Unless I missed the sarcasm, of course 
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Why blame the workers, at all? It’s a corporation’s responsibility to pay its’ employees wages by federal labor law, the point being that whether or not your boss is a dick they still have to pay you. Many people find themselves working for skeezy people they hate. Part of the nature of the game. It ain’t their fault the game is screwed to begin with, and pointing blame at workers only helps more douchebags like this douchebag keep doin’ what they’re doin’.
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I’m not blaming them. It’s not really the mark’s fault when he gets taken by the con. I’m just saying, if someone says “hey work for me and I’ll pay you cash and not make you fill out any forms or anything” and later you find there’s no record of your employment, that this shouldn’t come as a big surprise.
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Don’t be hasty Dude!
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I don’t understand how that works with so many people living paycheck-to-paycheck. Or all the articles saying that more than half of people aren’t prepared to deal with $500 of unexpected expense.
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If this guy is in the U.S., the rules for independent contractors are pretty strict. I’m assuming the employees didn’t set their own hours, work where it was convenient for them and furnish their own crappy tents. The IRS and the state will definitely come after him for payroll taxes. Plus, if they do file for unemployment, he is going to need pay for employer unemployment insurance
With this it sounds like there was very likely some serious “not collecting payroll taxes etc…” issues going on. And… if you thought screwing people who can afford to lawyer up was a bad idea, I’ve got another super ill advised one: “let’s try to screw the IRS in a very public commercial shitshow and think that tax law does not apply to us!”. Being sued may be the least part of this a-hole’s worry.
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I’m guessing lots and lots of credit card debt. I suspect the $500 setback rule is less true of game developers because anyone with any experience, especially when working for a startup, is expecting to not get a paycheck and money owed for untaken time off. Still, people get screwed over - I remember when ballplayer Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios went under, they not only didn’t pay out for weeks of paychecks, they had failed to pay into health insurance for a month or so, and some workers had been lured from other states by a benefit program that would sell their houses (and pay the mortgages until the house sold). Except they found out the mortgages hadn’t been paid, so they had lost the investments their houses represented as well as weeks of wages and now having a gap in their health insurance (before ACA), in one case while pregnant. That’s the kind of financial disaster it would be hard to recover from, and the irony is Schilling had made a promise to all his employees when he started the company that if things weren’t going well financially, he’d tell them. Christ, what an asshole.
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I think what was implied there is that roughly half the population has $1000 or less in savings.
If my partner and I took a $500 hit, we would lose our apartment.
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(Raises hand) I know!
If they’re lucky, they live with someone who has an income. (This happened to us twice in a 5 year period, back in the 90s when people still owned recording studios.)
If they’re unlucky, they get evicted, and move in with parents or friends (this is what the other dozen or so employees had to do).
And then, they get to find out that their employer never filed W4s; they were considered 1099 contractors, and no taxes or unemployment was paid.
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I have to wonder if Billy will now be groomed for the next generation leadership by the current regime of rich old white guys that cannot quite fess up to the label: $th Reich…
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It’s possibly a tax dodge. By not having money and simply making use of company assets he’s paying way less in taxes than he would be maintaining an equivalent lifestyle by getting paid and then paying for all that stuff himself.
There are more people who work for free than one would believe. Some examples:
In Oregon, at least, unpaid internships are heavily scrutinized and as such fairly rare.
https://www.littler.com/oregon-passes-workplace-protection-law-unpaid-interns
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Good to know. If there is a law against it, unpaid internships will disappear. But if a state or country (or international organization as the UN is) does not have a law against it, employers will simply not pay. Why would they?
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