When I left off in Part IV my friends and I had managed to sort out some nasty tax tricks the boss was pulling and I’d argued a hard bargain in favor of sick days for everyone in the company. (If you missed the earlier chapters, check them out here for the full story!)
Though my second 2+ hour meeting with the boss had gone a lot better than the first, it still left me unhinged: in exchange for not going to the IRS, I’d agreed to bargain with him for better working conditions, including paid sick days and consistent rules for employee raises. Now the ball was in his court.
Initially, the boss had claimed that he hadn’t realized that paid sick days were an important benefit because most Chinese companies don’t offer them…though I later found both this article and this one suggesting otherwise. He also expressed concern that employees might abuse paid sick time, since he claimed to have had problems with employees taking overly long lunches in the past. Once again, though, I never found any employees who corroborated the boss’s long lunch story, and all of them seemed surprised by the insinuation.
It’s hard to speculate how many of the boss’s claims were based on ignorance, how many stemmed from his fear of being taken advantage of, and how many were just made up, but I foolishly took what he said at face value. In any case, our week of madness occurred right before the boss and his wife left on a weeklong vacation (which sounded like an expensive one!), meaning we could rest easy while he was gone.
Or so I thought….
The Secret Chinese Chat Room
Over the weekend, the boss created a new room in our company chat program that only the Chinese employees were invited to. The room was simply labeled “Chinese Language” (I knew enough from studying Japanese to decipher 中文 when a coworker later showed it to me) and contained only one message sent by the boss.
That message, as another coworker translated it, was the boss warning the Chinese employees that while he was on vacation, Ian might try to come talk to them about some things that they might not feel comfortable talking about. If Ian did this, the message said, it was perfectly OK to say “I’m not comfortable talking about that” (the message’s only English sentence) and walk away.
Since I was hearing this in translation, I’m still not sure of the boss’s exact tone. Was it coolly casual, directly threatening, or somewhere in between? Regardless, the boss’s having sent it carried the clear message that he didn’t want the Chinese workers talking to me about workplace issues. It also showed that he was afraid of me trying.
“I Don’t Like It, But There’s Nothing I Can Do”
I found out about the message on Monday morning, but only after I’d greeted another coworker with a joke about us having a party while the boss was on vacation. The coworker’s response was to ignore me to the point of not even looking at me—so of course I assumed he hadn’t heard and repeated my joke. This time he responded with a terse “Sure” that was uncharacteristically brief even for him, so I figured he wasn’t feeling well and moved on.
I then found out about the Secret Chinese Chat Room from a different coworker and immediately knew why my first coworker hadn’t wanted to talk to me. Maybe he was afraid of what I might say beyond the joke, or maybe he was so afraid of the boss’s message that he was avoiding the most casual of workplace banter—but either way his response was striking.
Later that morning this same coworker knocked on my door wanting to talk. He explained about the Secret Chinese Chat Room for the second time and also mentioned that he’d heard about the 1099 issue. Now he’d come to personally ask me not to report anything to the IRS.
This particular coworker was in the US on a working visa, as were several others at the company. He worked in the office, and was one of the employees who always stayed the latest and had worked the most overtime during the holidays. If I talked to the IRS and they came to check out the company, he told me, he was certain the IRS would find enough things wrong that the company would be shut down. He didn’t want that to happen because he needed his job to stay in the country.
I asked him how he was so sure the IRS would shut the company down instead of just making the boss pay some fines, and he implied that the tax issues went far deeper than I knew about. “I think lots of companies are like that, he told me. “They don’t care about the law, and they always break the rules in secret, but no one tells anyone.”
My coworker had long since accepted this dishonesty as a fact of life, as he’d also accepted that working under grueling and unfair conditions was a tradeoff for his staying in the US. “Of course I don’t like it,” he said, “but there’s nothing I can do.” His mindset struck me as a reworded version of the “It is what it is” refrain I hear so often from people who readily accept defeat rather than trying to change their situations, and his experience even shares faint echoes of women brought to the US as sex slaves.
I reassured my coworker that I didn’t want him to lose his visa but told him I wasn’t the kind of person who gave up easily. I couldn’t stand working at a company where things weren’t fair and hated seeing my coworkers being taken advantage of, which was why I wanted to take action. I told him that everyone always has a choice to fight back against the forces keeping them down, especially if they’re willing to make sacrifices.
Maybe I thought that way, my coworker said, but he didn’t, and most Chinese people he knew didn’t. He had a car, a place to live, and bills to pay, and he needed a job to keep all of that. He was also married and wanted to stay in the US, and the boss’s working visa further made those things possible. For him it was worth working a terrible job if it meant keeping the life he’d grown comfortable with.
Though I was eventually able to instill some more confidence in him, his insistence that nothing about his situation could be changed stuck with me for a long time.
Another Three-Hour Meeting, This One Without Pay
That same Monday morning (it was a hell of a day!), I found another coworker in the break room incensed over something that had happened the previous Friday. Before the boss left on his vacation, he’d called my coworker upstairs for a three-hour meeting that ran past 8:30pm—without pay.
The things they talked about ranged once again to how this coworker shouldn’t be communicating with Ian, but also why he hadn’t gotten a year-end bonus, which the boss vaguely claimed was because of some performance-related issues. When the coworker asked whether he’d be paid overtime for their meeting, the boss told him that he wasn’t eligible for overtime because he was on an H-1B visa.
Rather than repeat my earlier mistake, this time I checked out the boss’s visa claim right away and found that, not surprisingly, he was wrong again. Non-US citizens working on H-1B visas have to be working a job that requires a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent, as the US Immigration website clearly states, but this is different from the FLSA’s definition of “highly-skilled employees” who don’t have to be paid overtime. Instead, these highly-skilled exempt employees have to be working in certain scientific or learned fields that require a more advanced degree in that specific area, usually at least a master’s.
To put it more simply, someone working an entry-level bookkeeping job is eligible for an H1-B visa if that bookkeeping job requires at least a bachelor’s degree, but because an entry-level bookkeeping job probably doesn’t require advanced master’s-level financial skills, the person likely still needs to be paid overtime. Thus, there’s not necessarily a correlation between H1-B visas and overtime exemptions, as this legal office is careful to point out.
It appeared that instead of listening to what I’d told him about overtime, the boss was now twisting my arguments around to use against us.
The First Person to Leave
For weeks I’d been thinking about the Chinese warehouse employee who’d been asking about his overtime pay back in January, and I still didn’t know the full story because his English was limited and my Chinese was nonexistent.
My plan was to ask a friend from outside the company to translate a message asking about my coworker’s overtime problem that I could pass to him secretly. Then, if he seemed eager to talk, I’d pull aside another coworker I trusted to translate. However, I felt reluctant to involve other coworkers before I knew for sure since I had so incredibly little to go on.
In retrospect, waiting was a poor decision: that Monday when the boss left on vacation, the warehouse worker told us he wasn’t coming back, and the next day he was gone.
Like I said, it was a hell of a day.
The Boss Starts Doing Nice Things
I wasn’t sure what to do when the boss came back from vacation: not only was I still reeling from the insanity of the past few weeks, I also wanted to play a little good-cop bad-cop by easing up and negotiating with him on friendlier terms.
The boss came back the same week as my birthday, and with all that I’d been through I didn’t feel much like celebrating. However, when the boss found out about my birthday he went and bought me a grocery store-decorated cake that a few of us shared during lunch. I felt more awkward than grateful—the boss hadn’t bought cakes for anyone else’s birthday, so the gesture felt like a clear attempt to appease me after the 1099 battle.
Then the boss decided to hold a pizza lunch for another coworker who was leaving to move to another country. I didn’t feel much like going and I don’t think anyone else did either, but we all put on happy faces and went for free pizza and some moderately forced conversation. Most of my coworkers spent that hour on their phones not talking to anyone, though the boss seemed determined to make it a cheerful occasion by telling a lot of stories and taking a group photo.
It occurred to me later that the boss’s sudden attempt to buy us food (which I’m sure he remembered to list as a business expense) was carefully calculated: by creating a superficially fun atmosphere with pizza lunches and cheap birthday cakes, he hoped that these platitudes would make up for the more serious discrimination and rulebreaking that was going on behind the scenes. It was also an artificial way of making us support the company and creating the appearance that everything was all right, since it’s a whole lot harder to demand sick days from someone who’s just bought you a birthday cake.
Speaking of Sick Days…Here’s What Happened When I Followed Up
I knew from my last meeting with the boss that I was close to getting us sick days, but I needed a chance to follow up. I also had an ace in the hole: if the boss didn’t voluntarily agree to offer sick days, I could bring up the New Hampshire state law that prevented companies from withholding pay from salaried employees who stayed home sick and use that to get us our sick pay.
Once again, I decided to wait a few days after the boss’s return—a move I thought would give him time to settle in and let his guard down. I also feared his thinking that I was spending all of my time on workplace problems, and wanted to let him know that I was keeping up with my actual work too. Once again, though, waiting gave the boss time to plan his defense while also creating the impression that I could be pushed around, and I wish I’d acted a lot sooner.
On Friday morning I sent him the follow-up about sick days but got no reply. This was unexpected, since the boss had never just not replied before, and the chat program’s read message clearly showed that he’d gotten it. I had to try again.
My second follow-up the next week was more direct, saying that I wanted to talk about sick days again and could come to him for another meeting if necessary. I also mentioned the previous follow-up to indicate that I’d remembered his silence. This time his reply was short and simple: this was a business decision, and he needed time to think about it. That was that.
Here’s when I should have brought up the New Hampshire sick day law, but in a moment of panic I didn’t—a Wednesday morning chat message didn’t seem like the time or the place to suddenly bring up state law. In planning out how to handle this I hadn’t banked on his simply saying he needed more time to think about it, and in my blind panic I chose a path of self-interest, asking instead if I could use one of my accumulated vacation days to cover the sick day I’d taken after my India trip. The boss shot this request down immediately, saying that it wouldn’t be fair to other employees if he advanced me a vacation day.
The boss had sensed how deeply I cared about an equal workplace where everyone followed the same rules and was now using it against me, all because I’d momentarily taken the selfish route. Meanwhile, I’d lost my chance to bring up the New Hampshire state law, and the conversation ended in a stark defeat.
The Boss Blocks My Inventory Access
Around this time I started having trouble accessing the section of our company inventory software that showed how much the company made or lost on a particular sale. I first suspected that this was some sort of software malfunction until I asked one of my coworkers. He explained that when the company was newer, the boss hadn’t let anyone see how much profit or loss the company made on an individual item, and it was only later that he’d unlocked this feature for certain trusted employees. I used to be on the unblocked list, but now I apparently wasn’t.
When I messaged the boss about this he replied that he’d “look into it,” though I never heard anything back. Since I was growing tired of not hearing back about things and had bigger fish to fry, I never followed up—though I wonder what excuse the boss would have made if I’d tried.
A New Low, and A New Bargain
Meanwhile, I was taking this whole mess pretty hard—I hadn’t been sleeping well, I wasn’t doing much creative work, and all the worrying and anxious phone calls exchanging updates with Kyle and Stu were becoming a real distraction. I’d also invested tens of hours researching work visas, overtime laws, tax codes, and benefit laws, and my head was swimming with RSAs and IRS form numbers. I still hadn’t heard back from my JET program interview and was also beginning to worry about what to do as a backup in case the job didn’t come through—was I in any position to bail out without another job, or was it worth trying to actually make things at the company better?
My workdays began to drag on—I spent a lot of time staring out the window (which, I should mention, wasn’t very productive for the company!), and kicked myself for the mistakes I’d made. This was also about the time the brakes on my trusty Volvo started sticking, creating a putrid stench whenever I drove for longer than a few minutes and leaving me to hitch rides to work with Kyle while I figured out the problem.
It occurred to me that I was fighting a fruitless, uphill battle, and that the boss had all the power in an environment where no one was willing to speak out against him. If the other employees were too scared to do anything, was it even worth my fighting alone?
Maybe instead of fighting for equal rights, the only way to succeed in the boss’s world was by working within that “case-by-case” basis where whatever you could bargain and take for yourself was what you got, regardless of the law or what was fair. After all, this was how the company ran its business: it raised prices when our competitors raised theirs, and raised them even higher when there weren’t any competitors at all, lowering them only when absolutely necessary to make a sale. The economics of pure capitalism weren’t governed by rules: they were governed by whatever you could take from other people as long as no one else stopped you.
These were the dark thoughts seeping into my brain, and in the middle of all this another coworker approached me with a proposition. He knew a Chinese guy who made money importing BMWs and Mercedes into China outside of official channels, since China levies incredibly high tariffs on imported goods that make luxury cars even more expensive than they already are. This guy, however, had figured out a way around the import taxes, but to do so he needed people to walk into a Mercedes dealership, pretend to be interested in a certain model, make the purchase, and deliver it to him on the sly—and for that, the buyers would make an easy $2,000 bucks and my coworker would get a finder’s fee.
My coworker thought I’d be perfectly suited to the job—mostly because I was white and less likely to arouse suspicion. All I had to do was meet with the guy, pick up a cashier’s check, make the purchase from the dealership, then hand over the Mercedes. The dealership would make me sign a paper promising that I wasn’t selling the car to any overseas buyers, but really, if they ever found out about it and barred me from buying from them again, I wasn’t going to be buying a Mercedes anytime soon, was I?
It seemed like an offer worth taking up.
Will Ian succumb to the allure of unrestrained capitalism and buy a Mercedes for the Chinese gray market? And why is he consistently referring to himself in the third-person??? Find out in Part VI!
Stay in touch—there’s way more to come!
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I am loving this series- can’t wait to find out what else happens! Can I say too- Ian has so much class that many who encountered him in other situations had no idea all this drama was going on.