HACKER Q&A
📣 trowa159

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?


  👤 alex_young Accepted Answer ✓
I 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.


👤 eqmvii
businesses 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!


👤 pluc
Glassdoor 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.

👤 lokar
I imagine if you start one, and it gets much use, right away you have a validation problem.

👤 Bender
I 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.

[1] - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/contacts


👤 lemonademan
I 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.

👤 Physkal
How reliable has Glass door been lately?

👤 WaitWaitWha
An 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.

👤 rf15
This is just asking for defamation troubles.

👤 dccoolgai
Yes. 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).

👤 excalibur
I would assume that the list of Trump appointees would be a good place to start.

👤 playorizaya
Make it. I’ll add a few.

These YC founders are not held accountable for their ridiculous behavior


👤 dqv
Yeah, but I have no idea how good it is or how expensive it is: https://www.dnb.com/en-us/smb.html

👤 jmkd
This 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.

👤 anymouse123456
This 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.


👤 singleshot_
Country 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.

👤 TZubiri
As 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.


👤 brador
Glassdoor?