When we left off in Part VI I’d secured a new job and was waiting for the perfect time to give my notice—but I was also feeling guilty about abandoning my cause to make things better in my shitty work environment. A lot of my coworkers were still having a rough time, and I knew I had to do something about it.
If you missed any of the earlier episodes you can get caught up here.
The day I quit was pretty anticlimactic. I messaged the boss with my resignation letter giving two weeks’ notice and explaining that I’d taken a teaching job in Japan and needed time to prepare for my trip. I also made sure to mention that the new job provided benefits such as sick days as a not-so-subtle jab at the boss’s stinginess.
In my letter I spelled out that I expected the company to pay me for my two unused vacation days, since this was laid out in the handbook, and I quoted the relevant sections as evidence. I’d talked to a few other coworkers who’d left the company without being paid for their unused vacation time—they didn’t know the handbook policy and hadn’t bothered to ask, so I wasn’t taking any chances in case the boss decided to conveniently forget about his own handbook rules.
The boss’s reply was brief: he congratulated me on my new job and said it was no problem to pay me for the vacation time. He told me that we’d have an exit interview before I left, then didn’t talk to me for a week and a half.
It’s hard to explain my mindset that first week after I resigned. All of my coworkers wanted to congratulate me and ask about my job in Japan, and the atmosphere at work was the brightest it had been in months, especially with the boss still holing up in his office and avoiding everyone. I also started working a lot harder—I went from marathon window-staring sessions and half-assing my daily work to cleaning up a plethora of loose ends to help whoever took my job after me. I also devoted myself more fully to the writing portion of the job that I actually enjoyed, and did some of my best work ever those last few days—a change that resulted entirely from my difference in attitude.
The biggest loose end of all, though, was making sure the boss didn’t break any more laws after I left. With Stu out and my brother on the job hunt, I worried that the boss would return to his old tricks after we were all gone. I wouldn’t be around to keep the boss in check anymore, but I knew there was one other person who could.
Calling for Help
Our company employed a warehouse manager who’d been out on leave when most of the craziness in Parts III, IV, and V went down. I’d helped him out with more than a few other favors, and he was one of the people in the company I trusted. However, there was a lot I hadn’t told him—partly because he’d been away, but also because I knew he was also close to the boss. By virtue of his position he was the one other person in the company besides the boss and his wife who had any real managerial status, and thus the only other person who could make sure the company followed the labor laws.
Four days before I was due to leave, I messaged the warehouse manager saying I wanted to talk about some issues, and he said he’d be right over.
Our meeting lasted about an hour and went better than I’d hoped for—not only did the warehouse manager already have an inkling about some of our workplace problems, he seemed especially concerned about keeping a strong warehouse team, since losing Stu and several other workers over the past few months had been a major blow. Thus, he had more skin in the game when it came to making sure that our coworkers felt comfortable at their jobs since it meant securing his own future.
I gave the warehouse manager a mini-lesson in American labor laws: I started with New Hampshire’s 5-hour meal break law (which he hadn’t known about) and recommended that the company plan an actual schedule during the busy holiday season so that everyone could take a break at different times. I then explained how overtime exemptions worked for some employees, suggesting that the boss clearly outline who needed to be paid overtime and who didn’t, something the warehouse manager heartily agreed with. The warehouse manager also told me that the company had been thinking about bringing in an outside HR company to help with issues like these, and he seemed newly energized about how this might help.
In the midst of our talk I also mentioned the rumor I’d heard about the warehouse worker who’d had a fight with the boss and gone around asking about his lost overtime pay and how, though I didn’t know for sure, I suspected that the boss hadn’t given it to him. Though the warehouse manager at first appeared confused, when I mentioned that this had gone down in January his eyes lit up in recognition and I realized that while he didn’t know about the lost overtime, he did know about the fight.
(Side Note: After I talked to a few other coworkers and put more pieces together, I think I figured out the full story. Sometime before I started, the boss had gotten the idea to only pay overtime during approved periods, and he may have even believed that this was legal—except that it isn’t. As I’ve said countless times in this series, any overtime non-exempt employees who work more than forty hours have to be paid for the time they actually work regardless of whether the boss gave his okay. If a company doesn’t want to pay overtime costs, they have to make sure their workers stay less than forty hours per week—which the boss never did. Instead, in cases where he didn’t want to pay overtime he just didn’t mention this to the workers and hoped no one would notice
I also believe that when the boss and the Chinese warehouse worker had their fight back in January, the boss silently decided to take away his paid overtime authorization, though he never told the warehouse worker this—which made the warehouse worker start asking around. In this case, as in others, the boss wanted to ensure that the overtime rules were as gray and unclear as possible so he could avoid paying people whenever he didn’t feel like it, so keeping the employees in the dark was key.)
How I Finally Told Off the Boss
My meeting with the warehouse manager had gone well, and I walked away confident that I’d taken a major step. Too bad the boss had other ideas.
Around five o’clock that evening I heard a knock at my door and the boss came in—the first time since our 1099 confrontation that he’d come to see me. With a nervous stutter he asked me a brief work-related question, then asked if I had a few minutes to chat—this time in my office. I said sure, and he pulled up a chair.
The boss appeared visibly unsettled, and said he’d heard that I’d been spreading a rumor (his words), and had come to set the record straight. The boss explained in an even tone that the warehouse worker I’d mentioned had indeed gotten all of his overtime during the entire period he’d been with the company. The company had the records to prove it, and every cent had been paid. However, this employee had also been disgruntled (again, the boss’s words), and was now spreading some misinformation that couldn’t be trusted.
The warehouse employee had lied about not being paid, the boss explained, and I shouldn’t believe those kinds of rumors. If I wanted to know the truth, he said, I should be sure to go to him.
I found this statement downright laughable—once again the boss wanted me to believe that the company was completely innocent while the warehouse worker was the one in the wrong. The boss spoke in a level tone and repeated this story several times throughout our meeting in what I later recognized as a simple form of brainwashing: by sticking to his story and repeating the lie over and over, he hoped to make it stand out in my mind as true—a tactic variously attributed to Lenin, Joseph Goebbels, and Hitler himself.
That’s when I realized I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the boss that I didn’t believe his version of what had happened because he’d gone out of his way to manipulate people, ignored the law, made bargains that only benefited himself, and avoided paying us for the time we’d worked. When things like that happened, I told him, people stopped trusting him.
The boss seemed oddly prepared for this—he immediately justified my own unpaid overtime as the result of problems with the payroll and timesheet system, then told me that my other marketing coworkers were overtime-exempt (a concept he’d become surprisingly familiar with since we’d last talked about it). When I asked him whether I was exempt, he said no, but never explained what made me different than my coworkers who did the same job. Instead he offered the vague (and clearly preplanned) defense that my other marketing coworkers had organized some advertising promotions a few months back—though when I told him that organizing a few promotions didn’t automatically make them overtime-exempt, the boss repeated his favorite mantra:
“Sure, you have your opinion, and you have mine. We could argue about this all day, but how do we really know who’s right?”
Again, the boss was implying that there was no right answer, but this time I called him out. I accused him of intimidating his workers to the point where they were afraid to speak out or even look for another job. I told him he was a tax cheat for trying to pay Kyle using a 1099, and that he was too cowardly to even admit that he’d been wrong. I told him he’d avoided the issue of sick days for months when he could have easily given them to us, and that he had zero compassion for the well-being of the people working for him. I told him I knew about the Secret Chinese Chat Room and his attempts to stop my coworkers from talking to me, and that the employees themselves had told me they hated working for him. Regardless of what the boss wanted me to think, I believed their version of the story over his.
Though the boss mostly stayed silent during this, he did a lot of exaggerated shaking of his head, as if trying to create the impression that he was dumbfounded and speechless at my claims. When I finished, he replied that I really shouldn’t believe what other people told me, because each person always explains things from their own point of view and would always try to sway me to their side.
It was this statement that made me maddest of all—this attempt once again to make me believe the boss’s version of events on the basis that everyone else was wrong. I sarcastically answered that of course the boss was right and that only his version of events was true, that my coworkers were all liars, that the company’s former employees were disgruntled, that the research I’d done about labor laws was wrong, that the Department of Labor was wrong, that Kyle was wrong, Stu was wrong, every last one of my coworkers was wrong, and that even the IRS was wrong—but that he, and only he, was right.
Is that what the boss wanted me to believe? Did he want me to lie and cheerfully agree that his version of events was true? Is that what he really wanted?
The End
By then it was almost 6:00, and the irony of the boss keeping me past quitting time in a meeting about unpaid overtime wasn’t lost on either of us. He repeated one more time that he’d come to say that the rumor about the warehouse employee losing his overtime wasn’t true, then walked out to the room and to his car, where he drove away immediately at 6:00, something I’d never once seen him do.
I sat trying to regain my composure, my breath coming in uneven gasps and my hands still shaking. I told a few others what had happened, then went home, drank a beer, called Kyle to talk things over, and in general spent most of the night worrying about how I was going to make it through my last three days. It turned out, though, that I didn’t have to.
The next afternoon the boss walked in while I was meeting with another coworker and said he’d like to have my exit interview. He appeared nervous and oddly formal, especially while the other coworker was in the room. He had my termination papers and wanted to process them: because I had to prepare for my trip to Japan, he told me, the company was giving me my last two days off with pay, and my time at the company was at an end.
At first I was confused, since the boss explained all this in an uncharacteristically roundabout way. When I realized that he was asking me to leave but paying me for two extra days of work, I initially thought that he was paying me for the unused vacation days I’d asked him about. This wasn’t the case, though: not only was he giving me the vacation time I’d asked for, he was sending me home for two extra days with pay. I then got excited at the prospect of two paid days off before realizing the reality of what was going on: the company was getting rid of me.
The boss appeared uncertain as we signed the papers, like he’d never done this before but was trying to follow instructions that someone had given him, or copying a process that he’d seen somewhere else. I also reacted in an oddly formal manner, unable to fully process what was going on and a little out of it from lack of sleep. Somehow, though, we determined that the boss would lock my user accounts on the company systems while I cleaned out my desk, and that I could take some time to say goodbye to my coworkers before he gave me my copy of the papers and walked me to the door.
The papers, pay stub, and even the actual paycheck were all legit—the “Voluntary Quit” box was checked on the termination form, and my reason for leaving was listed as “Took another job in Japan.” There was no mention of our fight, my spreading rumors, or my bringing up any laws. The whole matter seemed clean, polished, and perfectly official.
I said goodbye to my coworkers, some of whom responded neutrally, though others reacted with shock or genuine gratitude at having gotten to work with me. The boss’s wife gave me a cheerful wave and told me she hoped I enjoyed my new job. The contents of my desk I actually wanted all fit in my messenger bag, so at least I didn’t look like one of those employees carrying their things out in a box. When I’d finished my goodbyes, in a somewhat awkward turn of events I had to go all the way back up to the boss’s office so he could walk me back out the front door the way I’d come.
Neither of us said much on the walk down, and I made a show of clocking out one last time, both so there’d be a record of when I’d left and to show the boss that I took the time records seriously. I’d been planning what to say to him for the last hour, and as I walked out the door I turned and spoke.
“You know, I said a lot of things to you yesterday.”
The boss immediately sensed something was wrong and shut the door to stop the others from hearing.
“But there’s one thing I’ve been trying to make you understand this whole time. If you treat your employees well, they’ll do good work for you, but if you treat them badly, they’ll cause you nothing but trouble.”
The boss nodded awkwardly during this and waved his hand in an exaggerated manner. “Yes, yes,” he said quickly. “Goodbye.”
And just like that, I was free.
So what did I learn from all this? And was the incredible headache worth it? Check out my final reflections on what came of this whole mess and what I wish I’d done differently.
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