TL;DR – My fellow coworkers and I have not been paid for weeks, with no concrete answers to when we can expect to be paid. Now we are all struggling financially after being repeatedly lied to by the CEO (we'll call him, “Mike”, for privacy reasons), that the company would be funded by “tomorrow”. Our paychecks are an entire month late with no concrete date when we could expect to see our money. I'm not sure how to proceed.
So I love my career. I'm a remote animator (30 M) who has worked in the field for close to a decade. In February I was scouted by a tech company to run their media department and social media accounts.
When I started the job in April, my contract stated that I would be paid at $400/day, 40 hours/week with payday on the 1st and 15th of every month.
However, we were not told that the company was still trying to solidify it's funding, and that we would go weeks without seeing a paycheck. We've also had to pay out of pocket to go on work trips with the promise of compensation, which has yet happen.
Embarrassingly, I kissed a lot of butts to have a great relationship with the CEO, enough to where I'm able to call him and pressure him a bit when our paychecks are late. However this has backfired on my other coworkers who do great work but aren't as close to him as me. Unfortunately, part of this is due to the fact that the work environment is very “bro-y” (for lack of better words). So much so the CEO explicitly said to me in confidence that when payments go out, he pays me and the two other guys first. This inevitably means that some the women here go months without a paycheck, while I've only had to go a few weeks (until recently).
I'm fed up, but I'm not sure what options I have. I want to stand with my coworkers in solidarity, but we are all handling it in different ways. So have already quit, some are waiting, and others are protesting by not doing any work at all. But nothing seems to have an effect.
What should I do?