I have never personally witnessed anything like this, but I’ve always wanted to!
I’m talking about a TOTAL MUTINY on the job.
When the whole crew gets so fed up with the conditions, the boss, and various other things that they all just walk right off the job together.
Are you ready to hear some of these true tales?
Let’s jump into these stories from people on AskReddit.
1. We’re done here.
“The boss went off on a tirade on me for something that wasn’t my fault and I got him to scream “people like you are expendable pieces in this company and I can replace you tomorrow if I wanted to”.
80% of the engineers quit the next day. Simply didn’t show up. Including me.
From what I know, the entire project folded because my now ex boss couldn’t find people to replace us because no one wanted to do the kind of work he was looking for at the salary he was paying.”
2. Didn’t work out…
“I had worked at a grocery store for about 3 years before moving from Courtesy Clerk (basically bagger + custodian) to Helper Clerk (stocker).
The grocery department wanted to save costs on personnel, but couldn’t fire anyone or lay anyone off due to the union. So they started cutting back hours and literally told us “when someone quits, everyone else will get more hours.”
We were supposed to be 40-hour employees and they had us at 32 hours. 2 people quit and we were down to 24 hours. A third person quit, down to 16 hours. I don’t know what their plan was, but they didn’t give us more hours as people left.”
3. Everyone’s gone.
“They decided after 6 years it was time to do a drug test.
Even lost the CEO in that great idea.”
4. Now defunct.
“Canceled all raises and bonuses for everyone except the CEO, his wife (financial and HR), and his son (utterly useless IT) in a year where we have record profits and brought in almost double the clients on top of announcing they aren’t looking to hire more people when we were already overwhelmed.
Good part about it was when the majority of us quit they lost almost every single client shortly afterwards to their competitors and the company is now defunct.”
5. You can’t take coffee away from people.
“We stopped providing free coffee, and we’re so cheap that we sold our coffee maker.
This was in Seattle, so a couple of people bought their own coffee makers to put in their cubes. That tripped the breakers several times so it was very disruptive since our computers would shut down. Management then said no coffee allowed in the office at all.
We lost four very good engineers.”
6. Time to “revamp.”
“Tattoo shop owner (who lived in another state) hired some a**hole to come ‘revamp’ the shop. I had been managing for three years at this point and he just expected me to teach him how to do my job so he could replace me.
That guy had no clue how to run a shop. Plus the owner had been embezzling money for her coke habit and had blamed the longest-standing artist at the shop for lost revenue. Accused him of stealing. I did the books. No one was stealing. She was nuts.
Anyway, all the artists and I mutinied and left at the same time. F**ked them over good. With that idiot at the helm the shop didn’t last a year after we all left.”
7. A long, long time ago.
“Many years ago in high school I worked at a movie theater. The place was pretty poorly run from the moment I started there.
We never got paid on time and management was basically a bunch of lazy jackasses who sat in the office talking all day and never actually did any managing. It would have been hard for things to have gotten any worse but after a couple of months they brought in new management who seemed to want to make it their personal mission to run the theater as poorly as possible.
They first decided to implement a new policy requiring all projectionists to wear ties, despite the fact that projectionists are never seen by the public, not to mention that tiny little detail that the projectionists worked around giant, rapidly spinning objects that a tie could get caught in.
Management refused to reconsider the policy and every single projectionist quit as a result.
They then decided that the door people (of which I was one), who were always scheduled seven days a week, would now only be scheduled on the weekends, and refused to reassign any of us to concessions on the weekdays so we wouldn’t lose hours. As a result, almost every single door person quit, including me.
After that they started imposing impossible cleanliness standards on concessions, things like requiring them to scrape popcorn kernels out of the cracks in the trim behind the popcorn machines. Concessions was there until 5 AM every night trying to meet their standards. Most of the concession people quit as a result.
By my count the theater went from a staff of about fifty to a staff of about twelve in three weeks. I swung by about a month after I quit and found out that entire management staff had been fired and replaced yet again by an entirely new one, ones who actually seemed to be running the theater properly.
My best guess is that the previous management had been told to whip the theater into shape and they were idiots who had no idea how to effectively do that.”
8. Losing all kinds of people.
“I used to work at a grocery store, we had a manager who was hired to run the store but not be the franchisee and when his numbers were satisfactory enough, they would let him franchise it.
So far toward a year later and this guy was doing everything he could, making the store run and look wonderful and all the staff liked one another, out of nowhere he is told they are putting in a franchisee bid and tell him that if he wants it, he can have it.
He bids, but so does one of the District Managers sons, he gets it, Original manager is of course pissed but accepts to stay as the grocery manager if he keeps pay rate. Fast forward and the new franchisee gets fired for not following regulations, they do the franchisee bid a second time and tell original manager the same thing, he can have it if he wants it.
They give the store to another person a second time! I felt bad for the guy because all of his hard work and how well he treated me, store starts going down hill causing a lot of change and a lot of pissed off people.
I was the first one to walk out as all of hours were cut, the new franchisee never spoke to anyone but would bitch if we didn’t do things her way, I find out 14 more people quit within a month.”
9. Bad management.
“When I was 16, I worked in the concessions stand at a minor league baseball stadium. Minimum wage at the time was $5.15/hr, this job payed $8, and it was always in the evenings so it was perfect work for a high school student.
The only bad thing was our management was TERRIBLE. The main manager would throw toddler tantrums about once a shift over stupid bulls**t, like not ordering enough of a specific beer (she did the ordering) or running out of pre-cut lemons for tea.
One night the stadium was running a promotion and it was incredibly busy – easily 2-3x the normal volume of customers. We were all working our asses off handling multiple roles each with absolutely no downtime.
Although we all cleaned as we worked, nobody had a chance to do thorough cleaning for the whole shift because of the never-ending horde of hungry baseball fans.
The manager showed up 3-4 hours late per usual and throws the biggest f**king tantrum ever over the unswept floor. Finally, she announces “Listen up you lazy f**ks! Minimal work gets minimal pay. Everybody is being paid minimum wage tonight because you slobs won’t clean up anything.”
Both of our bartenders and the bar back quit on the spot, which caused a chain reaction. We all took off our aprons and hats to leave. She blocked the exit and was red in the face from screaming, so one of the cooks climbed out of one of the big serving windows where we served customers, so I did the same and most of the staff followed.
Bear in mind that this all happened in front of like 200+ customers. Of course, my final paycheck “got lost” so I had to file a wage theft complaint with the Texas Workforce Commission.”
10. This is epic.
“I worked at Buffalo Wild Wings for a few years as a line cook. Two different stores, same f**king pay. It was the type of work where you ask for a raise and they scoff and say “yeah, me too.”
Anyways, I had been pretty dead set on quitting sooner or later, our kitchen was very small. Most people ended up closing 4-5 days a week with doubles on the weekends, while still attending school full time as it was a college town.
On SUPER BOWL F**KING SUNDAY, a useless coworker who ducked out in the bathroom most the shift finally stops showing, and in response the managerial staff delegated closing to my pal J. Dude was a f**king delight to be around, hands down the best coworker ever.
J had told them that due to being a full time student, he no longer wanted to be first in last out (4pm-12am, 1am on the weekends). They basically told him to go f**k himself, and that they don’t have any more shifts for him.
Immediately, me and one other cook walked to the office and quit on the spot.
Buffalo wild wings lost 4 cooks on Super Bowl Sunday, leaving them with 7 full time students on the schedule.
It was a managerial s**t show.”
11. Abandon ship!
“They laid off half the company with no warning. This included a gentleman who was less than a year from retirement and had been there for 35+ years.
The company was shocked when half the remaining people abandoned ship shortly thereafter.”
12. Restructuring.
“Restructure of the way we’re paid.
What I used to do involved about 40% client interaction, 20% team/coworker interaction, and 40% paperwork and case coordination stuff. Based on what we do that means only 40% of the time is technically billable, and there are really sticky rules for what is and isn’t billable.
So, logically, we were being paid on a salary model. Cue management saying we can only make money for the time we have that is actually billable.
1/4th of the department quit. Two of us on the same day.”
13. Ran it into the ground.
“Owners retired, they were literally the greatest people, both very sweet, but kept the place running like a well oiled machine, they took pretty good care of us and their restaurant.
When they left, they gave the restaurant over the their nephew who at the time was a busboy/waiter, kind of standoffish, didn’t really interact with us too much, a bit lazy at times, but for the most part did his shit and went home, he seemed okay.
Until he got the power of being the owner, he fired four people, including two of the four cooks, and two of the three dishwashers, literally that same day, on a Friday night just before the dinner rush, all because he ‘didn’t like their attitude’.
He refused to allow people to take vacation that they’d already requested and gotten confirmed by the original owners, would change the schedule randomly without telling anyone and then scream at people when they missed a shift or came in late because of it.
He’d refuse to replenish the kitchen until we were literally already out of things, then take forever to put in the orders, he showed up randomly and would drink at the bar, for free of course because he was the owner, and then bring in all his buddies to drink with him, together they’d get way out of hand and grab at women and try to start fights.
Within the first month of him being the owner, over half the staff had quit, usually walking out literally in the middle of their shifts, after being screamed at, they’d basically throw down their aprons and tell everyone else that they were so sorry but they couldn’t do it anymore.
After the last cook, this big dude who usually kept the kitchen laughing and running at a decent pace, started crying in the middle of his shift and dropped everything he was doing after the boss came and yelled at him for being to slow and making ‘slop’, then walked out the rest of us just bailed along with him.
Four months later the place was closed, his aunt and uncle were absolutely furious and devastated that he’d run the business they’d built up for over 30 years into the ground.”
14. GONE.
“Word slipped out that the whole accounting department was being replaced so they all resigned all at once.”
15. Don’t need this.
“They reviewed the cameras back 3 months to catch people coming in less than 3 min late and have them all write ups.
Like 20 people walked out across the entire unit.”
Have you ever experienced something like this before at work?
If so, please tell us about it in the comments!
We can’t wait to hear your story!
