After Her Pay Was Docked $40k, She Told A Coworker That She Had Found A Better Job So It Would Leak To Management. Years Later She Filed A Suit And Won Back Thousands. » TwistedSifter

If you’ve ever had your wage decreased, you’ll know it’s a bad feeling. It’s often not something you can control, but the worker in this story knew her power

Check out how she got paid what she had earned.

I worked at a chain salon in the US for minimum wage (+tips). We got paid on a sliding scale. The more you added services the higher your hourly pay.

Then, for back to school, we started offering $10 haircuts.

I had a high service dollar per hour which should’ve meant a bigger hourly pay & paycheck.

Here’s where things get sketchy.

Except it didn’t.

That $7/haircut discount? It was coming out of our final service dollar calculations and we ended up making significantly less than usual!

I’d worked there for years and this was the smallest back to school paycheck I’d ever seen.

I went in the next day and was ticked. That morning, a coworker (who was a total brown-nose & gossip) and I were outside setting up the sale banner.

It was my turn to stand on the rickety step stool to do it and I said I was “Glad this will be the last time I ever do this!”

When she asked why, I told her not to tell anyone but I’d accepted a job at another salon with a set schedule, higher commission and $5 more an hour.

I said I’d planned on putting in my two weeks but they needed me to start sooner so I was going to work the weekend and not come back. This would leave us understaffed for the back to school rush.

After reiterating she could NOT tell ANYONE, especially not our boss, she agreed.

Then things start improving.

I left early that day and on my next shift my boss pulled me into her office. She said she’d “Heard a rumor” that I was leaving to work at a different salon. I told her I had a much better offer elsewhere, but if she could match that I would love to stay.

She had to put a call in to our district leader about the raise but said I could work with a set schedule starting the following week. I was working until 9pm some days and at 9am the next. The unpredictable schedule made finding childcare a pain in the butt!

I was consistently ranked #2 in sales for our store and the district, so the DL approved the raise and I stayed there another five years! This means I got an additional $39,000 in pay for “accidentally” telling the salon gossip my “secret.”

I also got 20% commission on $500-$1000 a week in product sales.

I also started printing out my service sales slip from the day before at the beginning of every shift, so that when payroll “readjusted” the paychecks to include coupons, I could pull up my record and dispute it.

According to payroll, there was nothing they could do about it. I stayed another five years, raising the issue sporadically, until they brought back the $10/haircut sale and I quit.

But that wasn’t the last of her work fiasco.

A few months after I left I was made aware that a different employee in another state filed a class action lawsuit and I got a letter asking if i wanted to be a part of it.

I accepted and the lawyer loved receiving five years worth of documentation, emails from corporate and payroll, etc. they had to go back through all of my paychecks and compensate me for the difference. This included adding the free haircuts (reward program) and discounted haircuts.

Their whole amount, increasing the service dollar. 19 cents an hour here and 30 cents an hour there added up and despite the fact that the settlement was split with a lot of people I got $10k from it, in addition to my adjusted pay which was around half the settlement amount.

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