Your worst example of corporate corruption?

[TwixVoy]

Mega corporations in this country have screwed us on a national level. Partly because management at these corporations are completely with out ethics.

I am wondering if anyone here would like to share personal examples of corporate corruption or other lack of ethics?

I will start.

When I was a manager in retail we had a sexual harassment situation. Basically an assistant department manager working alone with a regular employee randomly grabbed her butt, grabbed her by the arm, pulled her in to an aisle, and kissed her. She pushed him away and turned around and walked away. We had security camera footage of this event.

She complained to HR about it the next day. A few days later she stopped coming in to work and was terminated by HR for job abandonment. I was thinking "WTF is going on here?".

So I called her on my own time and asked her what was going on. She told me that she had stopped coming in to work because HR did nothing about the harassment and she was afraid of it continuing. I told her to come in and we would talk to our HR manager about it together and that we could see if we could get her termination revoked.

So the next day she came in and we went to the HR manager. When we came in to her office she had the look of a deer in the headlights. (should have been my first warning sign, but I was naive enough to believe she would be interested in doing the right thing) She pulled out every BS excuse in the book. "Oh gee technically you don't work here anymore so there is nothing we can do" etc etc. I told her that considering the situation and considering she was afraid of more harassment we should definitely look at restoring her employment and not adhere to the BS of "she abandoned her job" when HR did not a damn thing to address the harassment to begin with. We were told that our store manager would look at the situation.

So the next day our store manager called me in to his office. First thing he told me was that he was "seriously concerned" about the fact that we talked to HR about it and that I had "exercised extremely poor judgment as a manager". I was told that since she had quit we should forget the matter, and basically that I should shut the hell up and participate in pretending nothing ever happened. I was also told directly that my "poor judgment" would guarantee that I would NEVER be eligible to be considered for promotion and that basically I was stonewalled from doing anything else at that store.

Though of course I was not written up. None of that went down on paper. Funny how that works huh? Usually when someone exercises "extremely poor judgment" to the point that they could never be considered for promotion it usually gets some kind of write up. But of course that would have left a paper trail.

So she gave up on getting her job back. When I left that store a few months later the guy that did it was still working there. He was well protected. In fact he was actually being considered for promotion.

Funny how that works. I also should have never broken a rule I learned a long time ago - NEVER TRUST HR.

[ananda]

1. Halliburton and Blackwater..

.. they're connected in my mind.

[abumbyanyothername]

2. You mean other than being a bacterium in the bowels of finance

and part of a system that expanded the available credit in the system until it exploded and destroyed the world economy? (Not that the world economy as it was didn't deserve to be exploded, but you get my drift.)

Outside of that, nothing.

[countmyvote4real]

3. HR is not your friend. NEVER.

Go there only with a metaphorical grenade. They are there to protect the company, not you.

[backscatter712]

16. Human Resources: Turning human beings into resources... n/t

[abumbyanyothername]

4. By the way -- how long ago was this?

The company's action toward the employee is actionable, and its action toward you is actionable.

You may, however, have statute of limitations problems.

[TwixVoy]

6. Well outside of statue of limitations I am sure

Problem is even back then they were experts at covering up such things. She was making slightly more than minimum wage, and I wasn't even at middle class income levels. Neither of us had the resources to fight a multi-million dollar corporation.

[abumbyanyothername]

11. Well not that it matters for your case

but consumer attorneys would take a case like that on a contingency basis.

In case anyone currently in similar circumstances is reading the thread.

[nosmokes]

9. KBR is still electrocuting our GIs in the shower i believe, and that's just the

tip of the iceberg.

Monsanto

Koch

Carlyle

Exxon

[TahitiNut]

5. Executive stock fraud. Fortune 20. Well over $100M.

Involved key executives (incentive stock options, ya know) and certain members of the Board. Critical business transaction was "buried" until after quarterly reporting period.

That's about all I can say. NDA.

[KT2000]

7. In the early 1990s

many people working at a large aerospace company became ill working on new composite materials. It was a toxic material and the workers were working longs hours and weekends. They were poisoned and joined others in the state who had been poisoned by chemicals in the workplace. State workers comp was not paying the claims and playing hardball with people who were too sick to work and had no income to live on.
It was rumored that the president of the aerospace company told the governor that if chemical exposure injuries in the workplace were recognized by the state, they would move out of the state. This is a policy that continues to this day and has been joined by every other corporation.

People with chemical exposure injuries (as in brain damage) are diagnosed as mental cases stremming from a pre-existing condition. No liability for employers and manufacturers.

[hunter]

13. They've been doing it longer than that...

The aerospace contracters get away with murder in the name of national defense. They are vast pits of corruption shielded in secrecy. Most of the crap they build is useless.

[KT2000]

14. Yes rhere is a long history - but

this event solidified the cooperation of the interested parties - medical associations, think tanks and governments. It culminated in a suit brought against a CA doctor where "they" tried to codify the requirement for "mental illness" diagnosis or doctors would lose their medical license. At least that did not work.

[notesdev]

8. I worked in an office that got bombed

terrorist attack... I got paid up to the very minute the bomb went off, and not a single minute later. Pretty much shaped my view of corporate ethics from that point forward.

[Selatius]

10. A major theme park in Orlando I worked for was using interns to undercut full-time employees.

Recently, this company was going through a series of lay-offs. Several managers in my department were transferred or given an "option" of accepting a lesser position or getting out. The area manager was transferred and replaced with a new one from a different park, of which there are four.

Well, one of the stores in the area I worked in is a candy store, and the people who work in the kitchen are full-time employees of the company. Recently, one of the changes the new area manager enacted was that college interns are to be cross-trained to do kitchen work. Prior to this, only college interns who showed interest in the kitchen were given training. No more. It's now mandatory. The new area manager was trying to find ways to slash labor costs on full-time workers because they get health care and other benefits that college interns do not get. Interns were given no say in the matter. Impressment into cross-training was compulsory for all who were selected. Disobeying could mean the intern in question is terminated or written up.

This theme park expanded the use of college interns since the early 1980s as a way of avoiding hiring full or part-time employees. Yes, it's also true that the program exists to help Disney find true believers who want to work for the company as well as giving college students some first-hand experience in the workplace, but money is always the underlying factor at Disney or any other Fortune 100 company. The added benefit of this program is that they can deprive the current labor unions there of fresh blood by getting interns to do the work, essentially making the unions weaker in a state that has "right to work" laws on the books.

I felt sorry for the full-time workers in the kitchen. Many of them have families to support and bills to pay, and now the company slashed their hours using minimum wage interns. Customer service was better at this theme park 30 years ago before the new corporate thinking took over. A terrible shame.

I should know. I was an intern there until very recently.

[izzybeans]

12. Personally?

In college I worked at a GE plastics factory in Indiana. I was a grunt, cleaning industrial waste, mopping floors, shoveling the boiler room that filled with plastic pellets because of a hole in the production line.

One day i was dumping pallets of garbage into the giant compactor. In the garbage area someone had set a box of powdered chemicals so that it was intermixed with the trash. I picked up a big box that had a bunch of plastic stuffed into it. I assumed it was just garbage and so I drove the forklift into the compactor and dumped it like all the rest, causing a huge cloud of the powder to rain down throughout the compactor. It burned quite a bit, but the pain went a way when I showered. The next morning my arms and legs were swollen and lumpy. The onsite medical staff told me that what I had I had caught from swimming in a lake, not from work. I never knew what that chemical was. When it hit my skin I ran to the emergency shower. When I got back someone had hosed down the inside of the compactor and my boss told me he didn't know what it was because the box had been crushed already.

My boss never filled out an accident report and the medical staff covered up for him. After I explained what happened I was repeatedly told that what happened to me did not happen at work and that the infection I had was caused by a bacteria I got while swimming in a lake (something I hadn't done in a couple of months). My feet and arms still break out in a funny rash 13 years later.

[taught_me_patience]

15. Enron

The entire corporation was a scam. Nothing is even close. Others include:

AIG
Worldcom
Global Crossing
Countrywide Home Loans
LTCM

[sakabatou]

17. Should we include State Farm for their debacle after Katrina?

[taught_me_patience]

19. What they did there was corrupt

but, at least, they are not rotten to the core like some of the other companies I mentioned.

[closeupready]

18. The story dramatized in Silkwood.

n/t