update: my friend hired me but isn’t paying me what we agreed

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose friend hired them but wasn’t paying what they had agreed on? Here’s the update.

I’m happy to say that the outcome of the conversation with my now former boss was positive and I didn’t expect it to end as well as it did. Thank you, Alison, and everyone who provided helpful feedback.

I respectfully brought up with my friend what she was thinking to do in terms of the summer when the days were longer and I told her I needed to know what she was thinking to figure out my finances. I also said I was expecting the benefits and the pay we had discussed. I wanted to see what she would do / if it would change anything before making my final decision to leave. Instead, this led to her changing my pay once again and paying me by the hour instead of by the booking, both of which were not what we had first agreed upon. I was supposed to be paid a salary amount we had discussed when she was hiring me. I realized it was time to have the conversation to leave.

I ended up telling her that I was no longer able to work for her as I required some stability in my life financially and I was not receiving the pay and benefits that we had initially discussed. I also told her that I valued my time as I had given up many weekends and worked sometimes seven days a week at both jobs and it affected me financially, as well as my health. I said I understood if it was difficult in the beginning but that as time went on, I realized that she wasn’t capable of holding her end of the deal and I had to consider my well-being as well.

Surprisingly, she took it well. I was expecting her to try to convince me to stay, but I think she realized it herself too that she was stringing me along. She admitted that it was a lot to ask of me to be on call and how it affected my life. I’m a bit wary of how genuine it was, though.

In the aftermath, we still talk and are amicable but I have made my boundaries clear and I have been all the better for it. She did ask if she could reach out to me if she was ever in a tight spot and needed an extra hand, and I left the door open to that but only on my terms. I have not gone back to help as of yet, I’m focusing on my primary job and enjoying some free time. I’m realizing that running yourself into the ground for an extra check isn’t always worth it!

Some questions that came up in the comments:

• I hadn’t ever signed a written work agreement (though looking back I should’ve). Lesson learned. But she was my “friend” or so I thought and I didn’t think it through as I should have.
• She did lure me away from my previous job with promises of the same pay plus benefits and that I would be hired as a full-time employee from a government program incentive she had received to start her business. She had kept saying “by February” or “by March” I would be officially “hired,” but come May/June nothing had happened yet.
• I am currently living and working in Greece so things are a lot different than how it is in the U.S. and perhaps other countries.
• This was a part-time gig but she was treating it as full-time. At the time, I heavily relied on a second job to stand on my own two feet here.
• The boss of the job I worked at before I started working for my friend happily would take me back in a heartbeat. He is a kind and genuine man and very straightforward, almost the polar opposite of my friend.
• I am a private English teacher here. That is my full-time job that I have focused on building here on my own. The job my friend hired me for was focused on tourists and highly seasonal and dependent on weather, among other things. It was for horseback riding tours in the area. I had years of experience riding and training horses and it was what I did as a hobby.

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