If there’s one thing that should be sacred in the workplace, it’s an employee’s paycheck.

When a commission worker in pest control spent years optimizing his routes and timing his errands to keep the gas bill down only to keep watching his paycheck get quietly reduced by his boss’s friend discounts, he decided all his hard work was no longer worth maintaining.

Keep reading for the full story.

Boss’s discount to friends, my labor and paycheck

I work in a service industry — pest control — that pays me a percentage of what my customers pay, as an extra paycheck on top of my normal hourly rate.

The worker describes it as a pretty good deal.

For example: I go to a customer whose bill is $100, I get $20. If I’m out sick that day and a coworker goes instead, they get it.

Each month the grand total is added up, a certain dollar value is removed for the company baseline, and of what remains, I get 20%.

But the boss isn’t the most honest guy.

My boss has a bad habit of giving discounts to his friends — usually below the company minimums that have been set for me and my coworkers if we were to sell the work ourselves.

The problem is that despite these people not being my friends, I still get assigned to do the work.

This is starting to cut into his pay.

Now that the customer has paid less, I get paid less — an $80 bill now pays me $16 instead of $20.

I have brought this up multiple times over the years. My position is that if they want their friends to pay less, fine — but in the computer I should get my cut as if it were based on the full, current market price.

The boss is always dismissive of his employee’s concerns.

Each time, my boss’s response is to pull out his phone and calculator and play off the $4 difference — or whatever it is, sometimes a lot more — as insubstantial in the grand scheme of my total paycheck.

They have so far proven incapable of understanding how disrespectful this is.

If it’s such a meaningless and small amount, then why is it so hard to pay it to me — the person who actually did the labor?

But to the employee, it’s about more than that.

Not only do these discounts stack up against me, but we’re not a very financially successful company and can’t afford them in the first place. It’s a matter of principle.

They are effectively pinching pennies out of my paycheck, and it’s all justified under the current system because long-time customers also have similarly low prices — so it’s just supposed to be considered normal.

He’s finally starting to lose his patience, so finally, he starts fighting back.

Nothing illegal is happening with my pay, strictly speaking — just an absence of respect and morals. This just happened again despite recent discussions, and I am starting to snap.

The revenge.

He describes that he’s always been diligent about the amount of fuel he uses.

I fill up my work truck usually every 3 days, so combined with all the other employees, the gasoline bill is a regular talking point — there’s always pressure to keep it low.

I’ve always had a strong work ethic and tried to do my part for efficiency even before the first time I heard the gas speech in a meeting.

If I had personal errands — which we’re allowed to do, within reason — I would wait days or sometimes weeks until I was already driving in that area.

I was one of the first to go above and beyond and reorganize my route so that I was in one neighborhood per day, all to save gas.

But now, he was stopping all of that.

No longer.

My work truck is GPS tracked, and if they ever stop being lazy enough to start checking, they’re going to notice a sudden loss of efficiency.

If they ask? I’m going to pull out my calculator and suggest it’s a negligible difference they should just get over.

Take that, penny-pinching boss.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this post about a hardworking employee whose management refuses to give them one single break.

What did Reddit have to say?

This user agrees that the way things are set up right now are just plain unfair.

Why not start giving discounted customers discounted service?

This commenter would start looking for a new job altogether.

The boss appears to have a very flippant attitude about money.

When you start messing with an employee’s paycheck, they find other ways to make you pay for it.