The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. The book was intended to be a pitch for socialism but the American audience at the time totally missed that and focused on the horrible conditions of the meat packing industry presented in the story. Conditions that were described pretty accurately.
Worked at a place where we got a company wide ass chewing from the CEO for leaving right at 5:00 PM. Apparently he interpreted this as everyone was slacking off the last few minutes.
The results: instead of walking out the door right at 5:00, all the other departments would stand at the exit and wait for the accounting department to walk out of the building first. CEO favored the accounting department so I guess everyone figured they wouldn’t get in trouble if accounting left first.
I think his little tiff actually resulted in more time being wasted.