Hello everyone! I haven't used reddit in quite a while but my fiance said that you guys might be able to help me with a few issues I'm having with a former employer.
Okay, so I only worked for this nonprofit theater for just under 2 months, I was considered a contractor. I quit/was fired(long weird story) about 2 weeks ago and still have not gotten paid for the portion of the last month I worked. Here's where things get tricky, the person who offered me the job is my fiance's sister (B). I don't want to go into all the drama that happened while I was working there but I don't want to burn a bridge with her, at least not irreparably. She's a total bitch, but she at least feels like a real sister and I want her in my life, at least in that capacity.
Now this theater is like a 4 or 5 person operation at most, not including the kids and adults who act in the plays that they put up. At the head of this operation is a lady and her husband, L and H. Then there was B, who I think was considered stage manager or something. There was also a music director and many volunteers, but for the everyday maintenance of the theater and building sets and everything else, it was me, L, and B.
They had me do my invoices through Google sheets and paid me through zelle. There was no definite schedule for pay, L just told me “I try to get to it around the first week of the month but you might have to wait longer”. I didn't really have a problem with this as I was desperate for money, validation, and direction. The atmosphere seemed really cool and they were paying me $15 an hour so I figured I could do worse.
Well, halfway into the first week, during a rehearsal, not even a room away from about 12 kids, L, B, and the previous music director start taking shots of tequila from coffee cups. I wish I could say my alarm bells were going off at this point but I was still wearing my rose colored glasses. This alcohol drinking around children was a regular occurrence around the theater, they often carried coffee cups filled with wine, which they referred to as coffee and filled often. On rare occasions L would even smoke weed before or during working with the kids, never as openly as when she would drink the alcohol though.
On one specific occasion near the end of my time there, I was out running errands for the theater and I get a text from B asking if I could run to the grocery store for some tequila, beer, and an organic vegetable tray. I call her to ask if I need to come back and grab a different card because the one I currently have is the business credit card, she says “no, just use that one, we do it all the time”. Now, I was just about at the end of my rope with this place and burned out as fuck, so I just say “okay, I'll be back soon” and buy it with the company credit card like they told me to. This wasn't cheap shit either, I still remember the price of the two bottles of tequila they had me get, $49.99 each on sale.
Anyways, can I report them for any of this? I don't have any concrete proof but literally any time spent looking around their break room, security cameras, and credit card history would back me up.