I worked for a large, bicoastal chain of luxury gyms for the last year. During my time there, we experienced a management change, and our new manager delegated most of the prior responsibilities of her predecessor, to us, the minimum wage front desk staff. Suddenly we were in charge of learning new computer programs, I personally had to shift all of our reservation logs onto the cloud, after she threw away all of our old documents without first making new versions. So basically we had to start from scratch. She even left us with no way to trade shifts among one another, Which was another system I had to personally create in Excel. Anytime I ask her for help, she told me to figure things out myself.
After a series of events in my life, I concluded that this job, which was my second job at the time, was no longer worth keeping. I was also having some friction with this manager, understandably, because she delegated a lot of her responsibilities to me.
When I was leaving, she accidentally admitted to me that she hadn’t been paying me for any sick days the entire time I worked there. Because of a technicality, apparently I had to sign up with HR every time I wanted to use sick pay. This was not outlined anywhere that was visible, neither of my two managers ever mentioned this, and even when I requested to take time off, my manager did not inform me that I was not going to be paid for a sick day.
I contacted the HR at the company, before I left, and also after. They offered me a different job at a different gym, and I declined, but I let the representative know that I am still owed money, and I even told him the dates. After a month or two, I started getting ghosted by the HR division. They won’t return my emails or calls.
I fear that my manager was able to hide the evidence that I was ever scheduled for shifts in the first place, because she is the only person that knows how to use the scheduling program. I believe that HR stopped replying to me because they know that my trail runs cold, it’s like she deleted the evidence that I should have ever been there in the first place.
So, I believe I am out of options, but I hate feeling this defeated. This huge, luxury, rich, multinational corporation owes me under $1000 in UNPAID SICK LEAVE. What can I do? I haven’t contacted the New York State department of labor yet because I really don’t think I have any evidence to show, except if I can find maybe a random schedule that I have saved from a random week. But I don’t know how to access the program that they use for scheduling (Arcon).
I know they are in the wrong, I just don’t know how I can concretely prove it.