Top 10 Worst Workplace Policies

During the 1990s, Walmart implemented a controversial practice known as "Dead Peasant Insurance," where the company purchased corporate-owned life insurance policies on hundreds of thousands of its rank-and-file employees. Walmart named itself as the beneficiary of these policies, allowing the company to collect a payout upon the death of an insured worker. The existence of these policies was generally not disclosed to the employees' families and only came to public light through litigation in the early 2000s. Walmart ultimately settled the resulting lawsuits, bringing an end to a practice that sparked ethical concerns about companies profiting from the deaths of their employees.

UnitedHealth Group's use of algorithmic tools in prior authorization has been criticised for the rate at which it denies medical procedures. Automated denial at this scale raises an oversight question, because the decisions can block treatments such as chemotherapy or organ transplants.

Activision Blizzard's workplace culture, exposed by a California DFEH lawsuit filed in 2021, was alleged to include a "Cosby Suite" used by male employees at company events and "cube crawls" targeting women. The complaint described leadership ignoring reports over a period of years at a company then generating $8.8 billion in annual revenue.

Under Adam Neumann, WeWork ran company events built around alcohol - including its annual Summer Camp retreat - that employees described as effectively compulsory. The problem was less the party than the attendance: staff who did not drink, or who had caregiving obligations, were opting out of the setting where informal networking and visibility actually happened.

'996' means working 9am to 9pm, six days a week — 72 hours — and was defended openly by Chinese tech leaders, most notoriously when Jack Ma called it 'a blessing' in 2019. After the 996.ICU protest campaign on GitHub and several widely reported deaths of young employees, China's Supreme People's Court and labour ministry jointly declared the schedule illegal in August 2021.

Wells Fargo pushed retail staff to sell eight products per household — the internal slogan was 'Eight is Great' — with the quota tracked daily and enforced by threat of dismissal. Employees met it by opening roughly 3.5 million accounts customers had not asked for. The bank paid $3 billion to settle with the Justice Department and the SEC in 2020, and the Federal Reserve capped its total assets from 2018 until 2025.

IBM's age discrimination tactics systematically purged 20,000 employees over 40 through secret "resource actions" while publicly touting workforce modernization—a betrayal that cost experienced workers 30% more in lost wages than even the worst mass-layoff policies. ProPublica's investigation revealed a 60% higher dismissal rate for workers over 50 versus younger peers, all hidden behind a veneer of "skill refresh" initiatives. This policy is more insidious than #9's quotas because it targeted tenure and expertise, not performance, making compliance impossible for victims.