Worker Discovers His Manager Is Homeless And Living In A Truck After Being Promoted —'It Broke Him'
Promoting to salary is often a way to evade overtime, and it put this man in a terrible bind.
Africa Studio | Shutterstock For most of us, getting a promotion at work is a dream come true, which means doors being opened by a better financial situation. Especially when you've been slogging it out for an hourly wage, a move up can feel like a godsend.
But for one worker's manager, it has ended up being a promotion in name only, and it's upended his life in ways nobody expected.
The worker's manager is homeless after being promoted to a salary position.
Sadly, this man's supervisor is not alone. Homelessness rates in the U.S. were found to have hit an all-time high in December 2023 after rising by 12% since 2022.
Federal officials say much of the rise is due to pandemic rent and monetary assistance expiring at the same time that rents and the costs of goods have skyrocketed.
Contrary to popular belief, as much as 60% of the homeless population holds down a job — this man's supervisor isn't alone in that, either. But how he ended up there is, at first blush, rather surprising.
The worker wrote in his Reddit post that his supervisor's promotion was very recent. "He’s a solid dude, and from that moment on, I was rooting for him, and I let him know that," the worker wrote. But by the next time they saw each other six weeks later, the promotion had already turned disastrous.
The promotion effectively cut his pay so much that he was forced to begin living out of his truck.
"Fast forward to yesterday, and the guy tells me he’s leaving for Texas — for good," the worker wrote. "He’s living out of his truck with his wife, and because he is required to drive so much with the promotion, the costs have been piling up."
Their employer has been dragging its feet on reimbursing the supervisor for the transportation costs. "[They're] just now paying for the tolls. He still hasn’t received his gas card, and it basically ran his savings dry," the worker wrote.
Irina Soboleva S | Shutterstock
Because of his departure, the supervisor chose this worker to replace him, but after he learned the details, he was no longer interested. "Come to find out, I make more than him as an hourly employee versus his salary," he wrote.
It all left the worker feeling a bit mystified by the cruel twist of fate. "Crazy to think I was bitter about his promotion but it turns out he not only needed the break, but it was the outcome that broke him," he wrote.
Promoting workers to salaried management is a frequent ploy to avoid paying overtime or lowering a worker's pay.
"Changing a guy to salary is sometimes just a scam to stop paying overtime," another Redditor wrote in response to the worker's post. "At some companies, you have to be very careful about accepting one of these 'promotions.'"
Workers and employment lawyers have long suspected this to be the case, but it turns out it's actually true. A 2023 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that recent years had seen a five-fold increase in supposed "managerial" job positions just above the federal salary threshold, $684 per week or $35,568 annually at the time of the study, at which overtime is no longer required to be paid.
The NBER found that some of these positions were not managerial at all but rather clearly rudimentary hourly positions made to SOUND managerial, like a front desk clerk position renamed "Director of First Impressions" (the mere phrasing of which makes me want to bash my head against a brick wall until I go unconscious, but I digress).
The NBER also found that every inflated position equals a 13.5% savings in overtime pay — a staggering amount of money when you consider how many people are being hired or promoted into these bogus positions.
And in a truly sick twist, it seems as if employers may now be doing the opposite as well. Since the Biden-Harris Administration changed the federal overtime threshold on July 1, 2024, to $58,656 and will raise it again in 2025 in order to expand the number of salaried workers eligible for overtime, one worker on Reddit reported that their employer had "moved everyone in my job from salary to hourly to 'better align with government employment descriptions.'"
There seems to be no basement for how low employers will stoop in order to not pay workers fairly.
All the more reason to vote for candidates who are on the side of workers and the labor unions that protect them. Because no one should be rendered homeless by a promotion.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.