How about the shop owner who deducted money from people's pay to buy herself a wedding present? Or the employer who refused to offer maternity leave on the grounds that pregnancy was a "self-inflicted wound"?

Fortunately, these horrors are all American, and UK laws make it slightly less likely that a rogue employer would get away with it over here. But the bad news is that all the stories are, apparently, true.

These and many similar accounts of hard-hearted, dishonest and downright cruel employment practices appear on the My Bad Boss website, run by the American AFL-CIO trade union federation.

In all, there are 20 stories – entered for a competition to find America's worst boss.

First prize went to the manager who threw away an employee's disability benefit application when they were off work with cancer, knowing that it would take years to sort the problem out.

But my favourite story is the one about the factory blaze.

The full story has the company deciding that it needed to keep its helpdesk running even during emergencies. As a small concession, it agreed that one person should evacuate the building every five minutes as the situation escalated.

In a rather stark reversal of the dictum about the captain going down with their ship, staff were to leave in order of seniority, leaving the most junior – and most dispensable – employee to turn off the computers and lights.

On this occasion, there were nine employees present, leaving the most junior to carry on working for 45 minutes in an increasingly smoke-filled office until forced out into the open air, coughing and spluttering, by a security guard.

Of course, it could never happen here…