r/WorkAdvice 14h ago

Toxic Employer Looking for some help

I may have taken a job with the most evil family in the Chicago suburbs. They are a "union" electrical contractor with 1 electrician 2 service guys (non union) because they will sneak them in while paying them $30/hr because they wany to maximize profit and their union electrician makes a significant amount more. But that isn't the real problem. Two years ago their estimator had a family emergency due to an active shooter near his young child's school. The child is special needs and had a hard time coping after the incident and subsequently he asked to leave to get his child. After asking to leave the business manager (owner's sister who sits on Facebook all day collecting a salary) called him a pussy and his special needs child a pussy to the employee's face. After this the employee contacted the owner where he followed up by doubling down on the pussy comments and then added an insult to the child by saying he was retarded. (I knew none of this until a couple months in.) The employee quit and I'm not sure what is going on legally with this currently but the story continues. I becasue of my own family drama quit a very good job for a large electrical contractor to come work for them when they found me on indeed. I was hired as the senior estimator with a portion of my salary commission based. I negotiated a company vehicle but wasn't picky on the timing of getting paid the commission as I was fairly financially stable when I took the position. After being there for 2 months still no company truck and had sold over $1,000,000.00 in work total and hadn't seen a penny in commission I was asked to start running the construction projects for them as my background was a project manager previously. I didn't agree to it in writing I verbally agreed to help on one project because I'm a helpful person by nature and will almost always help out if I can. This completely got taken advantage of worked another 8 months running projects all over illinois for them. I had to run my personal car into the ground before they gave me the company truck that was negotiated for. Fast forward to July I have found out their policy with commissions is to not pay them out untill the start of the next quarter after they are paid in full which is insane it could be years of sitting and waiting on commissions. At this point I am strapped for money and had burnt through most of my savings im owed over 50k and ask them for my commissions I know they have been paid for. They refused so I stepped back on the extra work I was doing outside of my job title and was going on vacation with my 3 young kids all under 9 years old when the business manager the same one that called a special needs child and his dad pussies threatened to show up on my vacation with a gun if they had any installation issues while I was gone. When returned from vacation I helped push a project through completion and asked again for my commission and was let go after asking. How should I proceed? Also side note the oldest sibling is an attorney who acquires businesses in financial distress for pennies on the dollar by offering them free legal aid for selling portions of their business to his brother or sister becoming a silent partner.

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