Ask HN: How to Respond to Company Hiring in Bad Faith | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Respond to Company Hiring in Bad Faith

10 pointsthrowaway945 comments

I am a grad student that recently took a 3 month internship at a medium sized startup. After tendering a leave of absence from grad school, vacating my apartment, moving across a large country, and paying for a short term rental in a high cost market, the startup laid off all contingent employees and is still operating with statutory employees. This literally happened within 5 minutes of reporting for work. I am at the start of my post-grad career so I don't really want to start legal action, but my total financial impact is greater than $20k in lost wages and time. Does anyone have advice?

I am hesitant to provide much additional detail at this time but I am also uncertain how to proceed.

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Not a lawyer. Itemize the list and costs. Gather up any emails, letters, contracts, agreements, etc.

You can potentially pursue them in small claims court (limits may be higher then you think), where the costs are relatively small, or talk to a lawyer, an initial consultation may be free.

You can also send a letter to the company, saying that you relied on that offer of a job for a specific period and suffered financial damage (detailing it) because of there misrepresentation or omission of material facts, and requesting they pay such and such an amount to compensate you.

Finally your state labor relation board or whatever may agree you have some claim on your one day's wages.

"Start legal action" may not be possible at all. If it is possible, there's a range of possibilities in between "lawsuit" and "do nothing." If the company has hard-to-argue with legal duty to pay you then a letter from a lawyer might suffice.

Step 1: talk to startup, say "this is not cool" and see if you can get them to cough up some money.

Step 2: If that doesn't work find a labor lawyer and just asking them what they think. They'll probably be able to say "don't bother" or "I can write a letter for $X, but it probably won't work" etc. without you having to pay upfront.

In parallel: assume it's a loss and find some work.

If your story is true, what do you have to lose by publicly naming and shaming this company? They might offer you some compensation to repair their reputation.

You can gain a life-long reputation of being "difficult".

No one has ever gotten such a reputation strong enough that I became aware of it. I've seen many examples, however, of companies responding to public shaming by doing the right thing, or some semblance of it.

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