#3.William Bryant and Francis May
Who?
William Bryant and Francis May were the owners of the Bryant and May Match Company. For quite a while, if you were a smoker you had Bryant and May matches in your pocket. Also the blood and tears of children.
Why They Were pricks :
Look, if you ever have a chance to take a job that requires you to first travel in a time machine to Victorian era England, don't do it. This is Scrooge era here, when filthy children roamed the streets, eating rats and doing adorable song and dance numbers.
So how crappy of a boss did you have to be to become the subject of huge public backlash in those days? Let's examine the Bryant and May method.
First, you hire nothing but young, teenage girls. There were plenty of them around, they had no other opportunities, and they weren't likely to beat you down with lead pipes when they got fed up with your shit. You work them 12 hours a day, and pay them in the neighborhood of four shillings a week (the equivalent of $20... in today's money).
The exact amount Corey Feldman was paid to be in The Lost Boys sequel
Since forcing the workers to scrape by on quite a bit less than what it costs to buy food still wasn't keeping morale quite low enough, they
imposed a series of petty fines for a long list of offenses--everything from going to the bathroom without permission, to having dirty feet. When one girl let a machine jam up rather than have it tear off her finger, she was told the machine was more important, dammit, and to never let it happen again. When another girl did get her hand mangled, she was given the boot. Can't make matches one-handed!
However, Bryant and May couldn't help but notice the other match companies were still making more money. What were they doing wrong? Clearly they weren't abusing their employees enough... was there some kind of torture device they could be using? Maybe if they just let wild badgers run loose on the production floor?
They had a better idea. They had been making their matches with the extremely flammable but otherwise safe red phosphorous. But there was this other kind, white phosphorous, that was way cheaper. And there was absolutely no downside.
Oh, except it would literally eat your face off when you handled it.
Seriously. They called the condition
phossy jaw. It was caused by breathing the fumes for too long. The symptoms start with toothache, which led to swelling, abscesses and then a putrid discharge caused by your jaw bone actually rotting inside your head.
Then your jaw would actually start to glow green. It ****ing glowed. The only treatment was jaw amputation, which had to be done before organ failure killed the victim.
Keep in mind, Bryant and May knew this; white phosphorous matches and the corresponding side effects had been around for decades.
The girls at the factory finally went on strike, figuring horrifying deformities were the final straw. The whole "glow in the dark face-rot" won the sympathy of labor activists at the time, and the women eventually won the right to experience something less than David Cronenberg-levels of horror at their workplace.
The Bryant and May company, of course, stayed in business for decades and made its owners huge amounts of money.
(bi tasarrof)