30 Bosses That Pushed Their Employees To Do Unethical Things

I used to work over night as a department store stocker.

Not at all uncommon for me to have to work 12 to 15 hour days because they refused to hire more than a skeleton crew.

So it was equally not uncommon that I'd hit my 40 hours well before the work week was completed. At least once a month my boss would ask me to clock out at 40 hours and keep working with the promise they would provide paid days off to even the balance once the work load was lighter.

I absolutely refused and was met with the usual "You're not being a team player." nonsense.

"RUN it till it breaks."

Me standing there running a $11.5 million machine that uses liquid gold and computer parts for cars, telling bosses and technicians that it's making horrible rattling sounds.

It broke and cost them $8700 and three days down time, instead of $90 and one day's maintenance.

While working at a fast food restaurant we were preparing for a corporate inspection and my job was to clean the walk-in cooler and freezer. My boss told me to wet mop both. When I mentioned to him that wet mopping the freezer would cause it to turn into an ice rink he told me to put a cap full of antifreeze in the water. I told him this is the freezer where we keep beef, chicken, and french fries and I was not going to do it. He threatened to write me up but I still refused. He did not last long as the manager.

I will not name the fast food restaurant because this happened almost 25 years ago.

No me but my brother was a quality control engineer for a major airline. He discovered that most of the seats were bolted down with bolts that were too small. Seats could potentially break loose if the plane had a hard landing. Boss told him to sign off on it anyway. Because it would cost millions to go back and fix it. My brother told him to sign it and quit on the spot.

I used to work in the bakery department of Sainsbury's as my first job when I turned 16. At first it was just stacking shelves, but eventually they wanted me to work in the bakery itself. They emphasised several times that under no circumstance was into use the bread slicer as I was not old enough.

This lasted about a week until I was on the closing shift in the bakery on my own. The shift manager came in and started shouting at me about why I hadn't sliced all of the bread. I told him exactly what I had been told by my supervisor and another manager. He told me he doesn't care and that I couldn't finish work until it was done. This being my first job I just agreed to do it.

About 3 months later the machine developed a fault and it ended up lightly electrocuting me. I raised the issue and put it into the accident book. When It was investigated I was blamed by the manager as I shouldn't have been using the machine to begin with. When I reminded him that he was the one who told me to use it he denied it and gave me a written warning. Once the machine had been fixed he still expected me to use it. When I refused he sent me home and didn't add me to the rota for another 3 weeks.

First job after I graduated college, boss called me into his office and had me sit next to his daughter while she took an online exam, told me to make sure she passed it.

She definitely wouldn’t have passed if I wasn’t in the room.

I worked as a personal trainer years ago and the owner of the gym i worked in told me to have my clients get results slower so they would buy more training

At Dunkin I was asked to go take product from our store to another one 15 minutes away. This was during my shift. She demanded I clocked out so that if I got in an accident, the company wouldn’t get booked.

I quit not too long after that.

I ran a report at work, it supported an initiative he was opposed to. So he set up a meeting and asked me to run a “what if” scenario that would make it look like his initiative was better—I told him I could however I’d have to let our department VP and the other department VP know it wasn’t a “real” report, just a made up one, so they wouldn’t make decisions based off of the analysis (which they were going to do which is why I was running the report to begin with).

He chewed me out for 30 minutes saying he decided what was real or not. Literally laid into me, called me every name in the book. So I sent two reports, both conflicting each other, and the two VPs held a meeting to ask WTF??? And we get in there and my boss starts it off by saying to me “Why did you send conflicting reports this makes no sense?” Completely threw me under the bus

I had a boss ask to me take a bunch of stock from the warehouse to his personal storage unit, and not to ask any questions …