I was working as a soccer coach. We ran a class for young kids not in school to start learning basic things and following instructions, a one hour class.
For the last 3 months we have had this new hire who is an ex military guy, American, who was living in Korea until his mum passed from cancer and COVID prevented him from returning to Korea. We will call him Dave.
So Dave was given the shifts for the little kids and there were typically two a day 3 days a week. As was the norm for many other programs the business ran, he recorded his hours as 2.5, because he would come in early to set up and clean up afterwards. In fairness it was not a full half hour of work to set up and clean up.
Dave was assured that he would make 18/hr after 2 weeks as he was doing the classes by himself. Granted not the best at it, and objectively low intelligence (flat earth we,anti-vaxxer, dropped out of middle school because of some abuse and lived on a reservation til he joined the military.)
Finally the owners agree to give Dave his raise after i help him compose a text message to send to the owners. As one owner is doing the payroll, he sees that Dave has been recording his hours as 2.5 and decides that he wasn’t supposed to be getting 2.5 just 2. So he takes 8 hours out of his upcoming paycheck to make up for mistaken hours on previous paychecks.
This is where I got very uncomfortable. I understand their issue, and while what they did may not be illegal I think they absolutely went about it the wrong way.
Now for me personally I was nervous, is my employer allowed to go back through my previous paychecks and change my hours worked retroactively? How far back can they go? Can they say oh you didn’t work that day 6 months ago but you were paid for it so we are deducting a days pay from your next paycheck? How can anyone feel safe in that environment? There became a massive lack of trust from how they treated my fellow employee who I honestly don’t like as a person but deserves to be treated ethically and with basic human compassion.
I reached out to the Dept of Labor to ask if what the employer did was legal or not, and once my employers became aware, they said I was uncomfortable to be around and terminated me.
Not black and white tbh, I’ve tried to show it in an impartial way. But man I’m so angry at them every day. All I wanted was them to operate with standard ethics we as a society have agreed upon, and THAT makes me too uncomfortable to be around?
They also denied employees unemployment benefits during the April-june2020 lockdown as we were “still employed” and if we wanted unemployment we would have to quit, thus making ineligible for unemployment.
There is a wealth of negative experiences with these people, one owner specially is a definitive greedy capitalist who values profit and his self over all else. Acknowledging these are the sorts of people I have to sell my time to to be able to eat is enough to make me not want to wake up tomorrow. And it’s taboo to ask them to be ethical or have compassion.