For a little over a year I've been working in a small business crafts-work shop. I absolutely love it and it allows me flexibility I need in life so well. There are a total of 4 employees: The Owner, her son (let's call him B), my manager, and myself. I am at constant frustration with B who is 34 and hardly works at all.
Now stay with me, anti-work, I'm all for living a life work free and the owner/his mother is trying to retire and is setting him up to run the business passively and debt free. Currently though the business is struggling to make ends meet based on the sole fact that B does not do his job but still has the highest pay of all of us.
In a 5-day 36 hour work week (our open hours) he struggles to show up more than 8-10 hours and in that time often spends more time standing around or outside smoking than actually working on orders. Even in crunch-times (like the holidays or University graduations) we have to literally beg him to come in.
And the process of our craft requires him to either build the pieces before we work on them or we can order them pre-built but adds close to 2 grand extra in expenses a week (more cost for the business). So in order for me and my manager to get anything done, we NEED him to do his job.
Additionally he also is supposed to be cutting decorative pieces for each order using a computer operated machine to die cut specific designs. I asked him to teach me to use it so in a crunch or emergency I could do something but since then he has refused to touch the machine and all the die cutting has fallen to me on top of my other duties.
To my knowledge he has everything handed to him by his mother because she fears his failure in life and that it would be her fault (she talks about this frequently). That being said I know from what B has told me that he owns a home 100% paid for (inherited from his grandfather), doesn't have any debts, and his mother pays for his utilities. Yet he is still paid more than me. I'm making just above Min wage and busting my ass constantly.
I will admit I don't know what he makes exactly, but from how he talks about his lifestyle, lives in a high end area, and gets ALL his packages delivered to the store (6-8 a week), I'm sure he is sitting comfortably. And I understand seniority/experience. My manager makes way more than me but her work load is greater and she has 30+ yrs experience meanwhile I'm basically an apprentice. He has about 10 ish years experience but doesn't put in the work.
We bring this up to the Owner and her basic response is “well I can't force him to come in and I can't not pay him or he won't have money to live”. She doesn't see at all that she's feeding his bad behavior. And when I ask for a raise because I'm literally struggling so hard I'm told there's no room in the budget.
He's not pleasant to be around when he's here, he's decent at what he does when he decides he wants to do it, and he is so unbelievably unreliable. I am so beyond frustrated with him. I truly believe he needs to ONLY be paid for what he works and that would either drive his ass into work or make room in the budget to pay me better for picking up the slack.
How would I get it through to her that her son is destroying her business and making it impossible to meet deadlines and pissing customers off royally?
TLDR; Small business owner's son is lazy and extremely privileged. He is driving the business into the ground and get paid the most for the least amount of work. How do I get through to the owner?