What Industry Is Shadier Than Most People Realize? - r/AskReddit, Top Posts

What industry is a lot shadier than it seems?

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Avocado farms. Most of the farms in Central America are taken over by the cartel because of how much money is in selling avocados.

The textbook Industry
Pearson is the **** mafia

Health insurance. In the commercials it is all about caring for your health and stuff. But if you ever get a serious illness, they will do anything to avoid paying for your treatment. Source: my mother got breast cancer and her health insurance made a business decision to let her die rather than pay the 40,000$ for her treatment. They made that decision then hired lawyers to make it happen. My mom got to fight them in court while going through chemo. She made it, by mortgaging the house. She told me the insurance company caused her more stress than the prospect of dieing.

I buy insulin every month, and every month I literally have to beg my insurance over the phone about why I need this. Its scummy shit.

CBD, lot of predatory companies making subpar products with questionable raw materials and then marking it way the fuck up and selling it as a miracle cure to vulnerable and ill educated consumers. Usually have a high power legal team on deck, but pay their workers shit and no benefits.

More people died last year over vanilla in Madagascar than cocaine in South America. They’ve even coined the term “vanilla murder”. Farmers hire armed mercenaries to guard their crops from thieves near harvest time, and if one is caught... well... let’s just say it’s in response to all the farmers that were killed by thieves for the same reason.

Not an industry, but higher academia is badly broken.
Some of the smartest people are some of the most badly exploited. Old tenured professors limit the number of faculty many departments can have, forcing people to work as postdocs forever, effectively doing all the work the prof should be doing in the first place. Meagre pay and long hours, plus constant pressure makes postdocs some of the most depressed people.
The grad students are no better either. A lot of the times grad students don't complain about ill treatment, harassment and outright bullying as they don't want to jeopardize their prospects of graduating.
If you're a foreigner, this situation becomes even worse, whether you've a grad student or a postdoctoral researcher.

The maritime industry. Most of the big companies do things by the book and treat crews well because they’re afraid of lawsuits and unions, but many smaller “mom and pop” companies break laws and violate safety regulations with reckless abandon because they’re not as visible and can “stay under the radar” so to speak. It’s very common for a small company to ask a captain/crew to do something illegal and dangerous in order to increase profit, and for the captain/crew to comply out of fear of losing their jobs. And that’s just the US maritime industry; sailors from poorer nations who work on ships are often fed little more than rice and cheap ramen for months at a time and paid pennies for their backbreaking work. I love running tugs for a living, but the industry as a whole is rife with shady business.