“We All Quit In Solidarity”: 61 People Reveal What Led To Mass Resignations At Work

My boss fought against a cost saving initiative that would really hurt the community we are supposed to be helping. Like at ground level where people are already choosing between gassing up their car to go to work or having food, families would lose about $80 per week.

He was told it wouldn't go through, but we needed to "appear to be on board". It went through. He quit. The board asked him not to announce it. He announced it. 19 other team leaders and managers quit. They all moved to a tribal based initiative where they can do the work they were meant to be doing all along. Im happy for all of them.

Not seen but lived the consequences. At some point the director at my uni passed a law lowering the budget. Many teachers and other people warned that they would leave if it did pass. It passed. About 100 left.

Working in a call center, government contract supporting a program that has two major busy seasons for different things and an off season.

Teams Meeting with us (frontline people who man the phones and take the calls), our supervisor (who was an **angel**), our Manager, and the Call Center Manager (top person on-site).

We'd just completed the second major busy season, back to back calls from the beginning to the end of the day, automated with a routing system that puts the caller in our ear *3 seconds* after the last one ends.

There's no sitting there watching a phone ring. There's no avoiding the next call. It was *grueling* and *tortuous*. The thing that made the job worth it was that for ⅓ of the year there was time between calls, anywhere from a few minutes to nearly an hour.

Except, that hadn't happened. And we all wondered why we we're still getting B2B calls.

We're going over call metrics and the Call Center Manager casually let's slip that they've finally managed to fine tune the temp numbers at other sites to address the "unwanted downtime issues" to ensure we're consistently on the phone at all times year round.

You could hear a pin drop.

Half the Team quit within a week and those that remained were informed that they were not allowed to tell anybody what the Call Center Manager had said.

Manager was all pilled up on Xanax, messed up a handful of orders up, had to "make an example" of someone and fired my friend (we both worked at BK for beer money in early 20s after our blue collar jobs). Me and like 3 other people all quit that night and never came back. Got a call from the DM offering a raise to stay (lol $1). Nah, I'm good lol went back to working on peoples cars on the side.

The opposite of a bad manager driving people off. Corporate decided to fire a good manager because he made a higher up look bad by accidentally exposing the higher up using our branch budget to pay for legal stuff for branches they were planning on divesting later that year. They fired him, and lost a good church of people he’d brought up and worked with over 20 years. He was skilled, knowledgeable and well liked. Bad leadership really ruins everything.

It didn’t happen all in one day but it was within a week or two of one another. I worked for child protection services in a state that has one of the lowest populations in the country, but had one of the highest numbers of children in foster care above even California or New York. Best practice to serve families and children safely and well is around 25-30 kids on a caseload. Some of us had almost 80 kids on our caseloads. We were drowning, working crippling overtime, and begging for help, and constantly pointing out how unsafe and negligent those caseloads were and what a disservice we were doing to children and parents and the reunification process and even the foster parents caring for the children. And were constantly being told we weren’t doing enough.

One day we were all called into a meeting where the head of The Department of Health and Human Services, the very department in charge of CPS, intended to address our concerns. Or so we thought. She stood up and gave us a scathing lecture about how none of us were victims, we chose to be employed there and we should just be quiet and do our jobs and be thankful for the employment. Within a week or two anyone in my office that had been employed there with any significant time or experience resigned and took other, far less stressful social work positions in the community. Some that even paid better and didn’t require overtime. They were left in shambles and with only entry level workers barely out of training and had to redistribute hundreds of cases. I’d love to be able to say there have been reforms or improvements in my state but sadly, there hasn’t been.

Had a drunk for a VP...like ***everyday***-***drinking-by-12-Noon-drunk***. He was highly inappropriate all the time, a mean bully, and tried sleeping with as many women as possible on his teams. The three Directors that reported directly to him all quit on the same day (I was one of the Directors). At least 3-4 people on each of our teams also quit after we walked out. In total 11 people quit that day, and another 6 within a week. It represented about 1/3 of the entire IT staff. The CIO tried to get us all back, but we had been complaining to him for months, and he did nothing because he was also a drunk and was the VP's main drinking buddy. They would leave the office at 3PM every day and go to a bar down the street....***EVERY SINGLE DAY***. Not sure about the other two Directors, but I told all of this to the Director of HR who called me an hour after I left. The VP and CIO finally got fired a couple months later, but by that time another 20 people had left. This was a few years ago, and they've never really recovered the loss of all those experienced employees. It was tough for a couple months until I found a job, but I'd do it again...you have to draw the line somewhere.

Not quite all in a day, but my last job got a new manager who had NO IDEA how our department actually worked. Between micromanaging (we had to keep detailed time logs of how we spent our workday, down to the minutes we were away from our desk.) and completely impossible productivity "goals" and the fact that she bragged about coming back to work two days after gallbladder surgery as a way to shame us for taking time off, our department went from 8 people to 3 in a matter of months. I walked out after she accused me of faking a broken leg. (The leg had healed by then, but she was still harping about me missing work on New Years Eve because I couldn't drive and the bus didn't run on holidays.) Three others retired earlier than they'd planned.

Back in the early 2000's, something like '03/'04 I worked a summer temp job at a plant that made small parts for a major auto manufacturer. The week before their summer shutdown it was announced that their summer profit sharing bonus was being cancelled due to lower than expected sales across the board. People were understandably pissed but willing to deal with it. The next day our local paper had an article about how the company had promoted a new CEO who's salary was around $6 million per year, more than twice the last CEO. Nearly half the oncoming shift clocked in, quit and went home.

I was an ER nurse. I was on duty during a holiday and knew what to expect. There were several young nurses who were working their first holiday and were not happy about it. As the day became more crazy, the nurses were more vocal about missing out on their holiday plans. Finally it is early evening, the waiting room is packed and every exam room was filled. I became very concerned why it was taking so long to get the flow going. It turns out. I was the only nurse left. The others all left to go home to be with their families. None returned to work another shift. One said she was upset so many people decided to get sick on a holiday.

I worked in an ice cream shop and the manager was awful. She once stopped me from handing an ice cream cone to an old man buying ice cream for his granddaughter to weigh the ice cream and scold me for "overscooping" in front of the horrified customer and confused child. She liked to give us three hour shifts on weekend nights so you wrecked the night but made less than $10.

Five of the seven workers, all high school kids, quit in the same couple days.

Worked for DHL. Manager was lying to several people about them becoming the new manager, gave the job to a friend of his. We were only a 7 person crew. 3 of us walked after we got that news then saw a 600lb cnc table was loaded on top of all of the other packages and destroyed them. We got hired on at FedEx.

While we were out at breakfast together the lazy guy we all didn’t like accused us of stealing the scanners. We got a text threatening police from the route owner. I took pictures of us dropping off all company equipment in the trucks and giving keys to the supervisor though so sent that then never heard anything else.

I was working as in house counsel in legal compliance when a new CEO joined the company. She started to make small requests that grew into large requests, generally directly to junior personnel, asking us to obfuscate certain things, "spin" some required documentation to "distract" from elements, etc. When anyone pushed back, they were put on a PIP.

The entire legal team handed in our resignations in the same day, starting from the General Counsel and working down to the last paralegal. The HR director who received the letters (we literally lined up outside her door with them typed and printed) stopped asking questions and by the end was just accepting the letters while looking like she was going to burst into tears. She was a nice enough lady but she shouldn't have let them use PIPs to try to bully us into breaking the law.

I think the CEO lasted a few more years and ended up being removed after the company lost a lot of money.

During an all-hands meeting, when we were expecting to be informed about bonuses we had earned: “Instead of a bonus for doubling our monthly goals during a wage freeze, please enjoy a complimentary small drink from the soda fountain. We even kept it on for second shift for you guys!”

14 people, 6 of them 40+ year employees, threw their badges at the guy and left on the spot, at the beginning of the shift (total shift workforce was 60 ish), and 4 of those guys were directly involved in prototyping with the engineers and validating out-of-spec parts being reworked with new processes to potentially recover otherwise scrap parts and save a few million a year in rework. All of that got flushed because someone thought they could flex nuts without considering people who have chock-full 401Ks and only need a reason to leave. We got to I think 28% of the goal for the next month, and did not break 100% until after I left a few years later.

Ceo zero’d out the entire companies PTO balance to reduce his cash liability while trying to secretly sell the company. I was told he was told by the legal team that if one more employee left his sale would be jeopardized. This man was the worst human ive ever worked for. I went to the CFO, got all my employees PTO back within 2hrs. Once it was on the books myself and the entire engineering team walked out. A week later the entire software team walked out. He still somehow found his golden parachute. I will never work for anyone but myself now.

They refused to give me a pay raise to match market and the new guy.
It was a litmus test and almost the entire team was gone by end of the week. And all but one within a month.

Went to a bridal shop and we were told by a worker that we were welcome to stay and have the owner help us but that the rest of them were leaving/quitting right now due to how horrible she treats her employees!

Oh man, when i was an apprentice tech at a dealership years ago, we had a TERRIBLE management team. The upper management and service managers were brutal.

We had a total of 3 service advisors at the time who were all good at their jobs and took a lot of undeserved treatmen. They all found other work and organized to just not show up one day.

It was absolute chaos watching the techs and customers give the management team a hard time while they scrambled to fill in.

Thank you for bringing back that memory.

A line cook was sent home sick and a manger decided to jump in the kitchen to "help" and became a complete jerk. The waitstaff got fed up and almost all walked out and the kitchen staff followed. This was on a Friday. The next day the staff that was scheduled that did not work the previous day, came in and set up. When the doors opened they all walked out. It was brilliant.

Day 3 as a frack hand…

Pulled up into what can only be described as a river bed after 3 days of rain. The mud was literally hip deep, it was almost 100 degrees, and like 90% humidity. We had to rig up, do the first blast, wire line, do another one, and tear down…I was brand new and several hundred miles from home, zero experience and at the time still too tough to understand how messed up the situation was. 20% of the crew quit when we got back to the office, was told that’s normal. Boss bought us subway as a thanks.

That was the single hardest day of work I’ve ever done…in any field. It really set the bar high for what kinda nonsense I can deal with.