When did saying, if you don't like it, then leave, backfire spectacularly.

A former industrial job I used to have said those words verbatim during an all-hands meeting.

We were understaffed, underpaid, and overworked, and everyone knew it.

Instead of the two-to-one ratio of two machines to one operator for safety reasons, we'd have 4, 6, or 8,

because people were getting paid less than most retail jobs to bust their butts in some of the

most disgusting work I've ever done. You'd come home covered in moldy coolant, metal shavings, and stink.

Machines started breaking down because they'd never shut them down to perform

maintenance on them, so we'd often have massive problems, which of course meant even more

overtime to make up for the broken machines, and people started quitting. Management's response

was to tell us that they expected us to work harder, because they couldn't get more help in.

One of my co-workers, who generally gave no Fs, asked in front of

everyone in that room why they didn't try raising the bad wages and see if they could entice people

that way. The response was, we're not having that conversation right now. If you don't like it,

you can quit. Oh, buddy, was that the wrong thing to say? As soon as word got out to the other shifts,

what can only

be called a frickin' exodus began. We lost half of each shift within the week. I stuck around

for a couple more weeks until I had a conflict with my schooling at the time, since one of my classes

got out about 30 minutes before my shift, 30 minutes away. So I warned them in advance that I might

be a few minutes late one week,

maybe. And I got told that I needed to decide, what's more important, your school or your job.

So I quit, and I giggled my butt off at the sign in the HR office that said we had an almost

80% turnover rate. Never did find out what happened to that hellhole, but I can't imagine anything

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