Donating to charity is a great thing, but pushing someone who can’t afford it into a donation doesn’t help anyone.

In today’s story, an employee feels singled out and forced to make a charitable donation at work, but she eventually finds out why she was forced to donate.

When she learns the truth, she makes sure everyone else knows what’s going on too.

Let’s see how the story unfolds…

Boss forced me to give away my hard earned money so I sabotaged her bonus.

Every year the company I worked for has a huge fundraising campaign.

They solicit from all employees to voluntarily contribute towards charities directly from their paycheck, pretax.

You are encouraged and VERY HEAVILY pressured to donate to preselected charities of their choice in smaller amounts per month for the year or one lump sum.

Think lots of email reminders and signage all over company walls.

Ploys of having your name entered for prize drawings (didn’t matter how much you contribute, although prizes were always won by company executives and leadership…)

The company had running totals for departments of how many people were contributing.

They wanted 100% participation from all departments.

It was supposed to be private and anonymous and only show numbers.

I quickly learned it wasn’t as anonymous or voluntary as advertised…

If 1 or 2 people were holding back they were usually approached by the administrator and pressured to participate.

She didn’t want to contribute one year.

What’s really strange is the administrator of my department at the time, who was usually very stoic and stern, became giddy about the charity campaign.

It was weird and raised alarms.

One year I was struggling hard so I wasn’t going to contribute. I was so broke!

But here comes admin lady into the office suite “Weeee are almost to 100% participation” (claps, giddy squee) she looks around and starts to question each person.

The admin lady basically forced her to contribute.

She was eyeballing me the whole time, trying to subtly make her way to me.

She gets to my desk “Have yooouuuuuu made your contribution yet?”

Without thinking, should have just told her it was personal, I told her I was still considering which charity.

She pulls a chair over to my desk with a sob story from one of the charities and how the money helps those in need.

She asked me to pull up the charity website and literally walked me through entering my contribution.

So as a good little young, naive worker I did as I was being basically forced to do and contributed a minimal ($24/year at $2 a month) donation on my measly salary.

I made our dept reach 100% participation. Who cares right.

The admin lady wanted OP’s job.

The next year I purposely waited until the last second to make my contribution to see if I got the same one on one chat with admin lady.

Sure enough, here she comes with THE SAME sob story she has memorized and would baby talk me through making my contribution while she watched!

I soon became her target to get rid of.

She was out for my job so she separated me from people I got along well with, including my direct boss, and made me report directly to her.

She found out why the admin lady was so determined to get 100% participation.

I knew I had to get out of there quickly or I’d lose my job.

I applied for positions and wound up transferring to another department within a few weeks.

It ended up being an amazing move and one of my favorite positions to date.

In this new department they organized and ran multiple company, city, and county wide events, one of the biggest being The Charity Campaign for the whole company.

I brought up to my new coworkers how incredibly weird my previous admin lady was at that time of year.

They said of course she wanted 100% participation.

Admins GET A BONUS when their departments are 100% participation!!!!

She made sure her former department learned that the admin gets a bonus.

You can bet your sweet rear-ends I started telling everyone in my previous department about that little tidbit.

The next year that department had one of the lowest participation efforts!

Being that I was in a better place in life and actually liked my new department and leadership I began willingly contributing because the new admin would take that bonus and buy everyone lunch or some form of thanks.

It sounds like she made a wise move to switch departments.

OP’s former coworkers must not like the admin lady very much either since they didn’t want to help her get a bonus.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

This reader doesn’t like donation requests at stores.

Here’s what she could’ve said to the admin lady instead of donating.

Another person shares a similar story.

Here’s why forced donation is a problem.

This person points out who is really to blame for situations like the one in this story.

She should’ve reported the admin lady to HR.

It’s not a donation if it’s not voluntary.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.