Disclaimer: this happened to my ex a few years ago, but it definitely affected us at the time
Location: Manitoba, Canada
Synopsis:
Ex's salary was base + commission. Sometime after Christmas, when the bills basically come due, the owner of the company advised the department my ex was in that the employees were “overpaid” due to an accounting/payroll error and all employees affected needed to pay it back.
This was announced the Friday prior to a payday and sure as shit, all the commission that should have been part of the pay, was deducted so the entire department could pay back what was owed. At that time, it was legit 60% of the earnings gone from this paycheque.
There were more than a few protests from the employees, but it was explained by the owner's helpful lawyer, that since part of their pay was commission based, it was legal to have it removed from their earnings. It wasn't the first time this particular payroll employee made an error on people's paycheques, but it was certainly the biggest and caught a lot of attention that an entire department had to make up for this persons mistake. It took one pay period to rectify the problem, but it adversely affected more than 20 people in the company.
No one dug deeper that this was leaning towards wage theft of some sort, and there was a lot of complaining but this team bent over and took it up the tailpipe for various reasons…mostly because no one wanted to rock the boat, owner is a 'good guy', etc, etc. (yes, there was a lot of rah rah kool-aid at the company for that time)
(Personally, I would have found a way to fire the payroll person, but since they had a connection to the owner…it was forgivable.) I have no idea what the error was or why it was considered overpayment and it was explained poorly to the employees. The owner conveniently had his lawyer ready to handle the questions and explain everything away, while getting employees to sign and confirm a form, which I also never got to read.
Now reading more into wage theft and how owners appear to screw over their employees on the regular, I'm seriously wondering if more could have been done.
Hindsight is 20/20, but if the information discussed here can help someone else in the future, I say that's good info to have. I've tried to explain the best I could but if something needs clarification, let me know.
Also, ex no longer works for this particular Elon wannabee, thankfully.
Thoughts?