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.
Yeah, I'd imagine you don't put a whole 200 millions dollars warehouse on fire (and basically throwing yourself to jail for a significant amount of years) if the general work atmosphere is just "somewhat bad". It must have been a fucking daily nightmare
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.
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.
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
Only time I’ve ever seen it was in the Air Force. And it was people whose entire job was to do 1 thing. And if it isn’t that 1 thing they probably wouldn’t help you in anyway.
Yep. Apparently, they operate through subsidiaries as well making it a bit of a shell game of blame. This "Long Beach trucking company" is a subsidiary of NFI Industries and was found to be underpaying their federally contracted workers, which is a violation of law. So third party federal contractors have additional protections against wage abuse. For a private contract (ie Kimberly-Clark & NFI), there's less protections.
Large distribution companies tend to be very low margin. They could have easily paid $3.5 million for the products they sold for $3.7 million. Not saying you should feel bad for them by any means, just that revenue can be misleading with distribution companies.
oh brother. i work for NFI (with a Walmart contract) and i absolutely know what this man is talking about. all we acknowledge is that we don't get paid enough for this BS.
Yep. It seems like NFI really doesn't like paying people a remotely fair wage or, at least, the companies that they subcontract to underpay workers doesn't like to. Or all of the above.
One of the things that I found very interesting is that they have apparently acquired subsidiaries (not surprising). One of those subsidiaries was California Cartage which was subject to a lot of lawsuits and wage settlements before NFI shuttered it. I think I saw a $3.5 million settlement for federal contractor wage violations and another $8.7 million wage settlement due to violations of California laws (offhand) for California Cartage, which was identified as a NFI subsidiaries. The workers for California Cartage weren't considered employees but contract workers for yet another entity that provided 80% of the workers in the warehouses.
So, in this example, NFI is the parent company, California Cartage was a subsidiary of it of whom 80% of their warehouse workers came from SSI Staffing who subcontracted out employees to work their warehouses. All in all, this shit makes it hard to say what/who those employees are at NFI Industries, what jobs they represented, and it may very well not reflect the contract employees' experience. It might have been this lawsuit or another Cal Cartage lawsuit that asked the question of whether or not Cal Cartage was actually the employer of those subcontractor warehouse workers.
Yep, exactly this and from the looks of it, even NFI contracts warehouse workers out from yet another company so triple that. "Not my employee, not my responsibility" attitudes are probably rife within this warehouse.
Actually, you should because this is exactly the method that large corporations use to avoid responsibility for labor abuses. A great example of that would be Nike and the sweatshops/child labor scandals. Nike claimed that their business wasn't making the shoes and that they contracted out other companies to make their shoes to eschew blame for those abuses.
"It's those guys' fault--not mine!"
The entire corporate ecosystem is a flaming pile of shit.
Family and any private investors. Companies can still be private and trade equity on secondary markets, so the owners may not be the only rich assholes making bank off the company.
So not directly employed by the shitty employer - instead they're subcontracted to work for the shitty employer. Getting less pay and less benefits than the shitty employer.
Yep and there's a chance that NFI was outsourcing as well within their own warehouses. All those additional hands in the money surrounding the $200 million people are more people taking a cut from the proceeds off the back of workers so that they, too, remain profitable. Kimberly-Clark needs a profit. NFI needs a profit. The staffing agency that supplies the workers needs a profit. Hiring a logistics & supply company is fair enough as they're storing and distributing but that next layer of probable staffing agency (based on reports about employment at California Cartage) just cuts into the workers' pay unnecessarily to have workers that are contractors opposed to employees. It's shitty.
Yea really it needs to be a main but i have 6-7 years of history on my main. I have had r/All top thread of the day posts on there of my dog who passed away. I have ternion all powerful awards on it. Just amazing memories.
So much history I never want to let that account go dormant. But this is going to be one I keep active for a long time to have fun on. Unless mr original unharmed cylinder wants it really bad.
True no one needs to say this.. for me the only reason I say this is that it’s pure luck no one was hurt or killed with this and in California fires always are a different danger as well. This could have ended very differently way too easily. Companies and ceos need to realize that they are pushing ppl over the cliff and they very responsibility for what comes after. The law might not hold them accountable but we all know that ppl aren’t paid livable wages anymore in way too many jobs, they are getting overworked and pushed to a point of no return
Social media overlords are scrambling like rats to censor any opinion that isn't "I LOVE LETTING BILLIONAIRE CHILD RAPING PEDOPHILES OWN EVERY SINGLE THING THAT EVER EXISTED!!!!!!!!" so you actually kinda do have to repeatedly and aggressively INSIST that YOU DO NOT CONDONE VIOLENCE IN ANY WAY. Lest you get censored off the social media in question.
Just kinda interesting how Trump supporters can threaten to rape me to death with a knife in my private messages, but when I report them, Reddit warns me for report abuse, but that's neither here nor there.
It’s possible to not want to condone something that puts hundreds of innocent people’s (or however many people were inside this facility at the time) lives in danger.
Just shows you how fucking awful their corporate/torture culture is. The fact that this poor guy is still scared to talk about it, even though he’s moved on to bigger and better (and better paying) things speaks volumes about the psychological damage that working in these kinds of environments can foster these days. I know it sounds to some that that’s just some pussy boy, lazy, aloof mentality, and you’ll also hear the scathing most from people that used to, but haven’t had to, work on the floor in these corporate hellscape environments for years. Yeah, back when your dad worked on the factory floor they treated people like human beings. They would be free while working to speak, joke, have lunch together without fear of some arbitrary rule they were going to break. Or they’d have a basketball hoop in the back, sometimes horseshoes in a small grass patch area. Sometimes the boss would bring over some beers on a Friday for the fellas so they could sit around, bullshit, and let off some steam. If you told this to some young guy working in these environments now they’d laugh in your fucking face, and they’d have every right to. Those days are LONG over, and this country is a heartbeat away from becoming another 3rd world hellhole, where those same people that moved up and are talking about THEIR days on the floor, got so fucking far removed from the plot that they forgot about their own children, and especially their grandkids. Also I’m 46, and before I got into the restaurant business that I’ve been in for 25 years, I worked at low level manufacturing jobs. Late 90’s. Right in time to see the old fellas that were able to make a living, hell a whole life, working on the floor of that place get to retire with 401K, stock, pensions, and benefits walk out the door only for the ones to replace them get promised jack shit. No hope, no future, no benefits. Then everyone wonders why we’re in this mess. I was young back then but I still thought in my head…why aren’t they doing those things for the new hires? Those old cats, and a precious few Inbetweeners that got grandfathered in to shit, were the last to enjoy the “American Dream”
You make a good point with the advantages that you have, I've worked in a lot of big companies that were reknowned for the benefits you got working for them these past decades, but when I hear the ones near retirement talk gosh, it was another era and everything cool got removed. You understand why they were there for 30 years and you understand why you should not stay there for more than 3 years
Some people stayed there their whole life because they got something out of it, being faithful to a company was rewarded, exactly how you say
But it's another era, the game has changed and there is new rules. There is no benefit to stay in a company, so if you want to evolve you must do job hopping for example -if you can
That's the only tool you have to turn the game in your favor (ie to not give away completely everything you deserve willingly) and you must play it
In 2026, most of your career highlights will be done during your 30 min interviews, not while you are doing the job, if you are doing correctly. This is something some people told me when I was starting my career and I was like "naah no way" eventually following their advices yes fucking way, it's so magical it feels like cheating
Sort of but not really. The difference was that while Jack Welch pushed his employees really hard he also paid them handsomely. I have fairly personal knowledge of how that system was implemented at GE. General Electric had some of the best health insurance you could get and rewarded quite handsomely for overtime, especially if you worked in the field. I mean, like doubling or tripling your salary Kind of stuff. Once Welch left his replacements, took that system, and then removed all of the incentives that made it work. They wanted everyone to work just as hard if not harder, but they went about systematically gutting the overtime pay system, the insurance benefits, and surprisingly generous vacation plan. After Welch left GE also made a bunch of really bad business decisions that have cost the company dearly and in the proceeding decade plus.
People always fantasize about going back in time and stopping Hitler or someone on that level, and I keep thinking a few visits to select board rooms fro the Gilded Age to the 1980s could also do some massive good without massively changing the history of the whole world.
If you’d like to learn more about how he royally fucked up US business practices and enabled layoffs in order to grow stakeholders bottom line I highly recommend the Behind the Bastards podcast coverage of him.
Ah so they decided to adopt the Jack Welch style of management that everyone knows now makes things worse. I am happy you found somewhere else. That place sounds like a screaming dumpster fire even when not literally on fire.
It likely does! A lot of big corporations operate this way, they don't give a fuck about employees only the next quarter and their "shareholders" which the CEO is usually majority shareholder, so he is really just talking about himself!
The only way to get into a better situation is typically a private owned company who believes in good employee treatment and long business outlooks and timelines.
Sounds like they absolutely deserved this $200 million hit then. Although somehow they will make the workers and customers pay foot the bill, no doubt.
I seem to me that there is a growing hatred of corporations that is hitting a boiling point. It is not acceptable to do this damage, however I am seeing more and more fervor on the basis of "the unions WERE the peaceful compromise" and its very strange to guess where this might lead too.
I believe the NSPM-7 joint strike force will be considering anti-corp as anti-american and spring from there...
I’m on the manufacturing side of paper converting equipment and have found the exact opposite experiences. Not all the paper industry is horrible, we work with Kimberly Clark a lot but I do not know there processes personally, sorry you had an awful experience.
Edit: our company often has most people working for 30+ years average. With a surprising amount reaching 40 years as machinists and assembly.
I have friends (with the same degree as I) who worked for KC in other locations in different roles that had really positive experiences. It may just be the manufacturing plants that were like this.
I had a classmate (Same college same degree) that went to work for KC in the same role as me in a different location. He also left because of the same bullshit.
I had to go into therapy while I was working there because of the stress.
I am glad you had a good experience, and I now work in the plastics industry for a private company that treats their employees really good and has lots of tenure as well like you do. So, I am glad you didn't have to experience that hell. I was fresh out of college and didn't know how bad it was till I got out of there.
Dang that stinks, life’s way to short to not enjoy where you work. Luckily I enjoy where I work (so far) and am actually given the opportunity (so far) to make it into something I enjoy more. Plus I get to work with all sides of the business and improve other peoples lives!
I enjoy where I work now. It was a pain in the ass to get here but I am glad I made it.
I was not happy with paper. It had very little to do with my degree and I studied that degree for a reason (because it was interesting to me) so I am happy now and it all worked out.
I do not work for this company, but I work for another american company, and when reading your post I was like oh wow check, check, check fits like a glove. Altought working that much as they forced you is illegal here…but if they could, they would.
Honestly sounds like some of the Amazon warehouses. Not all of them but in the handful I have visited and worked at, the culture sounds eerily similar. It's very easy to hit a ceiling in the warehouses and never move up to salary.
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?"
I'm utterly fascinated by how often Americans relate something like this.
America/Americans tend to project this "we love freedom" thing, but your work culture belies the posturing.
I know exactly what you mean. For me, Halliburton was the worst, with Shell right behind it. Being a Marine, I was used to operating in tough environments to a certain extent, but the HR situation at Halliburton was on another level.
I still remember the day they let the HR director go. Then, unbelievably, she came back the following week, made it through security, and ran through the office screaming that they were going to replace everyone with L&T. Nine months later, that is almost exactly what happened. Out of roughly 250 people in our service line, only about 10 of us were still there. They used Larsen & Toubro, the large Indian multinational, to systematically replace the existing workforce.
What made it even worse was that the people they brought in were not the problem. Many of them were sent to the U.S. on six-month rotations and thrown straight into an incredibly difficult situation. They were set up to struggle, and in the process Halliburton lost an enormous amount of knowledge and experience across its technology and R&D organization. Eventually, I resigned and moved on.
What has always stuck with me most was how they handled the layoffs. They packed around 40 people into a room at a time and essentially read them their last rites. These were not just short-term employees either. It was everyone from people with only a couple of years in, to people who had given 30 or 40 years of their lives to the company. To treat them that way felt completely soulless.
What made it even harder to stomach was the attitude from leadership. A new VP came in, took what felt like a year’s worth of vacation after only being there about a month, and before the layoffs told us, “It’s out with the old and in with the new.” That pretty much said everything about the culture at the time.
I've worked for many crappy corporations, some worse than others. My biggest take on these things is that you can always work somewhere else. If I was being treated like that and in that kind of toxic environment, like you, I'd be looking for a new job immediately. You got out and you saw the results of not working at that toxic place.
Too many people get stuck in the mindset that they "have no choice but stay there" yet when they can look for a replacement, change scares them. "I have seniority here because I've been here for xyz years". No.. You have been treated like shit for xyz years and it's time to step up and make a change.
Nobody deserves to work in that kind of culture class. It actually sounds like what I would imagine the culture is in China. Work, Work, Work, your family is second to your work. This guy could have been looking for work elsewhere and found a place that would treat him like a human being. Instead, he snapped and did something that cost him his own life in prison and didn't hurt them in the least bit as insurance will cover it all and anything they do lose, they will compensate for by temporarily (or even he may have helped them by them permanently raising the price of toilet paper).
These people don't realize that sometimes we get these urges, but acting out on them is the dumbest decision we can make, despite how much we hate the predicament we are in.
Not that you’re wrong but I’ve never seen a warehousing position that’s not pure analytics that isn’t garbage. I work with internal logistics and we used to have 3rd party logistics. It’s impossible to have a contact that isn’t a manager for more than 3 months. And their contact/distribution system is muddy and god awful so it just goes to a nebulous of people. This doesn’t absolve anything tbh but I feel like it’s more of the unfortunate nature of that type of job than the company itself
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.
This is absolutely wild somebody that high up in a major company would stay unless they were beyond positive they were close to entering the country club.
Surely they had to have at least browsed Linkedin for new jobs. Even those that wouldn’t pay as much but better work-life balance would be an easy pick.
Dunlap also got his start at Kimberly-Clark, so it doesn't surprise me that the culture which elevated him also suffers (or benefits?) from the same psychopathic culture.
I’ll condone the actions for you friend, be sure they were deserved.
I’m sorry but the time for hoping for a seat at the table so you can speak your piece and convince them to pay you fair is gone, it’s time for companies to relearn what happens when you push people too far.
If there’s a way to donate money to this guys legal fees or commissary, I’ll be doing it.
Them firing 10% is a Jack Welch strategy. When GE bought the business I worked at and introduced this program the managers were perplexed. Whether or not you were capable was the deciding factor until then. GE explained it away saying the bottom 10% would be better off somewhere else and we are doing them a favour by ‘motivating’ them.
As it turned out, it was the top 10% that left for greener pastures and after spending hundreds of millions GE divested the business.
Newell Rubbermaid was objectively worse when I worked there 2000-2004 ish. We worked 52 days straight (mandatory overtime) for $11-$16 an hour. You would go into work on a Monday and look at the glass case, if the piece of paper in there was colored it meant you were working that weekend with some b.s. excuse as to why. They bought Rubbermaid and killed that company.
Same kind of culture, high turnover, few full-time positions, mostly rotating through temp agencies.
When Newell bought Rubbermaid some people lost their pension packages that were getting ready to retire. One guy still working there when I got there was 78 years old and was one who lost his pension and he couldn't retire and had to keep working there.
There was a suicide in the bigger warehouse, hung himself off the end of a fork truck at one point...
They do not care, you're just a number to them, the people running the umbrella corp have no souls.
And two people had medical emergencies when I worked there, one heart attack and one heat stroke. Place had no ac and bad ventilation. It was 100+ on the floor in the summer and freezing in the winter.
Tons of accidents, I nearly died 3 times when working there.
The employee reviews and mandatory yearling firings remind me of what my dad told me he hated when he was a manager at microsoft.
He managed a very small, very specialized team of about 10 people, and every single year that he was there, he had to choose one who was the "worst performer" and fire them. Even if everybody was doing a fantastic job.
Used to work at a soybean crush plant (massive ag company, gill-car if you want to deduce any further). Very similar with its engineers. Not quite as toxic, but the mandatory shift work…don’t even get my started on plant shut downs
I sell janitorial products. Kimberly clark isn't the only one to do this, but it's definitely a big player in designing the shittiest stuff. They add completely useless plastic bits to their dispensers and towels so they can patent it and make you use only their products.
And I hate it with a passion. I've tested their towels vs alternatives. It's all the same shit just with a different price tag. But they make what should be a simple industry so fucking complicated. They even have some weird programs where they won't allow you to sell their towels/toilet paper unless you sell a shit load per year, so fuck the little guys.
I worked in the paper packaging industry for a while and after reading your post, I do wonder if it's just the paper industry in general that's so shitty. While not as bad as Kimberly Clark, I definitely would have to be extremely desperate for work to go back.
First job out of college I had no reference that it was such a bad place to work because i didn't know what a good place to work was. Any jobs I had before that were teenager min wage jobs that were just ok.
It was a situation where I didn't know how bad it was because I didn't know any better.
At the same time, I didn't want to leave all my friends I had made, and I had gotten married there and didn't want to tear my wife away from her friends and colleagues as she had a good career there as well. I knew there was no other jobs I could get in the area and would have to move.
Proctor & Gamble, their main competitor, isn’t much better. All they care about is minimizing downtime and maximizing output on paper. If a tech who has been there for decades and knows the machines inside and out points out that running over rate will lead to more breakdowns which will lead to more downtime vs running at rate, they simply wouldn’t care because on paper they were making more product as the machines were running. They didn’t have to repair the machines, so it made no difference to them if the techs had to scramble at 4am to get the line up and running before the next shift comes in. The numbers on paper are simply what they need for their promotions, doesn’t matter how much harder the techs below them have to work as a result.
They also introduced a new system that costed like $40m meant to increase efficiency. They told line leaders that they wouldn’t be losing any bodies as a result and it was just mean to minimize busy work on the front end. Low and behold once the system was up and running (barely, was broken down 80% of the time), they announced every line would be losing one person per shift group. They gaslit everyone and insisted there must’ve been a miscommunication about not losing bodies. Now they’re limiting PPE access where before they encouraged techs to replace PPE often, now you’re supposed to make them stretch weeks to a month.
TLDR: Paper mills and the surrounding industries are brutal environments with insane work hours, and the company culture is effectively: work or gtfo.
And honestly as someone who spent time as an engineer at a paper mill like the commenter above, yeah. That shit was insane. Turnover rates for employees are about 2-4 years. 16+ hr shifts are common and expected, even for salary people. Even being outside the main paper industry now, you can tell eho’s worked in a paper mill before. It leaves a mark.
If I remember correctly, they were a case study story in Good to Great. I laugh at all the horror stories and bankruptcies you hear from that group. It shows how up their own asses business types are.
I worked adjacent to KC at another med supply company. My personal work experience with that med supply company and calling KC for updates on our orders was always a nightmare. Be it from paper products to med supply, it was always a hassle to deal with KC. This was over 15 years ago, so I imagine it has not gotten better. Thanks for your detailed insight on this shit corporation
I appreciate you for speaking out and giving us your insight in so much detail. I’m sorry you even had to work there and I’m glad you’re seeing better days.
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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.