A little context:
Context: I do a lot of work as a freelance, so I don´t suffer the struggles of management or a work that goes 9-5 but I suffer a lot of informal bullshit. I´m not from the US
Story: one friend of my brother got a gig with an important institution. He build a team from the task and everything went good until they realised they needed a data analyist from the job (they already sign the contract). My brother recommend me and I was like fine. First red flag- Employeer told me he was interesting in doing a project with me, that he wanted to check if I was available at X date for a zoom meeting. I said yes, from me it was like “this is going to be like a talk of the project, wages, time required etc.” I was wrong, the meeting was with the client and they present me as their data analyst and was like ok fine. But what the hell is the project about?
The project start and because it was an applied-research I was interested in being a co-author. And he said that there will be money involved but didn´t said how much. Then when the project get serious and started demanding more time I was like I need to know how much money I was gonna get paid in other to know how much this project needed priority, we negotiated the salary. And we fixed in X price. I even go with the low end of my price range and told him that because I wanted to work with them in future projects and he was a family friend
At the end of the project I did like 80% of the heavy lifting because, they didn´t have the qualifications of the job, I did have it. The client were super happy. They even were going to ask for more budget the next year to do more things together.
The day of the payment he said it´s going to pay me 15% less than the establish fair. But I found out in my check. He never told me before. And the arguments were bullshit: 1. You wanted to be a co-author and you are (everybody in the team is). 2. the other guy has a PhD and you don´t so It will be unfair to discredit his academic credentials. And what?
I´m mad because if a fight that 15% he will not hired me again. Also it was a verbal contract because he is a friend of my brother. But that´s not fair. I projected that money to pay the christmas gifts
Sorry for the bad english. Not native speaker and writting a rant