Bad Boss #4: You Want an Office Chair? Pay for It

by Tula Connell, Jul 23, 2006

What do you do with a boss who charges you for the flowers the company sent to your father’s funeral?

Have his car towed. Five days in a row.

This week’s winner of My Bad Boss Contest, sponsored by the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America, describes a boss so bad he charged employees for the chairs they sat in ($200) and even for the company’s new building signage—in addition to charging Jay $200 for the flowers the company sent to his father’s funeral.

Along with his co-workers, Jay, who received the most votes this week by visitors to the Bad Boss site, ultimately got revenge by reporting to authorities that the boss parked his car in the handicapped space in the mall next door.

Jay wins A Johnny Paycheck CD, “Take This Job and Shove It,” and becomes the fourth of five weekly My Bad Boss Contest winners. All weekly winners automatically are in the running for the grand prize—a one-week vacation getaway and $1,000 toward airfare, compliments of Union Privilege.

Jay’s bad boss joins a gaggle of losers, including the millionaire doctor who charged his employees $100 each to make up for canceled appointments on Sept. 11, 2001. Then there was the boss who wrote up his employee for being absent from work when she was two floors up having surgery for a miscarriage.

Another fun feature of the Bad Boss contest—in addition to reading bad boss stories, voting for the best of the worst and maybe even adding your own story—is the commentary by well-known progressives such as economist and author Dr. Julianne Malveaux or this week’s commentator, the indefatigable former Texas agriculture commissioner, Jim Hightower.

After reading through the bad boss submissions to the Working America contest, Hightower concludes bad bosses must have a “latent jerk gene” and further puts the entries in perspective with the comment “scientists really should be looking into this.”

I’m sure grant money would be available—maybe from Homeland Security, since raging bossism clearly is connected to some sort of primitive terrorist instinct.

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (0)