In Part V the boss fought back against our earlier victories by avoiding the issues and sending intimidating messages to my Chinese coworkers. (If you missed any previous chapters you can find them all here.) I felt drained, defeated, and increasingly hopeless, and still hadn’t heard back about the job in Japan.
In the midst of all this, the opportunity to make a quick two grand buying a Mercedes to ship to China seemed like a good one…
Buying the Mercedes for my coworker’s acquaintance seemed simple enough: all I had to do was meet him, pick up a cashier’s check for the cost of the car, then visit the dealership pretending to be interested in a specific model and features. The dealership would also make me sign a No-Export agreement stating I wasn’t selling the car to a foreign country—but hey, how were they ever going to know?
I started planning my act: I’d come dressed in a suit with no tie like I’d seen douchebag businessmen wear, then spin a story that my wife and I had been through a fight and it was either buy her a Mercedes or get a divorce. (That was the kind of thing douchebag businessmen did when their wives got mad at them, right?) I started practicing the firm handshake and fake cheerfulness I’d put on with the dealer, and planning who I’d ask to drop me off so they wouldn’t see my scraped-up Volvo with duct tape holding the seat together.
Meanwhile, things at work had grown unbelievably quiet. The boss was spending only a few hours a day at the company, and most of those hours he spent holed up in his office. Our department no longer held any meetings and had been left entirely to our own devices. At least one of my coworkers was doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work necessary to get him through the day, while I was just going through the motions to avoid boredom. My coworkers and I were also sharing a lot of snide, cynical remarks about the boss and the company, and this too was taking up a significant portion of our work time. (Let this be a sound lesson to managers everywhere: Discontented Employees = Lower Productivity!)
I met with the coworker who’d suggested the Mercedes deal and went over the details. The buyer was coming next week, and I told my coworker I’d think about it.
A New Light
In desperate times I tend to seek outside help. I’d been hitching rides to work with my brother Kyle because the brakes on my Volvo were stinking like a garbage fire, so I told him the whole story during one of our rides home. His response was uncharacteristically to the point:
“ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY?????”
This conversation happened on a rainy Monday afternoon, and it forced me to take a long, cold look at how low I’d sunk.
For the past nine months I’d been working in an environment where the laws didn’t matter, transactions were settled on a case-by-case basis, and the boss was obsessed with getting the best deal possible from his employees. In a environment where you feel constantly taken advantage of, it’s natural to start feeling like there’s no way out—the exact sentiment my defeated coworker expressed in Part V. When you’re being treated dishonestly and see everyone around you being treated dishonestly too, you start accepting that dishonesty as a principle of how the world works, making you more inclined to continue the cycle if it means preserving your own skin.
I thought about taking the Mercedes deal because I was stressed out in my daily life, worried about my future (there was still no word from Japan…), and surrounded by the boss’s selfish disregard for everyone around him. With everything I’d been through, I’d forgotten my mission to take care of the people I’d gotten into this mess, plus make things better for the coworkers that the boss was taking advantage of. Instead, I’d been tempted by self-gain, and I’d seriously thought about making a sketchy deal just to make some money on what’s known as the Chinese gray market.
What’s the Chinese Gray Market, Anyway?
I later found out how extensive the Chinese gray market is—as China experiences an explosion of middle-class money, consumers are demanding more and more products. Chinese people also feel a distinct lack of trust for items made in China, especially after the 2008 baby formula scandal where cheap chemical-tainted milk left six infants dead, and the allure of safety and quality combined with the perceived status of luxury items from abroad makes foreign-made goods seem all the more attractive.
However, China also levies strict taxes on imported goods that drive up prices, so the cheapest way to procure foreign products (especially luxury ones) is to buy them directly through international online retailers, a process known as haitao. Alongside this is the distinctly grayer area of daigou, where third parties buy items abroad to bring back to China and sell at a profit while still charging consumers less than what they’d pay going through official channels.
Luxury cars have been the pinnacle of Chinese gray market trade for a while now, since a BMW that costs $97,900 in the United States can go for the Chinese equivalent of $320,179. Resellers can make hefty profits by procuring cars from US dealerships at regular prices, often using fake buyers from Craigslist or elsewhere to do the actual buying, just as I’d been offered to do. BMW and Mercedes are the most popular targets, and manufacturers and dealerships are cracking down on these exchanges, with two buyers even getting charged for customs fraud in my own state of New Hampshire back in 2013 (a story I imagine was unrelated to my coworker’s acquaintance…maybe?).
I was tired of gray markets, reselling, and everything being a deal, and had zero desire to involve myself with any more of this. I told my coworker no way.
Having Other Options Made It Easier to Do the Right Thing
It weighed on me pretty heavily that I’d even considered getting involved in the Chinese car importing, and again I realized how badly the boss’s work environment had affected my judgement. That’s when I knew I had to get out of there.
I came to this conclusion in mid-March. I’d interviewed for the JET job in Japan two months prior, but I wasn’t due to hear back for another few weeks. My original plan had been to wait until I heard back, and if I got the job I’d make plans to leave the company in early summer a few weeks before departure. Now, though, I knew I had to leave at any cost, and if the JET job didn’t come through then I’d have to figure something else out.
A lot of people have asked me whether I’d have taken action against the boss in the first place if I hadn’t had a good feeling about the JET job—in other words, would I have risked the security of my main income source without a backup plan? This is a hard question, but I feel pretty confident that I would have acted either way, since it had been easy for me to get the job and would have been equally easy for me to get another one if the boss decided to let me go. I also had a decent amount of money saved, which gave me more confidence knowing that I had a financial cushion to fall back on.
One of my big takeaways from this adventure was that if you depend on a job for your day-to-day security, you’re more likely to turn a blind eye to sketchy shit, but if you don’t need that job to sustain yourself it’s about a million times easier to take action and do the right thing. Being tied down to a job makes us fearful of rocking the boat, a fear that companies and bosses have no problem taking advantage of.
Time to Jump Ship
In any case, it’s amazing how simply making the decision to leave a place can mentally free you even before you’ve given your notice—it’s like that scene in Revolutionary Road where Leonardo DiCaprio decides he’s going to move to Paris and comes into the office more chipper than he’s ever been. (I scrounged Youtube for this clip but was sadly unable to find it, so you’ll just have to watch the actual entire movie, which I recommend doing anyway).
In my case, I knew it was time to give up the fight and leave. I set a firm deadline of getting out by the end of April and decided to do as little work as possible until then so as not to support a company I didn’t respect.
How the Boss Reacted to Stu’s Job Interview
Meanwhile, Stu had revved up his search for new employment after our first kitchen table meeting a few weeks before. His hard work finally paid off when he got a callback for a job interview, which he scheduled for a Wednesday morning. He made plans to come into work an hour late, then went through the interview call and came to work as normal.
What happened next is subject to some speculation—maybe the company Stu interviewed with called our company to verify his employment, or maybe the boss just suspected something was up when Stu came in an hour late. Nevertheless, the day after Stu’s interview the boss called him into his office to give him the $3 per hour raise he’d asked for months before. Officially, this was because the more senior warehouse worker (the one who’d been asking about his overtime pay) had left three weeks before, but we all knew the real reason.
By the end of the week the other company had offered Stu the job, and he gave his notice first thing on Monday morning. During his last week at our company the boss barely even looked at him.
A Major Victory and a Dark Setback
I had big news too—my JET acceptance email came the same evening we went out to celebrate Stu’s farewell, thus turning the night into a double celebration. The sense of relief was overwhelming, and now the only thing we had to worry about was Kyle finding a new job too.
I left the JET acceptance a secret for the time being—I told one coworker that I’d interviewed for a job in Japan, but didn’t say any more for fear the boss would find out and take some sort of preemptive action. A part of me wanted to quit as soon as I possibly could…but another part of me wanted to tie up some loose ends before I left.
One of these loose ends involved a coworker who needed to ask the boss for some vacation time, though both of us were afraid the boss would say no or even renege on vacation time that he’d promised if he knew I was leaving. My coworker’s vacation was two weeks away, and to help him out I secretly planned to give my two weeks’ notice the morning of his departure (cunning, eh?), meaning that I’d be free of the company forever come April 20th.
Meanwhile, the rumor that I’d been to a job interview spread like wildfire (fortunately to everyone except the boss!), and a lot of my coworkers seemed envious that I had a chance to get out. I realized the full extent of their reactions one evening while walking across the parking lot with a Chinese coworker I didn’t know very well, and when he asked whether the rumor about my interview was true, I admitted that it was.
My coworker seemed aghast that I’d even been to another interview—wasn’t I worried about the boss finding out if the other company called to verify my employment? I laughed at this and said of course not—when the boss found out about Stu’s interview, he’d given him a raise! My coworker, though, didn’t find this funny and instead said something that neatly summed up the thing that had been bothering me the most this entire time:
“He treats you differently than he treats us.”
(You in this case meant white Americans, or at least anyone who wasn’t Chinese.)
Let me explain this a bit: at every step the boss’s case-by-case closed-door deals had left the Chinese workers in worse shape than the non-Chinese workers, especially the ones who needed working visas. If the boss knew that these workers needed their jobs and didn’t have other options, he could stop them from taking vacations, bully them in the secret Chinese Chat Room, intimidate them into coming in when they were sick, take away their bonuses, keep them in unpaid late-night meetings, and give them extra weekend tasks because he knew they wouldn’t fight back.
The boss knew he couldn’t cross these lines with the non-Chinese workers because it was easier for us to pursue other options—and when it became clear that Stu was pursuing these other options, that’s when he finally offered him a raise in an attempt to make him stay. It was selective bullying, and it made me sick to see my coworkers taken advantage of, though I don’t think I realized quite how much race played into the equation until that moment.
I protested that my coworker had no need to worry, that American companies only called to verify employment when the new job was a sure thing and that there was nothing the boss could really do, but he still seemed terrified at the very prospect of being caught job searching. This particular coworker had some high-demand skills I knew could get him another job easily, and I encouraged him to start looking—there were plenty of opportunities elsewhere, and I knew that he too could find one and move on.
My coworker’s reluctance to even think about job searching was yet another example of the boss’s control. I knew I had to get out of there—but I also had to make one final push to make things better.
Will Ian succeed in helping his downtrodden coworkers, or does the boss have more underhanded tricks up his sleeve? Find out as the story nears its thrilling conclusion!
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