Up until recently I was working for a small landscaping company. Basically, just a guy with a truck. I started in 2020 and the owner(John, but not really) started operations in 2019, and had one guy working with him(lets call him Billy Zane). John had left his previous employer on good terms, so about half our work was subcontracting for them, while the rest was him expanding into an area that the other guy did not operate in.
At first, things seemed good. It was contract labor, paid at a flat daily rate. Some jobs would only take 3hour but days never went past 7hours. Beyond the standard pulling plants out and replacing them with slightly different plants. We also did a lot of chop stone borders, patio extensions etc…and John taught me how to use all the equipment needed to do those jobs.
John was also accommodating with my schedule – my SO and I were a one car household and I was responsible for kid pickups from school.
No two days were ever quite the same but a typical day would have us meet up at the job site just before 9am, John would give BZ & I a rundown of the plans and then we'd all unload the truck. BZ & I then start to pull whatever needed to go & John goes to speak with the homeowner. John was never able to fit everything needed for a job into his truck. So after schmoozing the homeowner, he would go buy whatever else he couldn't fit, generally being mulch or rocks to cover the beds.
Coincidentally, John would be done with those pickups around lunchtime, at which point we'd see him again to unload the new materials and then we'd all grab lunch. Work would continue after and I'd leave around 3:45. As I later learned, if a job was going to take longer than 7 hours on site, John would have it billed/scheduled as a two day affair anyway.
After about 7 months of this, getting into summer of 2021, in early May BZ stopped coming in and ignored communication from John. But my schedule was also opening up as the kids weren't going to have school stuff going on. I told John as much and he was thrilled.
We had a convo and he needed someone reliable. He wanted to expand but obviously he can't do it on his own. And dangled becoming a partner.
Shortly after, I started shadowing him during estimates, established relationships with different vendors & wholesale suppliers. I was even with him when he bought his first landscaping trailer.
For that summer, we spent somewhere between 40 & 50 hours a week with each other. All in all, it was actually pretty fun. John and I have a lot in common, you know once you get past his MAGA, and some subjects – like gaming – we could talk about all day.
At that point though, he was still paying me the same rate since the beginning. When I would bring up pay, his reasoning for not increasingit was to keep our prices low and undercut the competition.
After that summer, he brought in a couple new people. On their first day when introductions are made, I'm introduced as the guy who's worked with him for a while and if they have any questions about the days plan, then they just need to ask me as I know how things are done. And then John leaves, supposedly to get mulch but as far as the new people are concerned, the crew lead left within 20min of meeting them.
How much effort could anybody truly be expected to give at that point?
John eventually returned, and saw that this job was nowhere near completion and he went off on us. Later on, John asked me what I thought went wrong and I told him that any new person would probably behave the same way if their new boss immediately left the job site at the start of the day.
In the months that followed John would periodically try to bring out new people, but he never really stuck around to train them and noone really lasted too long.
More and more, I would hear him complain, saying that dumbass line of, “Nobody wants to work anymore.”
I finally hit my breaking point one day, early in '22.
The job itself was fairly straightforward. It involved a tear-out, two yards of gravel and about 6 desert plants.
It was for a friend of John's, and we had done stuff at the location before, the homeowner likes desert plants but each winter they all die. Huzzah job security….
Because John couldn't keep a crew, that particular day John's fiancé (Jillian) came out to help. And help she did! Because that day she filled in the final piece of the puzzle –
See John and his friend(who is a roofing contractor) we're griping about day laborer work ethics. Nobody wants to work, yadda yadda yadda…
Meanwhile Jillian and myself were actually working. She ends up letting the cat out of the bag (she thought I knew) John, Mr. MAGA, had a second crew, consisting of undocumented laborers. All the times he disappeared and was difficult to reach? Apparently checking on a second group of people!
Shit finally started to click.
See, back when I was shadowing John and going with him on purchase runs I was able to learn the cost of materials, obviously I knew how much he was paying me for labor. Whenever I was with him for an estimate, he would quote well below what competitors charge, so it never made sense that we'd never book one of those jobs. Apparently we were booking them, he just didn't want to pay anyone a fair wage and lord knows he has to preserve his profit margin.
It's been a little over a year now since I stopped breaking my back for John. TBH I'm still pretty pissed at him. The utter fucking hypocrisy of that MAGA crowd is mind numbing.
I know that eventually I'll be able to move past these feeling but every so often, be it Christmas, memorial day or even just some random Sundays, our mother invites us both to family dinner.
For those interested, I started a hobby as a form of catharsis and this latest one kinda sums up my feelings.
https://youtu.be/_RsU18buo8c
Mods – let me know if this link isn't allowed. I didn't see anything in the rules prohibiting it but idk.
TL/DR : People suck, never work for a MAGAt regardless of who's vagina they slithered out of.