30 Bosses That Pushed Their Employees To Do Unethical Things

I worked as a temp in a production factory in between permanent jobs.

I was on permanent 12hour night shifts making plastic fuel cans, they also made chemical bottles too for bleach and other things.

I had been on-site for about 2 weeks when I went out for a cigarette break the guys in the unit next door were part of the same company and as I was standing there I saw a guy hit the emergency stop button and open the safety gate to clear a blockage from the machine he was using. He cleared the blockage and the machine that shouldn't move once isolated decided to finish it's cycle which crushed the operator in the chest. I ran in managed to free him from the machine hit the emergency button to let the night manager know there was a problem. The supervisor came in first and panicked and ran for the manager.

When he came in I asked if they had called an ambulance, they looked at me like I was an alien and said we aren't allowed to call an ambulance because that could trigger a HSE visit (OSHA for you American folks).

I told them I'd call one myself and get the HSE involved, the old guy who'd got hurt was in agony and having a lot of pain when breathing. And these as***les didn't want to get him medical treatment.

I called the ambulance myself and as a qualified first responder I gave them the details of what I'd seen and also told the paramedic about them not wanting to call the ambulance because of the HSE (health and safety executive for anyone wondering),

The old guy had 3 broken ribs and a flail which is where a piece of rib is loose inside the chest cavity and potentially fatal.

I gave the old guy my contact information in case he wanted to make a claim against the as***les he worked for and went home.

I got a call the following day from the agency saying that the company didn't want me back on site, she asked me what had happened for them to say that, so I explained that an older guy had been crushed in a machine and they didn't want to call an ambulance for him and I had to treat him because they had nobody qualified on-site.

She asked if she could call me back, she rang me a couple of hours later to tell me that they had pulled all of the agency staff out of there and she had ring the HSE herself, which was totally unexpected for an agency.

The good news is that the old guy came through it ok. The company got a massive fine for the multiple breaches of HSE guidelines and shut down for 4 months while the safety gear was brought up to an acceptable level.

I worked for the largest property management in San Francisco and frequently the Manager would ask us to shred checks that came to us so they could file for eviction on tenants. I quit immediately.

Not me but my dad’s story. 1980’s. My dad worked at a small mid-western bank as an executive. One day a fellow executive comes in with several loan applications and says he needs them all approved. My dad looks over them quickly and immediately realizes none of the applicants qualified. If they approved them the loans would go into default within three months and these people would lose their farms. My dad said it wasn’t possible. The other exec says “well if you just fudge the numbers it is.” My father tells him that’s impossible because other exec never walked into his office and they never had this conversation. The other exec nods and takes the papers back. Six months later the FBI raids the bank. My father was the only exec who didn’t go to prison for fraud.

Told me to revoke the instruction for employees to take weekly covid tests as too many were testing positive.

This was during the Honduran caravan that was coming up to the US. A 19 year old girl from Guatemala fell off the wall and broke her leg. I was pulled off duty (Border Patrol) to take her to the hospital. Since they had to put a cast on, obviously her jeans couldn’t go back on and they put her in one of the hospital gowns, which as you can imagine, doesn’t insulate very well.

Driving back to the station, the supervisor calls me to let me know that her paperwork was done, and since at that time we were sending single adults back to Mexico with no court date, he said to bring her back to the POE (port of entry) and walk her across the bridge. Now, even though you might think it stays warm on the border, around December at midnight it gets f**king cold. Not Montana cold, but still around or just under freezing. So I asked the supervisor if we were going to at least let her stay in the detention facility so she could be returned in the morning when things had warmed up a little. After all, this was a 19 year old girl with a broken leg who had never been to Mexico, had no money, and now no pants.

“Nope. Just drop her at the POE and walk her back.”

Well, f**k.

Stopped by an ATM, pulled out $50, called one of my buddies who was from Mexico and asked him where a cheap motel was near the bridge. Gave her my WhatsApp info and walked her across, put the $50 in her pocket and told her where to go and to call me the next day.

Two days later me and the same buddy went into Mexico and put her on a bus to a different city (in Mexico) closer to where her aunt lived (on the U.S side). Not sure if she made it. She texted me when she got to the city in Mexico, so I have hopes she at least made contact with her aunt, but I don’t know if she made it into the U.S.

So yeah. Was ordered by a supervisor to drop a freezing girl with a broken leg in a foreign country at midnight.

I used to be a behavioral therapist for kids on the autism spectrum disorder & was a shadow aide at school for one of my clients. One day my kiddo’s classmate comes up to me and tells me how he has seen his dad hit his mom multiple times.. I end up calling my supervisor to inform him of what happened (I was 18 and had no idea of how mandated reporting worked). He told me next time to “mind my business” when I asked him the process for calling Child Protective Services … of course I called CPS and had the emergency hotline social worker walk me through the process.

Unethical & illegal.

Back in a butcher shop portion of a grocery store I worked at. The supervisor asked me to change the date on some burger that wasn’t selling. The day she asked me to do this was the sell by date. I even asked her if that was safe/legal. She just tapped her name tag that said supervisor on it and said that was the only thing I needed to worry about. I put new tags on all of the packages while she was there but I didn’t put them on the shelves. After she left for the night I found the store manager and showed him. I showed him the old tags, which were just under the new tags so it was easy to pull them back and prove it. He had me toss the burger down the trash chute and my supervisor was gone from the store by the end of the week.

I was fresh out of high school and working at Blockbuster while the DC snipers were out killing people at random locations. For those not familiar, it was a period of I think a few weeks where these two guys were driving around shooting people while they pumped their gas, mowed lawns, went about their general business and so on. Some places were putting up tarps to keep customers safe, but they shot anyone who was convenient, really. It was a terrifying time to live in the area.

I was scheduled to go in the morning a child was shot at the school down the street from my house. My manager, in an absolute panic because we were so close by, refused to open the store.

I got a call from the district manager telling me that I still had to go in, and no, my neighborhood being on lockdown was not an excuse to miss work. As soon as I could leave, I was expected to show up. I assume she was trying to get the manager to come in as well.

I got to the store and my manager still wasn't there, so the DM said she would send me to another store. It didn't really occur to me at that point that she was doing it purely because she could, and that there was absolutely no reason since the store I actually worked at wasn't opening.

But what made it especially s***ty was that she sent me to a nearby store that was on the highway, with these tall, wide glass windows all around the length of the store. Exactly the kind of place that the snipers liked to hit, since they could shoot someone and then drive off down the highway. And the manager at that store proceeded to make me stand on a ladder and clean the windows out front.

In hindsight, I wonder if I wasn't just a sacrificial offering so they wouldn't get shot if that location was targeted.

Keep people at work when there was a chemical leak from the car painting shop next door, and people were getting sick.

The boss wasn't on site (almost never was), I tried calling him and got no answer, and I was the most senior worker on site so I sent everyone home.

When I was almost home (1h+ commute) he called me back. He had gotten my voicemail where I explained the situation and he was not happy. Apparently we should have waited it out or I should have arranged for everyone to work from home (not possible).

The guy was a dickhead but this one still makes me angry when I think about it.

Many, many years ago I was working as a part-time mechanic for a guy selling "restored cars". He called me in for an emergency brake repair on a TR-4. One of the rear wheel cylinders had failed and he needed it fixed ASAP. He had a buyer lined up with cash.

Instead of having me hone and rebuild the cylinder properly (I had the tools and the kit to do so) he wanted me to cut the pipe to the rear brakes and just crimp it over onto itself, enough to stop the leak. He was in a hurry and wanted it fixed before the customer saw anything.

I fixed it properly anyway, so that no one would die, and then rolled my toolbox out of there that very night.

Also at Dollar Tree, most of my cashiers were teenagers or dips**ts that never showed up for work so this older Korean woman kept getting called in to work the register. She was pretty much getting 40+ hours every week and open season for benefits was getting ready to start. My district manager called me and told me I had to convince her to not get any benefits or else. I told him that else better be him doing that s**t himself because I'm not about to do his dirty work.

My old boss at dollar tree would make me drive her to the bank in my car every night. And she would have me park like 10 feet back from the ATM while she walked up to it. She told me that if someone ever tried to run up on her while she was depositing the money I had to run them over. She said if they were too close to her to just hit her as well. She was incredibly adamant that I absolutely HAD to do this and very serious.

Our boss asked the whole staff on Thursday if anyone wanted to “work overtime over the weekend”, hoping to complete an extra 500 orders. And if we completed said 500 orders, everyone would get a $500 bonus. I asked her “what happens if we don’t complete the 500 orders?”, she then said “no one gets paid”. So I said “so, in theory, we could complete 499 orders and we wouldn’t get a dime?” She said “correct”.

I promptly turned their offer down and realized I was working for idiots.

Sleep with a girl (with him) that he had just spiked with drugs.

Was a bouncer at a club & the other guy was head of security. I went straight down to the police, they didn’t seem interested, so I went back, watched him, worked out who the girl was before the drugs had taken effect, and got her friend to take her home before she f**ked out. Watched him the rest of the night to make sure he couldn’t do anything and reported him that next day to his bosses.

When I was 16 I worked at Spencer's in the mall. The store manager was a middle aged female who found out she was being demoted. She made the decision to instead quit. Her last day I happened to be closing the store with her. Nothing wierd, we had done it many times before. After everything was closed and locked up we were punching out in the back room. I went to open the door that led back into the store and she physically put her hand over it and closed it like a scene from a movie. Then she said "you know I make schedules right" I said "yea I understand that". She said "Do you think it's a coincidence that you and I are closing my last day? This is your opportunity to do anything that you want with me me." I was so Uncomfortable and I didn't know what to do, so I gave her a hug and she said really that's it.. All the while her husband and 2 kids were waiting in the car outside the mall to pick her up to pick her up.

I was working at a Dollar Tree in Tennessee as a second job for some extra money and I was a key holder, big whoop, as my daughter was soon to be born.

It was the big day, I was at the hospital and the store manager wanted me to come to work and cover her so she could cheat on her husband with her boyfriend.

I obviously refused to leave the hospital, when I returned to work my next scheduled shift I was fired for insubordination.

When I was a teenager, I worked at a doctor's office after school and during the summers. The doctor was a total as***le, but for whatever reasons he liked me and was nice to me and the pay was really good.

Because he was an as***le, there was a lot of turnover in the office. This was 30 years ago now, so it was when you'd put ads in the paper to hire people. So, he would put ads in the paper to hire office staff and he had a separate phone number that he'd list in the ad for people to call.

He told me that only I should answer the line and when I took down the applicant's name and number I should mark candidates that "sounded black" with an asterisk as he "didn't want to hire blacks." Ummm, this was in 1989, not 1949. He'd done a lot of very questionable things during my time there, but this one took the cake. I didn't say a word though. I got tons of calls for the ad the first day it ran and didn't mark an asterisk next to any names at all, just wrote down the names and numbers.

At the end of the day, he asks if we got any calls and I said, "Yes, quite a few. Here's the list." He looks it over and goes "You didn't mark any of these." I just looked at him coyly and said, "Gee, I didn't really know what you meant by 'sounded black', and it's just really hard to tell that over a phone call, so I just took the names and numbers." I could tell he was piissseeeedddddd but didn't say a word.

Ironically, he ended up hiring a black woman for one of the office positions and she ended up working there for several years. Weird.

Branch Manager (Banking) asked me to pose in a picture, showing a lot of cleavage, to use on his construction loan website for his builders. He wanted them to ‘see’ who they would be working with in a daily basis so he could get more business.

I’m a tattoo apprentice and I got fired from my old shop because I didn’t come in to clean other peoples stations and do my duties because I had a horrible flu and couldn’t stop myself from vomiting every 20 min. You’d think a place that makes you get a certificate in blood-borne pathogens would understand but apparently that just gets you fired and told ‘You’re not committed enough’.

A boss I worked with asked me to help another manager in the financial department to do a homework he had to do as part of a master degree. The manager was doing a master in computer science management and took a dev class.

I’m an IT engineer. He wanted to pay me to code the work he had to do: a basic calculator program in Java.

I refused, for ethical reason.