My partner is a teacher and scored a job in an outback town at the start of the year, we moved here and I got a job in January as a landscaper, I was the only employee for a family business and got along really well with the boss. Once fuel prices started going up he even offered to kick in an extra $20 or so a week (which probably only covered a quarter of my fuel for a week) but I was grateful.
Flashforward to two weeks ago and the boss asks me to do some 12-14 hour days on a very big job, after the job is done I mention how the overtime is gonna be great because I have bills coming up and my boss stares at me like I'm speaking another language. This guy, who's been running a business for 9 years tells me that casual employees don't make overtime. Not just me specifically but he thinks casual employees in any industry don't make overtime (casual employees in Australia absolutely make overtime).
So I keep quiet and wait until I'm home to do some research, I find the award/minimum wage requirements for my job and discover he's been underpaying me by a fair amount since I've started. I bring all this information to him next work day and he organises a sit down with us and his accountant. The accountant also runs the numbers for pretty much every other business in this town and she has no idea what I'm talking about, it takes 4 hours just to explain that I'm not negotiating for more pay: I'm telling them they've breached the law and need to backpay me. At this point I'm still hopeful they'll accept their mistake and we can continue working together, but they try to coerce me into forgetting about it all, then they threaten me by saying they'll make sure no one else in town hires me after this and finish by saying they're going to sue me. I technically quit by not signing a new contract with them that was designed to screw me over.
Now I'm talking to the Fairwork Ombudsman (Australian Labor laws enforcers) about it all and they're very interested in the past employees pay from this business because they already owe me a few thousand dollars, so there's likely hundreds of thousands of stolen wages they're responsible for. I'm looking forward to them being investigated, especially the accountant but so far I've been turned away from at least 3 jobs because of them bad mouthing me around town. It's putting a lot of pressure on my partner and I'm furious about the whole thing.
TLDR: boss stole my wages and when confronted he ruined my reputation in a town I've just moved to, making it hard to land a new job