At long last we’ve come to the end of this ridiculous adventure—Part VII ended with me walking across the company parking lot for the last time and asking whether this whole ordeal was worth it.  (If you missed the rest of this series you can check out the other chapters here.)

At this point I’ve been out of the company for five months and had some time to reflect.  My brother’s also found a new job, Stu’s gotten settled in at his, and at least four of my other former coworkers left after I did, giving the company a total annual turnover rate of over 100% depending on how you do the numbers.

I now find myself thinking a lot about an important question: If I had the chance to do things over, would I have taken the job in the first place?

As mind-bending as those last few months at the company were, the first half of my time there was pretty easy, and I made a decent amount of money without a lot of stress.  More importantly, though, by standing up for myself and the rest of the team Continue reading »

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. Continue reading »

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?) Continue reading »

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 Continue reading »

When I left off in Part III my coworkers and I had become enmeshed in a web of labor violations, broken promises, and unfair treatment of workers that had grown too big to ignore.  If you missed the opening misadventures you can start with Part I here.

The boss had just offered Kyle a second 1099 contract that we definitely now knew was illegal—the only question was what to do about it.  After Kyle’s meeting we held a quick powwow in my office and I could tell how worried he was, not only because of the legal issues, but because he felt singled out as the only worker at the company being paid on a 1099.  We needed a plan, and we needed one fast.

First thing the next day, we decided, I would message the boss informing him about the tax laws and giving him a chance to change Kyle’s contract.  We decided Continue reading »

Part I of this series covered how I came to work for a crooked online retailer, while in Part II I started noticing that things weren’t quite right with how the company handled its employees, especially when it came to overtime pay…

WARNING: This chapter contains a LOT of specific incidents, but rather than make cuts I’ve decided to include the full list, both for completeness and because some readers might find them relevant to their own workplaces.  Feel free to skim—the point is that at the company a lot of sketchy shit started happening really quickly!

In January I took a ten-day trip to India, an experience that was both an eye-opening look at a new culture and a much-needed break after the gut-wrenching grind of the holidays.  Months before, I’d gotten the boss’s approval to use both unpaid days and two of my five yearly vacation days for the trip, but after I got back things took an unexpected turn… Continue reading »

When I left off in Part I I’d picked up a low-stress Day Job working for an online retailer and hooked my brother Kyle and my friend Stu up with jobs at the same company.  I was still keeping mostly to myself since it was only a Day Job and I had more important things to worry about…

One thing I forgot to mention is that in addition to keeping the names of the boss, his company, and everyone who worked there a secret, to further protect the identities of my former coworkers I’ll be masking their genders by using all male pronouns (he, him, his).  So anytime you see “he” in this series the person could very well be a woman….or it could be a man.  The only exception will be the boss’s wife, since she was involved with some seriously uncool stuff and there’s no need to disguise their relationship ;-) Continue reading »

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 Continue reading »