VERY long story short:
I have a somewhat senior role at Local Widget Store, Original Location. LWS had a competitor that recently went out of business, and my bosses (A and B) decided to expand the business to several other locations. Besides the fact that they're bungling the affair, I was explicitly told by Boss B that when they set up each location, they “set up the business to get around some rules” about employees. In my US state there are laws that employers must offer certain benefits (paid sick leave), there are different minimum wages for businesses with certain numbers of employees, etc. FMLA kicks in at 50 employees although at this moment I don't think we'll hit that. In addition to the fuckin' audacity of Boss B saying this to my face, I've long suspected they aren't doing a lot of things properly that would get them in legal trouble. Including paying employees differentially by gender and not filing tax/business/financial documents correctly.
We are definitely over the threshold of 15 employees across all businesses now for the state laws, but while I can find information on “what counts as employees” and “how to count number of employees” I can't find info on “what counts as an employer”. I was told that the “businesses are separate but not” and upon looking what I could in the state business portal, it looks like LWS Original is a stock corporation with Boss A as the director, and then Boss A is the resident agent of the other locations, which are LLCs. I was told Boss B “owns part of the company”, which I believe means Boss B owns shares of LWS Original, but I don't know if they installed Boss B in a different ownership position when they set up the new location. I was also told that this structure would “change eventually”, but I don't see any other documents in the state portal. (They've gotten dinged a million times for being late with documents and permits, so it's possible that they were never submitted!)
While I'm trying to figure out if myself or other employees have any negotiation or legal options, most of them depend on whether or not we're all employed by the same employer. There have been several employees now who have worked at several LWS locations, and I don't know if they had to be “hired” and sign tax documents for each location. The pay issues are most profound between the stores (which are all within a 15 mile radius of each other) so this would depend on whether we could claim that we're all employed by the same business. In my dreams I walk into the office and say, look, this shit isn't going to fly, and you have to start abiding by the rules, but I know they won't buy it unless I can show them (or legal representation) exactly WHY. Because I know they think they were so clever in “saving money” (AKA keeping an untenable business model afloat) by finding a way to avoid paying us according to what little paltry protections are out there.
Does anyone know how to figure this out without a lawyer? Are we separate businesses or not? Does it even matter if they're technically different if Boss A is at the head of them all and Boss A is representing them as the same business? How do I find out exactly WTF the business structure is, especially if they never filed it properly?