I quit a job for moral reasons after nearly two years because it took that long for me to realize that it wasn’t actually at all cool to work at an insurance company defending businesses that gave their employees mesothelioma (among many other types of claims).

It sounds obvious when you say it like that, but it took a while for me to realize that when the defense and plaintiff’s attorneys are all good friends with each other and with the mediators involved, there’s not actually much of a check on them negotiating multiple cases in conjunction (I’ll come down to $5k for smith and jones each, but I can’t settle Simmons for less than $200k).

When I witnessed that, I told my boss, who was horrified, until he realized that they weren’t billing that conversation to multiple claims, and then he didn’t see the issue. My management had always been very vocally in favor of paying what we owed, not trying to minimize our payments, but as long as the breach of ethics wasn’t “coming from our side,” they were perfectly happy to take advantage of it.

I’m very much not proud of this, but I think I could have continued believing that I was helping the real victims who had yet to come forward by saving the coverage reserves in the cases that were in front of me (through actively defending them and haggling during the negotiation of settlements, not through any funny business of my own) indefinitely, had I not witnessed that conversation or received such a blasé response from my company.