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People Share Stories About Workplaces So Toxic That The Entire Staff Quit At Once, Here Are The 35 Wildest Ones
Some jobs are so unnecessarily bad that it almost seems like the managers are competing in some secret contest to determine who is the truly worst boss. After all, employee turnover isn’t that uncommon and even a competent manager’s style might not work with every employee. But to have the entire team quit at once really takes some work.
Recently, a person asked the internet to share their stories of job experiences so bad, all the staff walked out at once. So scroll down and upvote what you think are the wildest ones, and comment your own stories. And if you want to explore other horrible job experiences, Bored Panda has you covered, so check out some more here.
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Oh fun one. Our salon lost our manager to having a new baby and becoming a SAHM. It was sad to see her go. So our DM comes in and says he's hiring from within the salon. He's been looking at our sales , client retention and what not to pick.
Meanwhile for a month or so we had no manager. So Becky took the role on and did great. ( We still had paperwork and orders that needed done) She set up a cleaning schedule. She fixed a lot of simple issues that our old manager just didn't see issues with. Our schedule was written out for the entire month . Basically she stepped up and put in a lot of work she didn't get paid to do. Becky also had a really bad back. Was 45 and did hair for 27 years. If anyone needed to manager it was her. Her client list had gone down a bit, but she was still very busy.
Tara had worked their six months at this point. And Tara was not a team player. She would put your sales commission on her account accidentally. She would say things like she's paid to do hair not clean. Not to mention, she weight shamed everyone. Skinny fat in between. She found hurtful things to say about everyone. But she would be loud and laugh and be goofy. So we kinda just rolled out eyes and moved on . She was 23 and had a decent client list and remained " busy" . But here's the thing. She wasn't busy. Her friends would come in, hang out and whatever. Sure, she would do a wash and blowdry. But that's $20. No cutting no coloring. When her actual clients came in, she would do their hair and after they left, her and her friends would laugh about them. Our old manager had to tell her if her friends aren't there to get their hair done they don't need to hangout.
So DM comes in and sees all these clients / friends waiting on Tara. His dumba*s thinks that Becky overstepped her role and Tara should be managing.
The best part. We all looked at each other and started packing our bags. 6 people walked out. Tara crying that this isn't fair she earned this and we are just jealous bit**es. We went as a group and rented spots at a different salon. The old one shut down a month later. Because we take our clients with us. And washing your friends' hair doesn't keep the salon a float.
I love this story, it has everything: loyalty, revenge, The Bad Person goes down eventually. It's a modern-a$$ Disney film!
Boss man told workers hell fire them for discussing wages, someone left a copy of the federal law protecting our rights to discuss wages on his desk, he gathered everyone into his office where he pinned the papers to a wall and shot them with his shotgun and then says anyone who discusses wages will be next. Wel all left and someone called the anonymous police line about a shooting at the place.
CEO announced to the company, amid concerns of being overworked, that other people have it worse and ‘if you don’t like it you can leave’. So everyone left.
While these may seem extreme, many companies are actually facing mass voluntary turnover, as workers choose to find other opportunities. Many have learned to not take themselves for granted and will leave bad jobs quickly. In 2021 alone, 45% of resignations were from people who had worked at a position for less than a year. The sunk cost fallacy still affects us, however, so this number drops to 8% after at least three years in a position.
Now, maybe that’s too harsh, if you are fine with your workplace, you’ll probably stay more than a year, if you can. Certain industries do suffer more turnover than others. Annual turnover in the US is around 18%, but it goes up to 30% for retail and commerce. These positions, particularly in service roles, have the misfortune of having to deal with potentially terrible managers and the general public. On the other hand, the energy industry experiences only around 15% turnover, as power infrastructure might kill you, but won’t yell at you for doing your job.
Record profits are made. The ceo an managers get raises " lunch brakes will now only be 10 min and there will no longer be free food. We did good but not good enough so no raises for yall this time " 10+ people walk out to never return
Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. — Karl Marx, 1818-1883
Our boss.
Multiple issues: trying to make us work while on vacation, underpaying us for car mileages, refusing to help with training, lying about being at the office when she was at home, ect
What made us all leave was when she denied leave for our coworker who’s dad had died unexpectedly. She asked for even just one day for the funeral and my boss refused.
We covered for our coworker for the week but then all put in our notice.
The higher ups finally figured out something was wrong for us ALL to resign and they fired her.
They begged us to come back, but if they’re that blind to what’s happening, it’s not worth it.
Landscaping company. We were already stretched to the breaking point because the owner would never hire enough help. Then he decided it was a perfect time to take a new project...over two hours away from where anyone lived. Multiple people quit after this announcement. I stayed for another few days and then quit.
A few weeks later, he was calling everyone and begging us to come back because the property owners were furious with him over the work not even being started. I told him I'd already gotten a new job. He swore at me and hung up lol
Despite the general chaos in the world economy since COVID, there is a growing sense of confidence among workers. Many of the stories here may have appeared risky, as quitting on the spot can be terrifying. You don’t know how long it will take to find a new job, how quickly you will have income again, and other concerns. But 36% of workers stated that they were ready to quit without having another job lined up for them. 22% were confident that they could find employment fairly quickly. So managers beware, more than half your workforce is ready to walk at almost a moment's notice.
They called in a consultant. This guy's "brilliant" idea was to totally switch business models and go from selling one type of product (which we had tons of clients willing to buy and were making great money) to selling a completely different product and turning all of our production staff into salespeople. After the announcement:
Day 1: three people left
Day 2: four more left
Day 3: it was down to me and the two owners, I lasted another week and then left.
Company went under in about 3 months.
Boss relied on the old “you’ll never be able to get a job somewhere else, and certainly not a better one” gaslighting tactic to keep us. One of us did find another, better job somewhere else. Everyone else was gone within 6 months.
And this is why you never use that phrase, cause workers will always be able to find a better job than yours if you’re saying that
I had a boss that colluded with some new hires and family members to vote out the union. We lost our pension, benefits, and guaranteed rates overnight. They only needed 40% to pass. Everyone who voted to keep the union quit within a month.
Either directly or indirectly, managers are responsible for over half (60%) of the voluntary and, obviously, involuntary turnover at a company. Of the 60% of US workers who chose to leave their jobs, managers were cited as a common factor for quitting, alongside a “less-than-ideal work environment,” which is a wonderfully vague way to describe a horrible workplace. Since managers can and do have so much control over the day to day of operations, it is safe enough to blame them for a workplace is, well, “less-than-ideal.”
They hired a manager who was vicious. Then did not stop her behavior. And long term employees just quit one by one. I held on longer than most. At my exit interview, they asked why I was leaving and I just said her name. Finally two years later they let her go but by that time they had an entire turnover of staff.
Private company (1924-1988) single owner dies of old age. Family sells Connecticut based company to French corporation.
French company says we are moving you guys 500 miles north to New Hampshire. You can move yourself at your own expense, and have equivalent pay for 1 year after which it may be readjusted.
They were expecting about 125 people to relocate with them; they got 3.
They got desperate, but in the end all they could get was people promising to stay until the Connecticut site closed, for an additional 6-month bonus at the end. (I took this, I was the last one, signing papers with HR on the loading dock and driving away with a few nice checks.)
EDIT 1: for those interested I met and spoke with old Bern himself in '87 while he was touring our test lab. His comment was (more or less) these guys need new equipment, which was spot on.
EDIT 2: No part of Connecticut is 500 miles from New Hampshire. More like 250 miles, if that.
In the US, for not entirely clear reasons, the West Coast appears to have the worst managers. In an America-wide survey of workers, people in California, Washington State, and Oregon complained the most about bad bosses and were the most likely in the US to quit over terrible managers. The bottom line, at least for US employers, is that statistics show that three out of four resignations could have been prevented.
Teenage Coworker asked for two days off because she’d found herself pregnant. Manager said that she was just reading her body wrong and wasn’t pregnant. Called her into work the day after her abortion.
I led an IT team that supported a new version of a proprietary application. The team was a mix of corporate employees and contractors.
Most of the customers who used out app were located in the Western hemisphere, so while we provided 24x7 support, the vast majority of customer issues were during the typical North American work day.
We had a couple of contractors who liked working overnights, so they covered the evenings, and did a handoff every AM.
This worked very well. So well, in fact, that our corporate overlords decided that the app should be expanded globally. We noted that the current team couldn't handle the additional support load without more team members.
Instead of doing that, management decided that we should just move a bunch of people from the day shift to the night shift. Since no one liked this idea, management implemented a mandatory "rolling" schedule, in which you might work 9-5 one week, and 3-11 the next. There was no predictability, and personal preferences/needs were not taken into account at all.
I pointed out to management that this would make our well-seasoned support team unhappy, and would technically violate the contract that the contractors were working under (which specified work hours).
Nobody in management thought that this was a problem.
I immediately wrote letters of recommendation for everyone on my team, and started applying for other jobs. In about two weeks, I had a better job lined out, and gave my notice.
Within about a month, all of the contractors had been moved to other contracts (with different companies) when they reported the contract breach to their handlers, and about a half dozen of the long-serving corporate folks had found other jobs, like I did.
Support for the app got moved to India, and my understanding is that the dealers (the people who used the app) staged something of a revolt, and the app had to be shut down and reverted to a previous version that cost the company a lot more money to maintain.
We could all be better managers than the ones mentioned in this thread!!
Not all at once, but in very quick succession.
A coworker, whose brother owned the business and no one liked, got promoted to supervisor. Took him about 20 minutes before he started abusing his power, ordering people to do extra hours to cover his shifts and s**t like that.
About 6 weeks later, basically the entire staff had found new jobs and quit.
Management who came in at noonish, checked some shots then left at 3-4pm announced that all artists would be required to work 12 hour days for the next few weeks because they took on too many contracts at once. A few people said "f**k it" and quit, that cascaded into more and more people quitting since they realized they'd be expected to finish their shots too.
we had a really really toxic manager (F 36) who wasn’t fit to be manager, would talk trash on her employees & got banned from working at VS. one time, the store flooded & we were waiting to hear back from her as to when the store was repaired. she had terrible (hardly any) communication, so she didn’t tell half the staff. one full time employee (F 41) stopped by 3 days after reopening & asked why she wasn’t notified. the manager told her “you’re a big girl, you should’ve figured it out yourself”. we all quite like beads falling off a broken necklace after that.
Boss said that we wouldn't have paid Christmas vacation (after doing it for 5 years), the issue is that he announced it two weeks before Christmas when a lot of people already had travel plans - That and removing Christmas bonuses.
A bunch of people quit over that, some I know are job hunting and ready to leave.
Management laid me off. The manager. In 6 years I had 1 turnover. After they laid me off all 6 of the guys reporting to me had their two weeks notice in. It’s a long story but basically the new management had no clue what they were doing and it showed when they “eliminated my position”
Boss binge watched us on the security cameras and came back to us with the findings.
oh.... experienced it too... old watcher creep was upper management (finance or smth). We were 3 students (19-20 y.o) working part time in one of chain retail stores. We found out about his fetish when he came personally to complain (even though being in his position he had no business being in the store) that we are "hiding from him" and he cannot observe us from "this angle of camera". Then he took a chair and proceeded to reach and adjust camera angle. WE WERE MORTIFIED. We happened to mention about this weird experience to area manager. Watcher was gone as quietly, as he embarked the company in the first place. brrrrr... creep...
They hired a micromanaging architect to lead a bunch of engineers.
One big team which worked extra shifts and extra long days in the corona times.
Government declared a bonus for the personell.
Some got it and others didnt while having the same contracts, responsibilities and also did overtime go help the company.
No explanation as to why someone was included or excluded. Some didnt feel like working there after that.
The explanation is obvious-- upper mgt pocketed the difference-- a call to the executive board just before leaving is apropos
Funny story.
Me and a friend worked at a burger king together, both on the same shift, that being 11 - 5. I didn't hate my job as the drive through person, as it was a start for 16 and half year old me. I knew I could be happier, thus I was already on the verge of quitting. My a*****e of a manager only added to my stress, though. To let you know how d***head-y he was, every day he would give us some sort of a sit-rep on, "how he owns this place", and how "you have to listen". One day, at around 3, a customer pulls up to the speaker and asks for a lot. Something like 4 burger and fry combos, one burger without onions and 2 others with extra ketchup. My friend makes the order alongside some coworkers as the customer arrives at the window. She was in her 30's, with black hair and a darker skin tone. She took her food and drove off, yet a couple minutes later she returned. On the speaker she says she got the wrong order. I'm new to this job, so I ask my friend, "What do I do? Her order is wrong." and he responds with, "I don't know, ask the manager.". I walked into his office, where he yelled, "WHAT." I
"Well, there's a customer in the drive-through who got her order wrong and wants a refund. What should I do?" I said. He stood from his chair. "UGH! Gimme a second!" I waited by the window for a couple minutes, when he arrived. At this point, the lady was at the window, and she had lost her temper. But, the thing is, when my manager took *one* look at her, he fumed.
"This is what we're dealing with, THIS!" He says, pointing at her as if she has three heads. "Another one of you. Your kind never leaves, do they?" He said, obviously remarking on her race. My friend had made her order correct, and was ready to give it back to her, when the manager snatched it and threw it in her car. The lady was understandably upset, but all credit to her, she just drove off only yelling a few swears. Everyone had seen what had happened, but kept quiet. The next day, I had already quit, but for whatever reason, my friend didn't. According to him, almost nobody showed up, because they had all quit.
The manager was soon fired after countless reports, and that burger king now has somebody else.
I'm going to be incredibly vague because certain slugs from my former employer would pick up on this comment in a heartbeat and I'll get nastygram phonecalls...
An employee got injured. It was NOT the employee's fault whatsoever. I won't say how they were injured but it was severe. 6 witnesses. One witness was a paramedic, and he tried to intervene. He was stopped, and the employee's husband was called to go in and pick his wife up off the floor, where they had literally just left her. He brought the employee to the ER. While at the ER, the employee found out that the incident report was obstructed and that the visit would be self-pay. An executive a*****e got involved and didn't want the incident report to trigger an OSHA investigation. Every witness was threatened to keep their mouths shut or they'd get fired. 5 quit the same day. Employee never got the incident covered. Whole thing was b******t.
Small engineering contracting company, very difficult business to be in.
The only real source of revenue was from legacy products that various defense companies still integrated into their systems. Unfortunately, the legacy products were being discontinued because components used to make them were obsolete and NLA.
So we needed to find a new money-making product, quick.
Our CEO was driving the company into the ground. He would insult and belittle many of the engineers because of project delays. We were severely understaffed and overworked, and since contracts were the new revenue strategy, we were always taking on more clients without finishing older projects.
Eventually, one of the more visionary engineers tried to have the owner of the company fire the CEO. The owner refused, he was barely involved and didn’t understand what was going on.
This engineer was subsequently let go by the CEO “due to finance reasons” (yea… okay). He was the manager of software engineering. So my colleague got promoted and did a decent job for a while, but we were again very short handed.
One engineer, we’ll call him Bob, the CEO focused his antics on in particular just quiet quit, until he got fired. It was sad; from talking to him, I knew how much he loved engineering, but he was just so burnt out from being s**t on all the time.
My new manager had another baby and so he was starting to feel the stress of the job. Many of us were below market rate and working above and beyond what a typical engineering job would require, especially at that pay grade…
So my manager jumped ship for a less stressful position at a more established company, presumably making more money as well.
So then I was promoted to manager. We now had an impossible backlog of projects given our team size (3 SWEs, including a new grad). Eventually, the other experienced SWE quit, leaving me and the new grad with all these projects.
At the same time, a startup I was working with got funded so I jumped ship. The new grad left a few months later.
I’m not sure how the company is still alive. I had some particularly nasty clients and it was very enjoyable telling them I was quitting, all while the CEO had to deal with the aftermath of having no staff left to finish ongoing projects.
I ended up hiring Bob the burnt-out engineer at my startup and we appreciate the hell out of him. We’re all in a much better place now.
Boss ordered a tractor-trailer full of rain gutters for a large job. The truck arrived however no Moffett or forklift was on-site. 60k lbs of metal gutters and equipment he wanted to be unloaded by hand. The whole crew got in the work trucks and left.
New Manager cut every full-time employee's weekly hours in half. I was working a steady 41.5 hours a week, then suddenly my weekly went to 19.5 hours. The moment I saw the schedule, I grabbed my stuff, and just left. Best decision I've ever made. And I found out later on, that 3 more people quit a few days after me. Sucks for you, Chipotle.
I was a valet. The work sucked, but my coworkers bonded and commiserated over everything, so on the whole, it wasn't so bad.
Then, for some-a*s reason, the company president got involved in the day-to-day operations of our lil' valet program. Dude's a millionaire, wheeling and dealing in the 3 biggest cities in our state, and running nearly every public parking lot as a private entity. Why was he *so* caught up in our little operation?
He hired one of his corporate homies - another millionaire - as a "hospitality manager," in an effort to whip us all into shape. To establish dominance, he fired 1 person per day for his first 2 weeks - 10 people out of 30. This led to more valets quitting, bringing our total down to 15. Then, he began ruling with an iron fist: We had to adhere to *every single syllable* of the corporate script; no ad-libbing or just making conversation with our customers. We were expected to stand at attention, feet shoulder width apart, with our hands folded behind our backs at all times we weren't servicing a car. We were expected to run everywhere - no walking, and *especially* no taking the tunnels or skywalks between buildings. We had to show our dedication to the company by being visible to everyone in the street (and he'd go to the upper levels of the buildings we were in with binoculars to spy on us).
Then, he began threatening us all - "I've got contacts at all these local temp agencies, I can have a whole new staff in here ready to work tomorrow." This, of course, killed morale even further, and more people quit.
Within 3 weeks, our 30-person valet outfit was reduced to 12 individuals.
Dude, u need to file a labor violation, and OSHA complaint-- can't force you to stay at attention-- even the military knows not to keep you at attention-- legs log up, and people pass out
For one job. I quit after 4 years. Was going to be denied a pay raise that I was supposed to have. Put the entire management staff in shock. A week later over half the staff quit because they we’re being blamed for what management was screwing up. The district manager came in and wanted to know what the hell was going on. They finally admitted I had pretty much running the place while they were sleeping and calling in. She fired all but one person and promptly promoted the crew leader who I had trained as the new assistant manager. Sadly the damage was done and they were bought out less than a year later by another company because they sank their profits after I left. Linch pin.
They pulled us into a group meeting to let us know our contract with company A had not been renewed so we would be moved to company B contract at the end of the month. We were told we would be going from 8-5 mon thru Fri shift to 2-11 with Wed Thursday off. 15 of the 22 of us put in our two weeks and left at the end of the contract with A. The rest tried it out and I heard 3 of them logged out and walked away without notice after the first week. Never did hear about the others though.
I applied directly to company A and got hired on in the same job with higher pay since I wouldn't need training and already had experience. They didn't renew their contract because they were building their own team to handle it so having someone with experience was a benefit to them and to me.
The restaurant I worked at wasn’t taking COVID seriously during the heart of the pandemic. They were violating their own social distancing measures and expecting everyone to simply be okay with it. On top of that, we were grossly understaffed and expected to provide the same quality of service as a fully-staffed restaurant. We just got burnt out and all just so happened to have found new jobs within two weeks of each other.
I worked as desk clerk for my dorm building freshman year of college and came back during my sophomore year knowing we got a new housing director. Notably in our contract it stated we were allowed to do homework or watch tv/listen to music during shifts (one earbud only) as long as you were still checking cameras, sorting packages, helping students as they came to the desk, and checking people in of you worked a night shift. These tasks usually took around an hour of your shift (excluding shifts between 10pm-2am on weekends when students would constantly be coming back from parties and having to check in). The new housing director for the building I worked in decided that even though we all signed contracts saying these things were allowed it didn’t mean we should be doing them.
After about a week she started giving out warnings for doing anything besides homework during shifts. Then a few weeks later she decided that not even homework was going to be tolerated. Me and the other girl who I shared night shifts with and who worked after me during day shifts had both started looking for other jobs after the first rule change because not doing anything but the desk duties for 4 hours was a huge waste of time and was also the only job in the city still paying minimum wage. We both agreed that if we weren’t going to be allowed to do nonwork related things we may as well find better paying jobs that at least have tasks for us to do during our shifts. Once we got accepted for a new jobs her at a hardware store and me at a grocery store we immediately put in our 2 weeks and left.
A few weeks later I ran into a guy who I had worked with the semester before and he asked if I still worked for the dorm building. I told him I had quit a few weeks ago and he told me that he had also just found a new job and that about half of the staff for that building and the other one the new director was in charge of had quit within the past month.
So basically going back on the rules we agreed on in our contracts resulted in the loss of half the desk clerks for the buildings.
Some people just love going on a power trip, problem is they don’t know when to come back from that trip !!! Lol
The drain on the roof plugged. Ice built up. Roof collapsed, killed some. Everyone else quit. Luckly, I was on the roof top during the accident. We were safe up there, and our settlement was higher then those bellow. Well, not more then those who died, but more then those under the falling roof. No, I can't give details. Part of the settlement.
Something similar happened at an old job of mine, except the occupier of the desk most of the roof landed on had got stuck in traffic and arrived about 30 seconds after it all came crashing down. Someone was looking out for him that day!
I was a shift manager at McDonalds. One day in the middle of a huge rush, manager trainee (who I will refer to as L) refused to listen to my direction because "they are a manager too." I went to my GM, GM then spoke with L, and once L came back, started smacking me on the back and said I need to stop being so sensitive. I then firmly told him to get his hands off me and sent him on a break. This whole time, my senior manager was beside me and never said a word, and apparently, the reason for that was that she was afraid she'd make him mad. Also, some background information, no one liked L because he was rude and very flirtatious with female employees. There had also been many complaints made to the GM about L before, concerning him being touchy with minors as well that was never dealt with so I went to HR and submitted a complaint. I'm not sure how it all went down, but GM fired L and everyone was happy about his termination. A couple of months later, we lost half of our managers within the span of a month. And then rumor started going around that L was coming back as an opening manager. GM spoke to me and said that L has changed and that L knew he was in the wrong, but I knew his work ethic and how much the employees disliked him. At this point, I was fed up with the job, being constantly overworked and understaffed, and now to find out that L was coming back was the last straw. I placed my notice the next day, and soon after, many followed suit.
We had a manager like that when I worked at Panera in high school. Super gross with all the girls (who were 16/17 years old). Eventually he got one of the 16 year olds pregnant. Instead of firing him, they just moved him to another location, where I heard he got ANOTHER teenager pregnant.
The program director suffered an extremely sudden loss. When she came back from a month of grieving, she was suddenly putting everyone on performance plans for really s****y reasons (I was put on one because like six clients had been dissatisfied with me in my four years there and four of those six were just upset that I had breasts, the other two were mad at the program as a whole and taking it out on me). She was also suddenly pushing us to bill for 100% of the time we were on the clock (we’d literally get yelled at for asking our managers for advice because it wasn’t billable). People started to leave at a high rate, and their clients would be dumped on the rest of us. The managers all refused to help with clients at all, so it was wholly on us. Between April and July of that year, the program lost 20 of the 33 employees.
HS principal with a diploma-mill degree routinely telling PhD-holding science teachers, "You don''t know anything. Sound waves have nothing to do with physics [for instance]. This is MY school. I have an education Master's, and you just have a science degree, [they ALL also had education degrees] so you're down here, and I'm up here." Uh, no... it's the taxpayer's school, and you're an uneducated twit. Losing 11 science teachers simultaneously is a pretty big blow to your school.
Working in food service seems to be the most abusive job. Office jobs are like being in Jr. High again. I worked food service as a teen at Shoney's and after a month I decided this is not for me, ever. I've had decent jobs, some I would have stayed at if I had not moved to another state.
This one company was building houses for Saddam Hussein during the trade embargo and embezzling money, hiding it in a banana stand near the beach. Unbelievable!
HS principal with a diploma-mill degree routinely telling PhD-holding science teachers, "You don''t know anything. Sound waves have nothing to do with physics [for instance]. This is MY school. I have an education Master's, and you just have a science degree, [they ALL also had education degrees] so you're down here, and I'm up here." Uh, no... it's the taxpayer's school, and you're an uneducated twit. Losing 11 science teachers simultaneously is a pretty big blow to your school.
Working in food service seems to be the most abusive job. Office jobs are like being in Jr. High again. I worked food service as a teen at Shoney's and after a month I decided this is not for me, ever. I've had decent jobs, some I would have stayed at if I had not moved to another state.
This one company was building houses for Saddam Hussein during the trade embargo and embezzling money, hiding it in a banana stand near the beach. Unbelievable!