Always read the fine print, folks…

Because it can pay off in a big way!

And a worker who was frustrated with their work situation learned that valuable lesson and shared their story on Reddit.

Promote me but won’t bump up my hourly wage? Sure thing, I’ll just use your rules to give myself a 50% pay bump.

“I was a technician working on large machines, we had numerous clients and were assigned to a given site.

They had a long drive back and forth to work every day.

The site I worked on was across a border so I couldn’t live near it, and had an hour commute each way every day. I got no expenses or mileage for this because it was my assigned site.

After working for this company for a while I got promoted to stop doing routine maintenance and work on more complex projects. Most of these projects were on a site near where I lived so that suited me just fine. However, the company told me they didn’t have any budget to increase my wage, which is where the malicious compliance came in.

They decided to read the fine print to find out what the heck was going on here.

I combed through their rules and regs as well as my contract, and found that if you had to travel to a site that was not your assigned one, you got paid as if you had driven from your assigned site to whatever other one you were working on.

Oh, it was on!

My assigned site was classified as being 1.5 hours from the site that I was doing most of my work on, so I was allowed claim those 1.5 hours as hours worked on my timesheet. So every day I would put down 1.5 hours commute there, 1.5 hours commute home, and 8 hours regular work.

Anything over 8 hours worked a day was paid at OT rates, so for those 3 hours “commute” I was getting paid 4.5 hours.

And there was nothing they could do about it.

Because my contract said my assigned site was site A, and I was mostly working at site B, there was nothing they could do about it and my country has pretty decent employee protections so I’d have had to agree to a contract change, which I obviously was not going to.

They told me numerous times they were going to change my assigned site but until the day I quit they were never able to.

The length of my commute most days was 10-15 mins each way.”

And here’s how folks reacted on Reddit.

This reader apparently works for some clueless people.

Another Reddit user shared their own story.

Another person was proud of what this person did.

This reader said they probably didn’t realize how this would work out in the future.

And one Reddit user said you always need to push back!

That’s the way it’s done!

Nice work!