There's high-pressure working environments, and then there's this!
Three managers at a Chinese construction firm have been jailed due to forcing staff to drink urine and eat cockroaches, according to reports from local media.
A video caught the entire ordeal. It has over 600,000 views as of writing and has been widely shared on Chinese social media site Weibo.
In the video, a male employee is stood in the middle of a circle of other employees while being whipped with a belt.
Other staff are seen to be drinking from plastic cups filled with yellow liquid as they hold their noses.
Social media posts alleged staff were threatened with having to eat cockroaches in sales targets weren’t met.
“If the sales goal has not been met by the end of this month, the team leader will have to eat three cockroaches for each failed sale,” one text message read.
Apparently, other methods of public shaming at the firm included drinking vinegar or toilet water and having their head shaved.
Three managers of the home renovation company based in Zinyi City, in the province of Guizhou, have been jailed between five and ten days, according to the South China Morning Post.
According to the BBC, the company failed to pay employee salaries for the past two months. However, staff were scared to bring it up for fear of losing their pay if they resigned.
This is the latest controversial case of unusual punishments for employees in China, as reported by the BBC, as other reports of alleged cases include crawling on public roads, kissing rubbish bins and even slapping fellow colleagues for team building.
The South China Morning Post attribute this type of behaviour to slower economic growth as “labour unrest has been growing and reports of ill-treatment of workers have become more common”.
And these types of punishments are increasingly common due as China’s government “bans independent labour organising, trade unions and workers from going on strike”.
After seeing staff forced to drink urine and eat roaches, maybe it’s time to consider better ways to motivate your workforce!
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