When you agree to do a job, you agree to do a job for a certain salary.

In today’s story, one employee explains how an employer was getting away with underpaying employees until an act of malicious compliance.

Let’s see how the story unfolds…

Ask to monitor hour working hours? If you say so

This MC happened nearly 10 years ago.

The relevant context is that, at the time, one’s salary for this job was made up of a low basic salary but a big uplift for the “intensity” of the job you were working (in terms of working hours outside of 9am-5pm).

The way that employers made sure jobs had the correct uplift was through a process known as “monitoring.”

In order for monitoring to be valid, a certain proportion of the employees on that job had to complete a diary of their working hours for two weeks.

Of course the diary was on an archaic electronic system, a pain to fill in, finicky, slow and generally made in a way to make it non-user friendly.

She explained the problem with one particular working location.

In this particular location I was working in, there was one job which everyone dreaded working because it was widely acknowledged that the workload was extremely high.

i.e. frequently working 2, 3 or even 4hrs of unpaid overtime every day to get the work done, and this was not adequately reflected in the overall pay.

This had been going on for the better part of a decade, and it was abundantly clear that the workload vastly outstripped the compensation.

However every time anyone complained the employer would hold up their hands and say “the monitoring doesn’t reflect that” – often because the threshold proportion of employees filling out the monitoring hadn’t been reached – and wash their hands of the situation.

They went full “these are the rules we’re just following them”.

Essentially the workers on that particular job were so overworked and the monitoring process so laborious that there was never enough people filling it in to reach the threshold.

She made sure everyone on the job filled out the monitoring.

Cue MC.

My best friend and I were suffering through this job for four months, alongside three others. In fact, over the course of the year, fifteen of us would work that job.

It came to the monitoring period, and my best friend and I were meticulous about filling in the monitoring.

We logged every single second we worked overtime, not missing a day for two weeks.

Not just that, however, we lit a fire under everyone else. We texted, called, cajoled, harassed or otherwise persuaded all the others on this job to fill out their monitoring accurately too.

In fact we were so driven that all thirty employees filled out their monitoring correctly.

The employee pointed back to the rules.

Well the monitoring period ended, and lo and behold it demonstrated we were being vastly underpaid for our roles, risking big penalties for the employer.

Not only that, but it turns out they had fudged the payment rates for a number of other jobs too.

The employer wasn’t defeated yet, as they once again pointed to the rulebook saying that any monitoring which showed a change in pay was due had to be repeated. So they set up a second fortnight of monitoring.

This time everyone wanted to fill out the monitoring.

You can guess what happened.

Instead of being defeated by another round of monitoring, the cohort suddenly had the bit between their teeth.

The second fortnight of monitoring we did significantly less badgering of people because suddenly everyone was rather motivated to do it themselves.

The second round of monitoring came and went with the same results as before – significant underpayment!

In the end, it paid off…literally.

The employer continued to stall, but we pointed at the rule book they had so often thrown in our face.

They ended up having to pay people who were doing the underpaid jobs more to make them up to the correct level of income.

Furthermore, the rule book said that payments were retrospective for the whole year, so even those who had worked those jobs before the monitoring happened got back-paid.

Overall I was owed and received nearly £10,000 in back pay.

I reckon the employer shelled out the better part of £250,000 in owed pay, and all because we stuck to the system like they told us to!

The employees should have complied with the monitoring from the beginning.

This doesn’t seem malicious. It’s more like they finally complied.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

Here’s the perspective of a manager…

This reader thinks this company sounds familiar.

Another reader commented about unions.

Another reader shared a similar story.

Everyone deserves to be paid fairly!

Log that overtime!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.