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Ask HN: Is there a bad employers (who have a records of not paying) list?
I worked with a few employers on contracts, and there were situations where they haven't paid fees for a while.
Is there a list or site that lists all the employers and if they have a record of them not fulfilling their contracts?
- lemonademan 3mo agoI don't know of any website that lists all employers who break contracts or miss payments. I might just create one. However, sometimes past contractors or clients leave reviews warning about unpaid freelance invoices or poor business ethics on review sites like Trustpilot.
- GrinningFool 3mo agoI don't know that anyone can risk running such a site. There'd need to be a long trail of proof behind each claim, and proof is getting easier to manufacture by the day.
- jcrben 3mo agoSection 230
- GrinningFool 3mo agoOops, I didn't see this reply sooner. Serving as authoritative source seems like the only value something like this could offer. If you're doing it under section 230, you can't curate - it's just whatever people post and is of much less value.
- lokar 3mo agoI imagine if you start one, and it gets much use, right away you have a validation problem.
- hnfong 3mo agoAlso, in most countries (especially the US), also a defamation problem.
- lokar 3mo agoIn the US? How is it different than yelp? (Except for the extortion)
- matsemann 3mo agoThere's a difference between "I didn't like their salad" (opinion) and "they don't pay their bills" (a fact, that could be defamation if not true)
- lokar 3mo agoWhat about “the service was slow”
- microgpt 3mo agoIn Germany if you leave a Google review saying "the salad tasted bad" you may get sued for defamation, but probably not because they'll threaten Google first, who will take it down and ding your account. If they do sue you, they will win unless you can prove to a judge that the salad tasted bad. You will then have to pay a few thousand dollars of damages and another few thousand of legal fees (yours and theirs).
- excalibur 3mo agoI would assume that the list of Trump appointees would be a good place to start.
- rf15 3mo agoThis is just asking for defamation troubles.
- pluc 3mo agoDepending on your jurisdiction, reviews are protected free speech. You're arguably reviewing your employment.
- dismalaf 3mo agoIf they actually didn't pay staff, do you really think they want to go to court?
- hnfong 3mo ago... yes? Also, what if there were malicious submissions? Then they would definitely go to court. How can you tell?
- dismalaf 3mo agoIt's easy to prove that you didn't get paid though. The company would lose in a second, assuming the claim is true. Defamation is only defamation if it isn't true. Surely they'd know that they didn't pay the employee writing the review... That being said, the whole scenario seems absurd. Most countries have easy ways for employees to file claims of non-payment and companies are forced to pay up.. I've never heard of a company not paying staff AND getting away with it unless they're bankrupt.
- Bender 3mo agoI do not have an answer to your question but if a company is not paying people contact the labor board in their state/province and report them. Example for the US [1]. Everyone not being paid should do the same. The risk of course is that the company may have to accelerate plans to shut down. a.k.a. pulling off the bandage but if one is essentially working for free then maybe that is not so bad. [1] - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/contacts https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/contacts
- eqmvii 3mo agobusinesses absolutely love not paying for things. each other, contractors, etc. employees don’t realize how good they have it with payroll protections tbh. That’s how it should be of course!
- bluefirebrand 3mo agoThis is why a public shitlist of non-paying employers might be useful If companies start taking a reputation hit for not paying contractors in a timely fashion, they will correct the behavior eventually
- f4c39012 3mo agoIn much the same way as some HR departments exist to protect the business from their employees, some Finance departments exist to not pay the bills (for as long as possible). They may of course do this because the business itself is not being paid
- microgpt 3mo agoI read somewhere (HN?) that a guy (an engineer who somehow got temporarily involved in running a restaurant?) got a restaurant a huge (70%?) discount on meat by buying a year's meat upfront on a predictable delivery schedule. Your vendors hate 90 day payment just as much as you hate when your customers do it, and they are covering for non-payment, late payment, and difficult customers by raising their prices. Crucially, they have to charge you the "bad customer" price because they don't know you, and then your incentive is to be a bad customer because it doesn't cost anything extra for you. The restaurant owner thought it was crazy but couldn't argue with the cost reduction. The moral of the story was that if you'd just communicate more you may find a mutual benefit. The restaurant loved the vendor but the vendor also felt the restaurant was their best customer even though they were getting 70% less money! - because of the predictability, less need for inventory, better cash flow.
- Physkal 3mo agoHow reliable has Glass door been lately?
- OutOfHere 3mo agoConsidering they require an ID now, it's not usable anymore.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- WaitWaitWha 3mo agoAn unethical company is likely would consider a lawsuit to put such private site out of business. A collection of unethical companies would be an exponentially higher risk to such site.
- tux3 3mo agoSounds like a Streissand effect waiting to happen. Besides, IANAL, but I'm sure plenty of people here could find a lawyer to file for an easy anti-SLAPP defense. Factual statements about bad employers are very much free speech. Judges aren't particularly fond of frivolous lawsuits. There are already mechanisms in place to quickly throw those away without wasting everyone's time and money.
- fsckboy 3mo ago>Factual statements about bad employers and how is this hypothetical website you're hyping supposed to uncover the factuality of statements random people from the internet are posting?
- tux3 3mo agoSame way any other website with user-generated content deals with it. The website has broad immunity as a platform, but is expected to take down content that would be illegal when notified. Random people on the Internet have been at it long enough that there is plenty of precedent to establish that you can safely host a platform. But then again, I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and for legal reasons this is not the legal definition of legal advice, etc.
- trowa159 3mo agoI guess it needs to be upvoted by other verified users? say if user A is claiming that user C hasn't paid the bill,l. User B can come in and verify it also happened to them. or they need to sign in using Linkedin for credibility. and provide text or photo evidence?
- toss1 3mo ago
- dccoolgai 3mo agoYes. It's called a "union". They were discovered around the turn of the 20th century, caused the greatest increase in prosperity and wealth for the greatest number of people of any idea in history but then we decided we were collectively too smart for all that so we're inexorably inching our way back towards children suffering in dangerous conditions to enrich a few warlords (and no, they won't pay you on time).
- xhkkffbf 3mo agoAnd when those "union" bosses run off with the pension fund, who do you call? Or when they insist on the dues and then use them for something else?
- sigilis 3mo agoA lawyer? That’s pretty obvious. It’s what you do when anyone is in breach of contract or some other civil matter. You just sue them. If it’s a criminal fraud, there’s other people who will help, we call those the authorities.
- nxm 3mo agoMoney is already gone
- dccoolgai 3mo agoThe police? Like you would call fir any crime. The union boss is also elected, so you don't vote for people that would do that. You have a lot more power/leverage in that situation than a CEO laying you off right before your options cliff, despite what the people funding whisper/fear campaigns and their shills in the media are desperate to convince you of. Point me to one example of a union boss stealing pensions and I'll bring you 100 cases of CEXs doing worse with no recourse for the victims.
- pluc 3mo agoGlassdoor before they allowed takeovers of corporate pages by the business operators. But your best bet is probably unfortunately to scan social media. There's ghostjobs.io for job offer reviews but I'm not aware of anything else.
- alex_young 3mo agoI worked for one such employer long ago that would “accidentally” bounce paychecks. This happened with such regularity that people would take their checks to said employer’s bank on payday and stand in line to cash them before heading to the office. You’d see a couple of coworkers in line to do this. Maintaining a list like this is probably not super useful. Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long.
- 01284a7e 3mo ago"Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long." "On contracts" is explicitly mentioned. While bouncing your W-2 employees' paychecks is a big no-no, there are plenty of organizations that stiff contractors for decades.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago> plenty of organizations that stiff contractors for decades POTUS was famous for doing this - stiffing small contractors working on his real estate projects. This seemed like a pretty major character tell, but folks voted for him all the same. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hundreds-claim-donald-trump-doesn-t-pay-his-bills-n589261 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hundreds-claim-donald-t...
- cyanydeez 3mo ago>will not continue the routine of employing people for long The secret is to do this under different corporate names, not that they go out of business literally, but in America and probably elsewhere, they just rebrand and restablish elsewhere.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo agoI used to work for a tiny company where probably just due to lack of cash (and/or failure to properly manage the payroll account) this was also an issue. We'd be given our paychecks in the morning and go to the bank at lunchtime to cash them!
- jmkd 3mo agoThis is absolutely needed for media companies in London, some of whom may pay freelancers many months after invoicing and only if the freelancer repeatedly reminds them and escalates towards legal threats. When I ran such a company we made a point of paying people the same day they invoiced in order to stand out as being great to work with, it was the easiest win ever.
- singleshot_ 3mo agoCountry recorder has a list of judgements against people and entities found to be in breach of contract. This is what exists but probably not what you were thinking of.
- trowa159 3mo agonah, was thinking more like a solid list of the company's name, founders info that future contractors can look at so they can decide if they wanna work with them or not
- TZubiri 3mo agoAs far as I understand it, yes, the corporate legal system is setup to precisely solve this problem. Court cases are public, and non payment cases can be brought to courts, generally as breach of contract. So find the State the company is setup in, find the courts of the relevant jurisdictions, and see if they have any cases for non-payment.
- anymouse123456 3mo agoThis is why, as a contractor, you never, never, ever transfer source materials until the bill has been paid. If a company insists on working inside their version control system, insist that each biweekly payment be submitted in advance.
- anymouse123456 3mo agoEarly in my career, when I was dealing more with bottom-tier customers, the first 3 companies tried to stiff me. They were all surprised to learn that they couldn't do much without the source material that they never paid for. One of them was very surprised when the website flipped to a white screen on a Monday morning at 9am. They called asking why "THEIR" website was blank. I explained that they didn't own any websites, as no money was exchanged. If they would like me to transfer MY website to them, all they needed to do, was submit payment, along with late fees. The money hit my account within the hour and they owned a website a few minutes after that.
- playorizaya 3mo agoMake it. I’ll add a few. These YC founders are not held accountable for their ridiculous behavior
- trowa159 3mo agowill do.. I want this list because I don't want to see people needing to go through this again. My situation was with this guy Derek, we signed a contract with a fixed monthly amount. 1 and a half years later, he told me the Israeli investor pulled the plug. Ok, understandable, it's been 2 years, and he told me he doesn't have anything to do with the business anymore, so don't bother him. Guess what, he's got money to work on some other projects. Feels like they know too well, they can just get away with it because going to court is gonna take ages. its BS.
- playorizaya 3mo agoCall it FounderRank. Just let people share stories like this. Like RateMyProfessor but for founders, so people know who to avoid.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dqv 3mo agoYeah, but I have no idea how good it is or how expensive it is: https://www.dnb.com/en-us/smb.html https://www.dnb.com/en-us/smb.html
- brador 3mo agoGlassdoor?
- pgt 3mo agoThis is such an obvious feature for Glassdoor, but needs verification to avoid abuse.
- duxup 3mo agoHow long does a place last doing this? I would assume they go out of business, or (at least in the US) run into an informed employee who reports them to local state authorities ... and maybe still go out of business.
- qsxfthnkp2322 3mo agoA startup I worked for many years ago did this. The founder would be like its okay you babe you got 1% equity or whatever And I would also be like I gotta pay my rent and buy groceries though... That company went under in a year. Surprisingly... The founder reached out in the years since talking about his new endeavor trying to get me to join the team. Ha. Jokes.