranking." But the practice is far from unique to the online retailer. It nearly drove Microsoft to ruin.
The idea is to rank everyone in the company from best to worst and then eliminate the worst. To make this more practical, each department ranks their members separately. In those departments, each team often does the same. The lowest-ranking members are then fired, while the highest-ranking members get massively remunerated. It sounds like a harsh yet practical way to weed out the useless. In reality, it turned Microsoft into a den of paranoia, backbiting, and aggressive office rivalries.
