[donall]

IANAL, but habitually screaming at and insulting employees sounds like textbook harassment/bullying. I suppose this sort of criminality is less likely to be reported in more precarious employment situations.

As a data point, I have worked a lot of (so-called) blue collar jobs over the years, from stacking shelves to washing pots to serving drinks to digging ditches, and I never had a problem with a bully or a disrespectful boss. I have now been working as a software engineer for 10 years and one of my more recent bosses refused to call me by my name for several months and instead referred to me as "dickhead" or "you Irish bastard" and was known to jab his finger in people's faces and yell "fuck you" when he lost his temper. Assholes are assholes, no matter what your job title.

(but I certainly agree that lower-paid jobs are a lot tougher; even if the wages were the same, I wouldn't go back to any of the jobs I did before software)

[subsubzero]

I think retail encourages this type of behavior by having large numbers of unskilled workers all fighting for the small amount of decent paying positions, and then topping that off with paper thin profit margins due to business decisions made up higher, this leads to abusive managers floating to the top (of store management, district and regional management) as fear is a good way to get the troops inline and carry out the home offices orders. In addition job prospects of a retail front line worker are usually slim.