> This doesn't just happen for low-wage jobs.
Yeah... little rant here... I recently got back from a year-long contract in Sydney.
Australia is one of the most labor-friendly places on the planet. So if this sort of crap can happen there, it can happen anywhere.
Recently settled and signed NDA... but I feel relatively anonymous on here.
Anyway first... they made me an offer letter, and I resigned from the old job. About a week later -- they knew I had given notice at the old job -- they came back to me and said, "Yeah, we thought our budget was X, but now it's 80% X. Take it or leave it." I was annoyed, but I took it.
Christmas came, they were giving out bonuses. Even though I was counted as a full-time employee, I didn't get a bonus like all the other non-immigrant workers. We found out that every Australian citizen or permanent resident got a bonus, but none of the Americans did. Shortly after complaining, HR sent a letter out to everyone saying that talking about pay or bonuses was a fireable offense.
I stepped up to cover a few holidays, and worked over the Christmas break. But they had automatically taken 2 weeks off of my vacation pool... it took about 4 months to get it sorted, I eventually did get the time back -- but only after I pulled time sheet records (something most employees couldn't do) to show I was working.
My final expense report never got paid.
They had my start date off by about a week. They had my end date off by 3 days.
Long story short, I ended up taking them to the Fair Work Commission (sort of like Small Claims Court). It was not an easy decision to do this. My network in Australia isn't huge, and I can't control the story they will tell inside the company, or to future employers who want to call and verify work / references. Clearly I can control who I list as references, but... far too much damage can be done when someone looks up connections on LinkedIn, and asks one of the shady folks, "Hey, what did you think of him?" I won’t get a chance to tell my side of it, I just don’t get the job.
So I won my claim (or at least got them to make me an offer that I settled for -- about 50% of what I was actually due), and helped a handful of other people win their claims... but I'm quite certain I alienated my manager and MD and everyone on the HR team in the process. It's expensive to stand up for yourself. Time to fight it, cost of a lawyer, and cost to the network... not hard to see why so many people don't fight it. A few grand... meh, I probably would have written it off if they paid any portion time, expense reports, or bonuses that they should have paid me.
Mind you this wasn't some Podunk 10-person agency... it was an agency with over 2,000 global employees. And I wasn't some day-rate worker, I was director-level and they tasked me with running some of their biggest projects for some of their highest profile clients.