This past year, I’ve had to deal with the worst manager I’ve ever had and I’ll list a few of the many awful experiences with him here. His first week on the job he said he would fire the next person who messed up to “make an example out of them”. The same week, he proceeded to fire two other managers for speaking against this plan which made us severely understaffed right before the holidays last year. Because of this, most people were concerned about speaking against him in fear of losing their job. This is basically where it all started to go down hill. As mentioned before, we were severely understaffed during the holidays. On one of our busiest days of the year, he attempted to bribe me to not take my breaks because he couldn’t afford having anyone gone for a few minutes.
When I had a sinus infection, I called out of my shift and provided a doctors note and a Covid test as requested by management when you call out. He responded by blowing up my phone to come into work, claiming I was just hungover (I was not) and had lost all trust from management. One time he full on yelled at me and cursed me out over the phone because I wouldn’t cover a shift on my day off. I defended myself and he told me if I don’t like his management style, then I can find a new job. A little further into my employment I received a promotion and worked for two months without the raise that was offered to me. He basically exploded when I asked for back pay on those two months and said that if I’m only here for money, then I’m here for the wrong reasons? I never received that back pay and promptly stepped down from the position which resulted in even more backlash.
The final problem that I will mention here is the stolen tips. Cash tips were pooled and split evenly amongst staff (we did not receive credit card tips at this location). A few months into my employment, I noticed that instead of reporting our actual received tip amount, he would just list $99 of cash tips on every single paystub. This was his method of keeping as much cash on hand as possible because he would use our tips to cover drawer shortages at the end of the night. Even if we knew who shorted the drawer (assigned cash registers), he would take tips from the entire staff. Some nights, drawers would be short up to $200 because of calculation errors. Many of us expressed that this was illegal and would rather have our tips reported accurately and payed out on our paychecks like normal. He threatened to take our tips away entirely so we all just kept our mouths shut after that. These examples are just a few of many and I will share more details if requested.
I know, it seems obvious: Inform HR or find a new job. Not only is our Human Resources rep. incompetent and lazy, he is also a good friend of my store manager. In fact, my manager would often joke about how he could get away with anything because HR was so unresponsive. This job also payed better hourly than any other related company in the area so most people were financially constrained to staying and putting up with his shit.
Luckily, I was able to find my way out of there recently and actually moved away from the area entirely. Now, I feel comfortable reporting him to the labor department and airing him out on Glassdoor without fear of retaliation/losing my job, but I still have a few concerns. Is it too late to report him when I know he is still doing the same things? Is it possible for the company to come after me and sue for defamation? Will this prevent me from getting jobs in the future?