Hi all. This is a topic close to my heart. My close friend got scammed by the restaurant that he works for. When he checked his pay against his collective agreement, he realized he'd been constantly underpaid. Fortunately he managed to get hundreds of euros back per month plus all the back pay after fighting for it. Also, a few friends doing internship have also experienced similar things.

It feels horribly wrong to me that employers keep scamming workers and that nobody is trying to do anything about it, so I'm trying to build a tech solution for this (wageguard.org if you want to check it out).

Question: If you've dealt with this, how did your boss take advantage of you? What would've helped you?

Also, sorry for repost!

by Majestic_Command_109

8 comments

  1. Used be a trucker. When I got promotion, they still kept paying me same old salary linked to previous role. Luckily, I read TES and contracts but I think many us don’t have time to do that. After that job, I’ve called with labour unions but they seem to be busy even if they know the topic well.

    About your site, you’re solving with tech? I think it is quite big problem so even if you can fix 10% that could help a lot

  2. Who could do anything about it besides the person itself?

    You can join union and let them check agreement and the salary you’ve gotten if there’s a suspicion about foul play but even union won’t do it without complaint. Adults are supposed to do at least the minimum to look after themselves, like checking the salary, finding about labour laws and unions, worker rights etc.

  4. I don’t know. I have my own company, and I think it’s just part of the “game” to work extra long hours for free. Unions do sometimes come and bother me, and I do end up paying workers what I owe them — but I don’t think it’s fair.

  5. I started my career as sales representative. As the job was mostly commission based, I was super unsure what my real pay is. In the end, discussed with peers how they calculated salaries

    Good luck with the technical solution. Signed up for the waitlist to support you.

  6. We can’t babysit everything, people need to take responsibility of their finances.

  7. Restaurant sector, majority of staff were young (19-25) people freshly moved in to Finland, and it felt like that was used as an opportunity for mistreatment. We did get minimum wage, pretty much exactly to the cent. We were told that holiday pay only accrues after a year of employment (almost noone worked there for that long, the turnover was crazy), and when the minimum wage went up by a little bit, it was presented to us as a super generous payrise because we are such nice employees… All of us on 0 hour contracts, the full time employees would sometimes do 6 shifts a week, some of them 10 hours long. Weekends had shorter breaks (15 minutes). Once I had to skip on a family holiday trip because they said they just cannot give me days off, and I was too stupid to argue with it..

    Overall there was just a lot of emotional manipulation, guilt tripping, etc etc. Eventually shit hit the fan when we were asked to attend mandatory unpaid meetings which we did not like. They basically implied that we have to go, because of their generous decision to give us free lunches, and low-key threatened that they can always take that privilege away..(as if we weren’t throwing out/taking home kilos of leftover food every week anyway). As they fired me, they wrote a 7 page document on why I (20yo at the time btw) am a terrible person that was lying and scheming and sabotaging their business, purely so that I could not get unemployment benefits for the first 3 months

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