Hughes Hubbard & Reed: Low-Class Sweatshop

One firm that was left off the chart is Hughes, Hubbard and Reed. It pays below market--$35 / hour and is incredibly stingy across the board. The conditions on that project are horrendous, and the leadership is both incompetent and psychotic. They have an operation offsite like the Matrix with 100s of attorneys crammed into one room. They put the rest of the bodies in the bowels of the firm's main building in a windowless space with lead paint, asbestos, dust, blinding flourescent lights, a broken furnace that sets the room as either an arctic freezer in the winter or a sauna in the spring and some of the nastiest bathrooms in the city. The size of the overblown egos of the staff attorneys and 17th year associates are rivaled only by their waistlines--the Eggman and the Walrus personified. These uncredentialed, illiterate, ignorant and just plain dumb figures wield the micromillimeter of power they have to make other people's lives miserable. They stuck a babysitter ("Anita" equivalent) in a corner of one room to peak through the glass of a partition to spy on people in another room and instructed her to follow people to the bathroom to make sure they were really going to the bathroom. Then they had someone scrape the frosting off the glass with an ice scraper and a toxic chemical that converted the glass to plastic while people were working in that room. This project may rival the "Anita" project and Paul Weiss, and things promise to get worse still: the glass wall will come down (if only life were a Lewis Carol novel, Humpty Dumpty / the Eggman would sit on the wall and have a great fall), and more bodies will be crammed into the dank space making it even more of a fire hazard and health code violation than it already is. If anyone calls you with a job at HHR, hang up the phone and run away.