Young Aussie lifts the lid on the trauma of working in a corporate office

A young Australian woman has taken to social media to complain about the treatment she experienced while working in corporate offices. 

Influencer Chloe Baradinsky, from Sydney, said in the video posted to TikTok she was making a ‘trauma salad corporate edition’ by dumping various sweet treats into a bowl while listing her negative experiences.

‘I got told by a male in the industry I only got hired because I tick two diversity boxes, I’m a female and I’m Asian,’ Ms Baradinsky began. 

Ms Baradinsky, who works in the finance industry, said a male colleague was ‘super handsy’ with her at a work dinner before going to cover her mouth with his hand each time she went to speak to silence her. 

‘I got yelled at that I wasn’t working hard enough even though I had worked till 9pm every night the past few weeks and the past few weekends,’ she continued. 

‘I was at an industry event and a male said to my old boss, we all know why you hired her, because of her looks. 

‘Once I was throwing up all day from food poisoning and my boss gave me a 5.30pm early mark. Or the time when a boss asked me to dinner on Valentines Day.’

She finished the video by describing an incident when she had pneumonia and her team ‘wouldn’t believe I was sick enough not to work’ so she dragged herself out of bed ‘for the first time in a week’ and went into the office.

Commenters on the video were mostly supportive of Ms Baradinsky with some calling corporate workplaces ‘toxic’ and saying ‘this is why we need unions’.

‘I once worked in a company where my boss told me my main job was to make sure there was a banana on her desk every morning. Which was in fact not at all part of my job,’ one person said.

‘I worked for a global IT company in Sydney and let me tell you I have millions of stories just like this. I quit after 5 years and never looked back,’ another said.

‘This is grim. I’m hoping these are all previous employment situations,’ added a third.

However, other commenters said Ms Baradinsky was being overly dramatic.

‘Y’all are ridiculous to call this trauma,’ one person said. 

‘What’s the other option, have everyone social distance from you and treat you like a disease in case you get offended,’ another said.

Ms Baradinsky, who quit the industry to start her own clothing business K. Juliet, posted another video in which she expanded on her corporate woes. 

Workplace platform WorkL this week released a list of the happiest companies to work for in the world based on more than a million surveys filled out by users (pictured, Sydney’s CBD)

She said after the dinner where her male colleague was being ‘super handsy’, nobody in her team called him out the next day or checked if she was OK. 

‘I’m not a sensitive person. I want to make that clear. I’m not sensitive. You’re in a work environment, you already feel stupid cause you’re young, you’re the only female there, you’re the most junior. I would expect my team to stick up for me. I would expect my manager to say something to that person the next day,’ she said. 

‘My performance from early last year to late last year was starkly different.’

Ms Baradinsky said her confidence had dropped due to her treatment at work and she had been crying in the bathroom regularly.

‘I am very capable. I’m not an idiot, despite being told basically in more ways or less that I’m an idiot,’ she explained. 

‘I got yelled at by someone in the team. I’ve never been spoken to like that before. He was like, you shouldn’t be taking lunch breaks. You’re not working hard enough. I had been working till like 9 or 10 every night and on the weekends. If I’m working long hours, I expect flexibility in return. There was no flexibility.’

Ms Baradinsky said she eventually had a confrontation with senior staff members. 

‘I snapped and I said, “You watched me bawl my eyes out and no one did anything about it” and the senior person was like, “I asked other people how I should handle it”. This is a senior person they should know how to manage their own staff.

‘I said I know nothing will change and there was silence and then someone goes, “this team will never change”, so there you go. I got up and left and I never spoke to anyone in that team again. There’s a whole lot more to it for another video,’ she said.

On Tuesday, workplace platform WorkL released a list of the happiest companies to work for in the world based on more than a million surveys filled out by users.

In Australia, Bunnings, MECCA, CommBank, the Queensland Government and Google topped the list.