From June 2017 to April 2018 I worked at a No-Longer Secret Office Day Job where I wrote ad copy and managed inventory for a small online electronics shop that routinely broke labor and tax laws and did some pretty serious discriminating. I discovered this over the course of several months, and when things reached a breaking point my friends and I decided to take action. That’s what this series is about.
I don’t mean to write this as a formal whistleblowing complaint (I took care of that already!), but more as a personal narrative that I hope you (yes, you!) the reader can learn from, since labor and tax laws are pretty complicated and it can be hard to know when you’re being taken advantage of. Whether your job is your passion, a Day Job, or somewhere in between, making sure our workplaces are fair and legal is big stuff.
Oh yeah, a quick disclaimer first—nothing in this series should be taken as legal advice of ANY kind, and any factual information presented is meant as a jumping-off point for readers to do their own research and make their own decisions. So yeah, don’t go taking ANYTHING I say as legal advice ;-)
Also, for easy navigation and all that jazz, here’s a chapter-by-chapter rundown so you can skip around:
Part I: How My Friends and I Came to Work for a Shady Online Retailer
Part II: Something’s Fishy About the Company Overtime Policy
Part III: A Laundry List of Terrible
Part IV: Showdown
Part V: The Boss Strikes Back
Part VI: Throwing in the Towel
Part VII: The Company Disappeared Me!
Part VIII: What Did I Learn From All This?
So What Exactly Happened?
The problems at my former job were almost entirely due to the company owner, whom I’ll refer to as “the boss.” The boss was a former software engineer in his late thirties or early forties who ran an Amazon and eBay store that he’d expanded to a full warehouse operation several years before. He lived with his wife and kids in an expensive suburb and drove a late-model Lexus SUV while his wife drove a Tesla. His overall appearance was friendly and cheerful—he usually spoke in a soft tone of voice, was easy to talk to, and dressed casually, including one day when he gave a major presentation while wearing a t-shirt with a penguin on it.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the laws I caught him breaking during my time at the company:
- Not paying workers for overtime hours, even after the overtime laws were brought to his attention.
- Falsely claiming that certain employees were exempt from overtime regardless of their actual job duties.
- Paying (and attempting to pay) regular employees using 1099 independent contractor forms to save on payroll taxes.
- Deducting pay from salaried employees who took sick days in violation of New Hampshire state law.
- Giving out vacation time instead of overtime pay to employees who worked extra weekend hours.
- Not paying overtime for evening and weekend business trips.
- Not allowing employees to take meal breaks every 5 hours during the busy holiday season, in violation of New Hampshire state law.
- Requiring employees to work seven days per week without prior permission, in violation of New Hampshire state law.
- Holding employees to different standards based on their country of origin and working visa status.
- Not clearly posting overtime and labor laws where employees could see them.
In addition, here’s some other things he did that, while technically not illegal, were manipulative, discriminatory, and just plain not cool:
- Not allowing employees to take days off for vacations, appointments, or their children’s events.
- Discouraging employees from taking sick days, and ignoring their obvious health problems when they came in with fevers, flus, and severe lack of sleep.
- Encouraging employees to keep their salaries, bonuses, and fringe benefits secret from their coworkers so that some of them wouldn’t know they were getting a bad deal.
- Assigning excessive tasks to employees he knew would willingly work overtime without pay.
- Discouraging employees from talking about labor laws and working conditions.
- Discouraging employees from forming unions.
- Telling employees that bringing in “outside groups” such as the IRS or Department of Labor was wrong, and that employees should always come to him first to settle problems.
- Giving out employee bonuses (and withholding bonuses) based on random criteria that was never made clear to employees.
- Vaguely promising raises, benefits, and improved working conditions during one-on-one meetings, then consistently failing to deliver.
- Intimidating employees against looking for other jobs.
- Consistently neglecting to pay overtime, and when confronted, insisting that it “was just a mistake.”
- Not paying employees for their unused vacation time despite the company’s handbook promising to do so.
Finally, here’s a few things that showed that the boss just didn’t care about other people:
- He argued that following laws was less important than making money.
- He never admitted when the company made legal or financial mistakes, and instead corrected them quietly while making excuses.
- He refused to give a $200 pay advance to a loyal employee whose Paypal account had been hacked.
- He ignored health insurance and sick days as necessary employee benefits.
Holy Smokes, That’s a Long-Ass List! How’d You End Up Working at a Place Like That???
Dial all the way back to April 2017 when I was finishing the third draft of my novel, crashing with some friends in their spare room, and making barely enough to make ends meet as an online test grader. I’d set this up as a temporary plan while I waited to hear back from a kick-ass job I thought I had a really good shot at…but ended up not getting (triple sad face).
When the angst and frustration had cleared, I realized I needed to get back to work. The heaviest rewrites on my novel were done, my savings had dropped precipitously low, and I was itching to have my own living space again. To do that, though, I needed a full-time Day Job.
My criteria for said Day Job was ridiculously low: it had to pay enough for me to afford my own place, not involve a lot of stress, and be something I could easily leave after a year, since I was already planning to apply for a JET job in Japan. Besides my writing skills, I had a strong resume in copyediting, some old experience with marketing and ad writing, plus a decent amount of publicity and social media work I figured I could finagle into something an employer would be interested in, so I put on my job-searching hat.
Job searching is one of my least favorite things in the entire universe to do, especially when you’re doing it because you need a job. Most weeks I found few positions I was qualified for, and since New Hampshire’s a small state population- and industry-wise, knowing I had limited opportunities felt discouraging.
I got a few email replies, completed some copyediting tests, and went on a few interviews. One interview for an editing job at a big accounting company went well, but I didn’t get it. Another job with a small startup just didn’t feel right, since I had a bad feeling about the company’s potential. The third interview, though, felt like the happy medium.
First Impressions
I’ve always been an informal guy, as my casual swearing and excessive use of exclamation points suggests. I feel most comfortable in an atmosphere where I can be myself without a lot of rules or decorum, so during the interview I thought I’d found my haven.
The boss’s company operated out of a warehouse with a few offices attached, and the entire space looked like it’d been thrown together with scrounged shelving and furniture from a state auction. The meeting room ceiling consisted of bare joists and insulation, and many of the walls were plywood. There were empty boxes, computer parts, and pieces of junk everywhere. It seemed like a company that didn’t care about making a good impression, which was fine by me as long as they offered me a paycheck.
The boss and his wife (who handled payroll) were both Chinese, as were most of the other ten or twelve employees, and everyone was refreshingly young (20s and 30s) and ridiculously chill. I walked away from the interview feeling comfortable because the people there were laid back, close to my age, and unconcerned with the usual office formalities.
The boss liked that I’d had experience with editing, plus experience working in a different culture, doing actual marketing work, and working on a smaller team. The boss himself was friendly both on the phone and in person, alternating between telling me about the business and discussing cultural topics related to China and America. Everything seemed right, so when he called three days later to offer me the job, I accepted.
Smooth Sailing
My first four months at the company were an easy ride: I had my own office, my coworkers seemed not to know what to do with me, and most days there didn’t seem to be enough work for me to do. Summer was the slow season, and I hadn’t quite been trained in all the company marketing duties, so most days I just made up my own projects—and, astoundingly, this made me stand out with very little effort on my part. Most of the time, though, since the job lacked any real structure, I felt relaxed and free almost to the point of boredom.
I kept mostly to myself and spent the vast majority of each day in my office, interacting with my new coworkers only when necessary. This actually helped me fit right in, since everyone else kept to themselves too and mostly talked via the company chat program rather than face-to-face.
Since the weather was warm, most days I took my lunches outside with a book or used the time to run errands. I started saving money right away, and kept up a Day Job routine of grinding through the day to focus on my other work at night, which meant that I left work every evening at 6pm on the dot while my coworkers were still buried at their computers. All told, it looked like I’d be able to cruise through the next few months without any problems at all.
Spreading the Love
As fall arrived, the company started prepping for the busy holiday retail season, which meant they needed more help. Since they didn’t have a separate HR department and hiring was a drawn-out process, the boss asked me if I knew anyone interested in a newly vacated technician position—and as it turned out, my younger brother Kyle was at that very moment in the market for a new job.
Here’s a photo of Kyle (right) and me (left) taken right before our road trip from Los Angeles to New Hampshire a few years back. He and I are pretty close, so when I saw the opportunity for him to ditch his hellish seventy-minute commute and try something he was more interested in, I figured I’d pass it along. After all, passing on opportunities is how people help each other get ahead, right?
Kyle got the technician job and started working, so when the company needed more people to process orders in the warehouse, I offered the job to my old high-school friend and former roommate Stu, who’d been looking to shift careers from his job at a bakery to something electronics- or programing-related with a more pleasant work environment. Rather than show you a picture of Stu, here’s a picture of some amazing bacon jam-filled BBQ maple cupcakes he made instead:
Stu interviewed and got the job (though not because of his cupcakes), and started working in the warehouse right before the holiday season.
Everything seemed to be coming up Milhouse—I had a laid-back Day Job working with my brother and one of my best friends, I was getting a lot of creative work done, and at the end of the year I’d be eligible for an employee profit-sharing bonus. I’d ever gotten permission to take time off (some paid, some unpaid) for my trip to India! The only thing that seemed to be missing was health insurance, which the company didn’t provide—but I was making enough that paying for my own through the Affordable Care Act didn’t seem like a big deal.
Even now I still kick myself for not being more observant and asking more questions during those first few months. Why was Kyle being paid on a 1099 instead of a W-2 form? Were the Chinese employees being paid overtime to stay late day after day while I left on time? And what exactly was the company’s sick day policy?
Things were about to get real.
Coming up in Part II: a new employee walks out, shifty overtime policies revealed, and the boss cranks the workload up to 11! Follow me at the links below and never miss an update:
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Cover photo under CC 2.0 license, cupcake photo by Stu Keenan.
Ian this is terrific from Stu’s mom