Getting fired is one thing, but not receiving your final paycheck is a whole other ballgame. Here, we have a former employee who was unjustly dismissed by his former boss after calling out the rampant and consistent wage theft practices at the company. Now, he is considering filing a class-action lawsuit along with several mistreated former employees because his boss tried to get away with never sending this guy's final paycheck. It's easy sometimes to accept this kind of treatment due to the v…

Imagine going through the entire job application, interview, and salary negotiation process only to discover that your actual job has far more responsibilities and expectations than you were anticipating. This new hire spent thousands of dollars relocating to a new city in order to be a communications assistant. He had negotiated his salary to reflect the typical range for a position of that nature. However, after beginning the job, he learned that he was the head of the entire communications d…

Colleges and universities should really offer students a course in job searching, because there are people out there who enter the real world with no idea what they should look for and how, and they end up making mistakes that could have been avoided. After a few classes in resume writing and interviewing, one of the lessons in job searching should be about the process of accepting a job, and the terms that should always be written in the offer letter. For example, the pay – Never accept a job…

Some lessons are only learned the hard way, as these bosses found out after making a critical mistake. Backing up your creations, whether it be writing, data, or video files, is crucial. It's an easy thing to overlook: you think to yourself, “Oh, I'll back it up later.” But the first time you accidentally lose four days of work on your video edit, or find yourself staring at a blank Word document that used to be 15 pages long, you realize just how important it is to have redundancies. Suddenly,…

Imagine signing onto a part-time job only to learn that the people running the store are incompetent high school graduates. It's not that these 18-year-olds are not capable of running a business one day, but as of now, the total lack of professionalism is on full display. It's already pretty awkward to work for someone far younger than you, but that's something the Redditor could get past. Otherwise, they would not have signed onto the position in the first place. What made this job particularl…

Turning a power-tripping authority's own methods against them b y adhering rigidly to their strict rules—turning the authority they love so much into their own downfall or to be “Hoist with their own petard,” as Shakespeare would have put it. And there's a reason why this theme is so pervasive throughout history and intriguing to us through to the modern day, the poetic justice of someone's own misuse of authority against them by turning their orders into a perfect act of defiance.

Imagine helping build something from the ground up, only to have your contribution entirely dismissed and undervalued. This CEO is giving an Elizabeth Holmes level of ruthlessness after cheating her former CTO out of his promised shares in the company just before its official launch. This, of course, was after two years of contracted work on the CTO’s part in helping develop the app and raise funding for the startup. Once the CEO found an investor who signed onto the company as her COO, this Re…

This boss has an odd incentive structure, and it is not at all favorable towards his hard-working employees. When you go to an interview at a movie theater, I imagine they ask you about your customer service qualifications or your background working in retail. They probably don't ask how much snow you can shovel… these employees had to find out the hard way that it was part of their workplace requirements. U/SparkleFritz had a boss who insisted that when it snowed, the employees should be the o…

We are firm believers that hourly employees should get paid exactly the amount they are due for their work, not a minute less or more. Clocking in and out of a job is the perfect way to track the hours and make sure employees are getting paid exactly what they are owed. That means, of course, that as long as an employee is physically on the job, they should be getting paid for it, and they only clock out when they are entirely off the job premises. The fact that the workers in this Reddit story…

When there are changes in management at a workplace, the whole vibe can suddenly shift. A new manager can change a workplace without even trying, although, as these people shared, a lot of managers try their hardest to act in charge at their new place of business. While we're on the subject of hiring new people, read about the HR folks who were surprised by these odd resumes, like one person whose “ resume had a skills sectio n...only thing listed was ‘calculator.'”

Some managers insist that their workers would take any opportunity to slack off, and this attitude is especially pervasive in any industry where staff are frequently off-site and operating in a multi-site environment, like in delivery or maintenance scheduling. Meanwhile, these same managers are comfortable at their desks obsessing over this single point and trying to thwart their workers from slacking while achieving very little themselves. This cynical view prevents them from taking any feedb…

Every naive employee has to learn how to create boundaries with one's coworkers. A professional work team is not a sorority no matter how much someone may try to create that dynamic. If you find yourself trying to be one of the cool kids at work, take a minute to step back and remember that this is not high school and you likely do not need your work relationships to overlap too much with your friendships outside of work. Of course, there are exceptions and there are plenty of work environments…

To be fair, this boss had it coming. The concept of 'work-life balance' is becoming increasingly normalized throughout the workforce, as it should. No one wants to spend their entire lives planning around their jobs. And although that used to be the case in generations past, nowadays, employees don't stand for mistreatment; instead, they just leave. Well, this Gen X employee can't really leave the company. He's been there for years and is nearing his retirement. So, instead of up and quitting,…

Moral of the story: karma always catches up with you. This man has been a night auditor for hotels for the past 19 years. When he got assigned to a new hotel, he went about his work just like he'd done for the past 19 years. But he was instantly met with Karen , a longtime employee who had been getting away for years with handing her work off to other coworkers. And she's not even in a manager-type position, so she has no authority to tell anyone what to do. But she's gotten away with it for so…

"Put those union dues to work"

They always say that you should fake it till you make it, and it's no secret that a little bravado will get you a long way. Sure, there might be an inverse relationship between confidence and competence—since you need to know enough about something to know how much you don't know, which makes you less confident as a result. But a lack of competence certainly doesn't stop people from getting jobs when there's confidence on display. But what do you do when you fail so epically upward that you fin…