Getting paid is the entire point of having a job, but there seems to be an epidemic of bosses and leadership who don’t realize this is the case. Late paychecks are not acceptable, especially in an economy where most of us can barely scrape by.
From poverty wages to ways they constantly ask employees to work for free “for exposure,” or to be a “team player” by taking on the work of a colleague on leave, with no adjustment to salary. It really seems like an awful lot of bosses missed the memo that pay is the point, and most of us cannot survive without it. A recent story on Reddit is a perfect example that mixes this obliviousness with downright shocking audacity.
Employees were told to take out loans when their paychecks weren’t submitted on time.
In his post, a worker wrote that he’s recently gotten a new boss, and that boss is not exactly on top of things. “He tells us he totally forgot to submit the timesheets this week, and he didn’t notice until today when they were due,” the worker wrote in his post.
Okay, sounds like a “you” problem, Bossman. Guess you’ll need to spend your day running this problem up the flagpole and getting the payroll people to do an emergency late submission, right? Paycheck errors are not employees’ problem, after all.
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Except they apparently are at this workplace, because the boss seemed to assume that everyone would just wait another two weeks or a month and get a double paycheck down the line.
The problem, of course, is that statistic we’ve all heard a gazillion times about how the average American doesn’t even have $400 cash on hand for an emergency or is one paycheck away from homelessness. It is virtually no one’s reality that they can just wait till the next pay period. The boss seems to have missed that memo, too.
The company was unwilling to pay the bank fees to rush the paychecks and offered loans instead.
When the worker pushed back on the boss and explained that he “can’t go an entire pay period with no money, I have a family,” the truth came out. The boss explained that he was told by the corporate office that they were unwilling to pay the bank transfer fees that would ensue from rushing everyone’s paychecks and that they would all have to wait until the next pay period.
Presumably, after an uproar ensued, they then messaged the entire staff to notify them that “if we signed a piece of paper, we could take a loan out against the [company], but we would have to pay it back like a loan.” So, employers are payday loan companies now? What are the terms of this “loan?” What happens if something catastrophic goes wrong and the employees can’t pay it back?
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But almost worse was how oblivious this man’s boss seemed. “He then has the sheer audacity to ask us in the group chat if we are mad at him and if this is actually an inconvenience to any of us,” the worker wrote. If you’ve never lived paycheck-to-paycheck, this will likely sound insane to you.
But if you have? Well… I’ve lost track of the number of bosses I’ve had who had absolutely no idea that “paycheck-to-paycheck” quite literally means there is no money left by the end of the pay period. They cannot fathom that this is reality, despite the fact that some data shows that as much as 65% — nearly two-thirds — of Americans live this way.
Aside from being inappropriate, it is illegal to withhold pay under federal law.
The audacity of this company is striking on its face, but especially given that it is illegal under federal law to withhold pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act. This seems like a case of a company just assuming its employees don’t know their rights and proceeding accordingly.
Commenters on Reddit urged this worker to immediately contact his state Board or Department of Labor and file a complaint, or to do so on a federal level if his state has no equivalent entity. In most cases, an investigation will be triggered, and the state authority will then compel the company to pay up.
In the end, the worker ended up calling the payroll department directly and making a huge stink about the issue, and it worked. “New checks issued all around,” he wrote, adding that once those checks were secured, several people quit on the spot.
As they should. Mistakes happen, even with all-important issues like pay. Where the rubber meets the road is how a boss and company choose to handle it. And you couldn’t get a clearer message that a company views its employees as disposable cogs than this.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
