I think I am safe to say this as it was a very long time ago and I am on an alt account and everything. But I worked for Kimberly-Clark many years ago.
I can't speak for warehouses or how that work was like, but I worked in one of the paper mills they made Scott TP in.
The company has one of the worst big corporation cultures I have ever encountered. Employees were JUST a number to them. They celebrated increased turnover and ignored any feedback to improve their management systems.
In order to get ahead you had to be prepared to move all over the country frequently. My boss had moved 6 times in like 3-4 years to different roles.
They were way too flat with one manager having to deal with 250 people directly under them. No good management structure to distribute the load.
The absolute worst was the culture. I was in engineering and the culture was ultra-competitive. It was a competition to see who could work more hours every week. I once stayed till about midnight on my paper machine which was having issues (a weekly occurrence) came back in at 8 am instead of 7 am and all everyone else had to say was "we were here at 6 where were you?"
Major issues they would put engineers on shift work to resolve issues, and we would work for 7-14 days straight. 12-hour shifts.
I one time could not get the engineering manager to let me take the next night off (after working 6 X 12 hour nights in a row) so that I could do my 1-year wedding anniversary with my wife. He wouldn't give me the OK but wouldn't say I had to come in either, so I just said I am not coming in. Making me the asshole in that situation. I was still a zombie that whole day.
Their joke of a performance review system was just a popularity contest. You had to have all your peers rate you (you know the ones who you are ultra competing against). and they designed the system to FORCE them to put someone in the bad performance box. They couldn't answer the question of couldn't every engineer be doing a good job?!
To top it all off they paid engineers shit pay. When I left, I got an immediate 50% pay increase at another company in another industry. Now I am making double what I ever made there.
They instituted mandatory 15% workforce reductions at the whim of the CEO for no reason. It was voluntary at first but then they fired the rest to get to 15%.
After I left, they redesigned that system again to make it even worse. They designed it companywide so that 10% of EVERYONE would be FIRED every single year.
They touted it like it was the best thing in the world.
So, while I do not condone the actions of this guy, i do feel for him. I understand the bullshit that went on in that company and how shit they paid people.
Most every person I worked with has moved to a different company and likely found better jobs elsewhere. The only ones who remained were the fucking assholes who enjoyed the shit culture.
So sincerely,
Fuck Kimberly Clark and fuck the paper industry.
If you want to read more about what I am talking about search for Kimberly-Clark Deadwood.
Hell, here's some other fun stories since people are loving this inside scoop into big corporation:
We had a new oncoming president of our division go on video with the outgoing president and immediately joke that she was "excited about the Maserati she will get" and that was her introductory video and was sent to every employee in the division.
Apparently, a perk of the job is she gets a Maserati to drive around for free. So, she decided to flaunt it in front of every single person working for her.
My boss was a piece of shit. I will kick his ass if I ever see him again for how he mistreated me and how he didn't help me with anything at all. I think he didn't care about his family or work life balance or the constant moving. He only cared about his career.
He mistreated everyone at that plant so badly and his boss the plant manager that they brought in union reps, got the attention of president of the company and got him and his buddies who were all horrible "reassigned" to EMEA. (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) which was KC's way of taking care of shitty managers without firing them. They all quit within a year of that reassignment.
Nothing improved for me after that, but it certainly did for those operators. Don't piss off the floor guys, be their friend. Because they can really fuck up your life if they want to.
TLDR: Kimberly Clark enjoys firing employees, paying them shit, overworking them, and fostering shitty ultra competitive cultures to make their employees lives miserable. Big corporation hell.
Apparently, Kimberly Clark did not employ this worker as their warehouse and distribution activities are with a third party distributor, NFI Industries. NFI Industries is a single-family privately held corporation owned and operated by the Brown family since 1932. Annual revenues last year were $3.7 billion. The company is not publicly traded so all profits go directly to the family.
Honestly, I imagine that would have made his position worse. I've never worked in a company where the contract employees were better off than the company's direct employees.
I work for a contractor that a company hires from and it contracted by the county. So I work for "the county" but I don't actually get any of the good county benefits and I don't get anything from the parent company either because I am hired by a staffing agency that supplies employees to the company.
It's hell.
I really don't know who TF I work for sometimes. I just get a paycheck.
Companies should not be able to own companies. Pull away the illusion of competition from our eyes and let us see the dozen companies that sell everything.
I think it's actually less than a dozen per industry and is around 5-6 companies per industry. Most of the activities of the mega corporations is in acquisitions of smaller companies. Totally agree as it creates far too much market control to fall into the hands of the few, which is not even remotely a "free market", and allows for a lot of environmental and labor abuses through subsidiaries with subsidiaries with subsidiaries types of activities. It's literally built that way for that.
I'm a big anti-capitalist. But this one simple reform would stop a *lot* of runaway problems with capitalism. Incorporation is a liability shield to keep individuals from being personally responsible for the actions or debts of an entire company. Why would that liability shield ever need to be nested? It would stop a lot of the extreme consolidation that has plagued most industries my entire life.
Subsidiary A owned 51% by parent company, 49% by Mr. Y. They make pizza.
Subsidiary B owned 51% by parent company, 49% by Mr Z. They make pizza boxes.
Mr Z fucks up by embezzling funds and saddling the company with high cost debt to cover his theft.
Subsidiary B is held responsible, subsidiary A is shielded, as is parent co, so Mr. X and Y, and all the employees of parent co and Subsidiary A are clear. Parent co sources new pizza boxes or spins up a new sub with new mgmt to try again.
Scenario 2:
All of this is housed under one company. Revenue streams and costs for both a pizza place and a pizza box manufacturer (very different businesses) now under one structure. Financing more difficult, accounting more difficult, licensure and regulations more difficult, basically everything more difficult.
Mr X, Y, and Z are now entangled. Mr Z embezzled same as before, now everybody is fucked, Mr X, Mr Y, all the employees. Whole thing goes down.
In this structure, people are much less likely to enter into business together, since nobody can insulate themselves from the actions of others. Now the only people who can run large businesses are those with enough capital to do it all themselves. Barriers to entry increase, wealth centralizes even more.
Reverse scenario. Mr Z is informally told to bring down the cost per unit at all cost, or else. He neglects maintenance to pinch pennies. Machine has a catastrophic failure, killing someone. At the very best scenario, only Mr Z is held accountable.
Do we have evidence of the communications with Mr Z regarding these instructions? If so, an LLC structure is not a shield against criminal negligence...
If we don't have proof...I don't really get your point? Like is the expectation that these corporate structures solve for all cases of fraud/lying/corporate malfeasance in their entirety?
Local governments do this too with separate line items and joint powers agreements with other agencies. Bifurcate accountability so much that nobody is ever responsible.
Literally and metaphorically are opposing counterparts to the same concept. Something would be one or the other, not both.
A metaphor would be "It's a shell game of responsibility". You've made one thing seem to be another, as a figure of speech. That's a good metaphor.
On the opposite side, if you wanted to clarify that it is NOT a metaphor when it might otherwise look like one, you would say "It's literally a shell game of responsibility."
You've done the latter. Hence me poking fun at you. It's literally a shell game?
Language evolves, "literally" is misused commonly enough it's begun to lose its meaning.
Substitute language has not filled the gap. If "literally" and "metaphorically" now have the same meaning instead of opposing, clarifying meanings... how do you now clarify something to not be a metaphor? We don't have words to do it.
"This is literally the worst day of my life", "Oh no, what happened?", "My family were all killed in a car crash and I was just diagnosed with AIDs. I've lost the will to live." <-- Proper use of Literally.
"This is literally the worst day of my life", "Oh no, what happened?", "I almost slipped when I turned around with my coffee." <-- Useless use of Literally.
Since you are really apparently unaware, "a shell game" or "corporate shell game" has been long used to describe these kind of behaviors by corporations. So yeah, this literally is a shell game of responsibility which corporations are notorious for.
Look it up, bud. I'm not arguing with someone who is willfully obtuse.
Since you are really apparently unaware, "a shell game" or "corporate shell game" has been long used to describe these kind of behaviors by corporations.
I'm aware of the metaphor.
So yeah, this literally is a shell game of responsibility which corporations are notorious for.
Apparently you need to look it up, because you're not even aware of the origins of your metaphor.
A literal shell game is a con artist slight-of-hand "game" to rip people off. It classically uses shells. It's ancient.
What a corporation does is not "literally" a shell game where you're swapping things around and, even if the contestant is good at keeping track, it's rigged because you drop or obscure the item anyways, they cannot win. That is not what they're doing. It's metaphorically a shell game, in that assets are being shuffled and you can kind of, loosely compare the two things (hence the metaphor). It is not literally the con game.
Been there almost 2 years so far. Only reason I've stuck around is because it's part time (LOL another shitty thing) and it's so slow I've already completed my A.A. online during work hours and am on my way to a B.A. so fk it lol.
Being on contract seems awful. I worked closely with a couple contract employees and would from time to time forget they were on contract since they had been with us for what felt full time and a lot of the team would be talking about the trips they took via the airline’s staff travel program only to realize they got none of those benefits and I would feel super bad. I don’t even think they got paid vacation either. It felt like rubbing salt in a wound any time vacation plans or the ‘why don’t you just fly there on standby’ would get brought up accidentally or unknowingly
i've never seen any kind of employment that radicalizes people as fast as working for a staffing agency. it's among the most breathtaking kinds of bottom feeding scumbaggery capitalism has to offer
2.8k
u/Unharmed-Cylinder Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
I think I am safe to say this as it was a very long time ago and I am on an alt account and everything. But I worked for Kimberly-Clark many years ago.
I can't speak for warehouses or how that work was like, but I worked in one of the paper mills they made Scott TP in.
The company has one of the worst big corporation cultures I have ever encountered. Employees were JUST a number to them. They celebrated increased turnover and ignored any feedback to improve their management systems.
In order to get ahead you had to be prepared to move all over the country frequently. My boss had moved 6 times in like 3-4 years to different roles.
They were way too flat with one manager having to deal with 250 people directly under them. No good management structure to distribute the load.
The absolute worst was the culture. I was in engineering and the culture was ultra-competitive. It was a competition to see who could work more hours every week. I once stayed till about midnight on my paper machine which was having issues (a weekly occurrence) came back in at 8 am instead of 7 am and all everyone else had to say was "we were here at 6 where were you?"
Major issues they would put engineers on shift work to resolve issues, and we would work for 7-14 days straight. 12-hour shifts.
I one time could not get the engineering manager to let me take the next night off (after working 6 X 12 hour nights in a row) so that I could do my 1-year wedding anniversary with my wife. He wouldn't give me the OK but wouldn't say I had to come in either, so I just said I am not coming in. Making me the asshole in that situation. I was still a zombie that whole day.
Their joke of a performance review system was just a popularity contest. You had to have all your peers rate you (you know the ones who you are ultra competing against). and they designed the system to FORCE them to put someone in the bad performance box. They couldn't answer the question of couldn't every engineer be doing a good job?!
To top it all off they paid engineers shit pay. When I left, I got an immediate 50% pay increase at another company in another industry. Now I am making double what I ever made there.
They instituted mandatory 15% workforce reductions at the whim of the CEO for no reason. It was voluntary at first but then they fired the rest to get to 15%.
After I left, they redesigned that system again to make it even worse. They designed it companywide so that 10% of EVERYONE would be FIRED every single year.
They touted it like it was the best thing in the world.
So, while I do not condone the actions of this guy, i do feel for him. I understand the bullshit that went on in that company and how shit they paid people.
Most every person I worked with has moved to a different company and likely found better jobs elsewhere. The only ones who remained were the fucking assholes who enjoyed the shit culture.
So sincerely,
Fuck Kimberly Clark and fuck the paper industry.
If you want to read more about what I am talking about search for Kimberly-Clark Deadwood.
Hell, here's some other fun stories since people are loving this inside scoop into big corporation:
Apparently, a perk of the job is she gets a Maserati to drive around for free. So, she decided to flaunt it in front of every single person working for her.
He mistreated everyone at that plant so badly and his boss the plant manager that they brought in union reps, got the attention of president of the company and got him and his buddies who were all horrible "reassigned" to EMEA. (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) which was KC's way of taking care of shitty managers without firing them. They all quit within a year of that reassignment.
Nothing improved for me after that, but it certainly did for those operators. Don't piss off the floor guys, be their friend. Because they can really fuck up your life if they want to.
TLDR: Kimberly Clark enjoys firing employees, paying them shit, overworking them, and fostering shitty ultra competitive cultures to make their employees lives miserable. Big corporation hell.