working under the table

[BeerMoney]

Man, I agree with you.

[AJackson]

[ QUOTE ]
I think you should have paid for the broken mirror.
I think you should not have left your tools with him for such a long period of time.
I think he should pay for your damaged and missing tools.
I think you should let the whole thing slide and not make such a big deal out of this.

[/ QUOTE ]

[mroels]

i worked under the table for a landscape company throughout college. we didn't do any maintainance work, mostly taking new barescapes (or yards that had been neglected for decades) and creating them into awesome backyards. my boss was an awesome guy who just didn't have any sense of organization or planning. he was a complete idiot when it came to scheduling stuff, and didn't really have a grip on reality. anyway, i used to drive one of three trucks available, and [censored] them up all the time. this was primarily due to the fact the boss didn't want to spend money on good trucks and would buy like a ford ranger for heavy hauling. also we frequently had to overload the trucks because the time he'd allot for tasks were always insufficient. he'd always get pissed when the trucks broke down, saying that we should pay for it coz we were being careless blah blah blah...what it came down to was that they were company trucks, used for company jobs, and therefore i couldn't be liable for anything that happened to them on company time. if i had borrowed the truck to help a friend move or something, and it broke coz of that, then i'd be responsible.

your tools however, are your personal property that are being borrowed by the company so any damage should be reimbursed. and btw unless you gave him express permission to use those tools, your boss shouldn't have touched them.

and my experience with under the table work ended when i nearly lost my thumb. had a job related accident, where equipment failure (which i had warned my boss about)caused a broken arm and hand, and my thumb was pretty much mangled to bits. ofcourse, no worker's comp, luckily i just bought insurance two weeks before it happened. but, my boss called me once to see how long the truck was gonna be at the ER with me, and once a month later to see when i'd be coming back to work (coz a bunch of guys left when i told them what happened). obviously being in college i didn't have too much money, and painkillers where killing my bank acct (until i started selling half of the percs i got from the doc). but either way, i asked my boss for money for reimburse me for like my deductibles and prescription costs. ofcourse, he didn't want to citing the whole truck issue. and since i wasn't coming back to work anytime soon he didn't even make an effort to give me my last 2 weeks pay. i had to call him for like 2 months before he finally gave my paycheck (minus the last day because the accident happened 3 hrs into the day, minus car detailing costs to remove blood (this car was nasty to begin with)stains) to one of my coworkers. he never reimbursed me for my medical bills, so i reported his ass to the dept. of labor and BBB for operating a business without a license and, sued him breach of a verbal contract for failure to pay my fair wages and some accident/hazardous work environment claim.

i ended up getting some cash (which went to legal fees), and his three trucks. i donated two of them to salvatin army.

[man]

mroels,

I'm glad I didn't get [censored] up on the job, because my boss made it clear that we were uninsured workers. that sucks about your situation, but I suppose all these things are risks we take for not paying taxes!

my boss has a history of doing shady things similar to what you're talking about. he makes people work extra unpaid time to repair mistakes they'd made (luckily I'm normally a pretty careful worker so I didn't have to deal with that), he shaves hours off timesheets, and other stuff. it's weird, because he's actually a really nice guy, he's just completely selfish when it comes to business related things.

results are standard and boring. he wasn't budging on paying for my tools, however he did give me some decent-quality ones to replace the ones he'd lost/broken. (I didn't got a new drill bit set, though.) and I'm still almost positive that he was the one who originally broke the mirror, and did a [censored] job of repairing it. then when I bumped the mirror it came dislodged and blamed it on me. but meh.