In Sichuan, China, three supervisors at an interior decorating company crawled on their hands and knees for over half a mile after failing to meet sales targets.
They weren't alone in the shaming: One female employee was forced to shave her eyebrows to repent. However, she was not forced to crawl around the city streets, but apparently, did so as an act of self-inflicted punishment.
According to WCC Daily, the general manager said he would crawl a half a mile if the company didn't make their sales target. The company didn't, and there were also discrepancies in the accounting, so the manager got two other execs to join him.
"The temperature was 104 degrees," said one witness quoted by WCC Daily. "It was like they were masochistic." Witnesses to the scene expressed shock as this sort of thing isn't that common (though, it did happen last year at another company).
The men crawling were in high management positions. They wore gloves for their crawl, but due to heatstroke, two of them had to stop crawling. None of the three were able to crawl the half mile they were supposed to.
The incident has been covered by the mainstream Chinese press like Xinhuanet and iFeng as well as the television news media.
According to WCC Daily, one employee said that the company's atonements had always been harsh, such as allegedly cleaning the office, whether that's sweeping up, taking out the trash, or scrubbing the toilets, as well as paying for business dinners. Besides crawling, employees are allegedly shave their eyebrows, and for male employees, their heads when they fail to meet expectations.
In China, these actions are being viewed as extreme—and some even wonder if this was a publicity stunt for the company; however, one law professor told WCC Daily that these kinds of actions aren't exactly illegal there.
业绩差 达州3老总当街爬行900米 [WCC Daily]
3老总未完成销售目标当众爬3圈 女员工剃眉 [Huanqiu.com]
3名老总因业绩未完成高温跪地爬行 2人晕倒(图) [iFeng]
Photo: Huanqiu.com/iFeng
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