Okay, so I'm asking this mainly out of curiosity and maybe even to help out my friend.

My friend works at an apartment complex where she also lives. When you get the job, they "pay for your rent" and then plus some in exchange for you to work for them and be at their beck and call when someone needs something. From the start it seams pretty legit. You work, they pay your rent. Well, as I started to hear more and more about her job it all started to seem really fishy. First of all, they charge a higher rent amount for employees than they do for anyone else that lives there. She's required to work 20 hours per pay period (every 2 weeks), which is fine. BUT the problem is that when she doesn't, she gets screamed at by her boss about how she doesn't get paid time off and that she HAS to work a minimum of 20 hours per pay period. Well, when she takes vacations, she's required to make up the hours she loses before she leaves so that she has 20 hours in, which seems fine if that's what they want her to do. But they also require her to make up hours she loses when the office is closed (for example, she lost 2 hours of work on 4th of July because they were closed during normal business hours and was required to make up those hours). When she works over 20 hours she doesn't get paid any extra. To me this seems like she's paid salary, but after rent is pulled from her paycheck, she usually only gets between $10-50. How can this even be possible? Rent for everyone living there is around $265/mo. and I can't imagine employee rent is much higher than $350. From what I've read of the laws it says that salaried employees must make no less than $455 per week. It seems ridiculous that they'd be taking so much and have her on salary rather than as hourly when she's clocking time anyway. Is this legal?

PING ME

Chances are that it is legal. You'd have to research in your state, maybe talk to a specialist, but there are many, many loopholes to those rules. Part-time employees, in particular, lack a lot of protections full-time workers get. Then she may not be an "employee" but a contract worker or some other designation (yet another loophole). On top of that, an employer can get away with a lot if the "contract" includes exceptions that an employee has signed and agreed to.

It does sound like a crappy situation, and she may have some legal recourse, but chances are it would be extremely expensive to fight it legally, would probably cost her the job and her home (if not in the short term, in the long term they could make is so unpleasant for her that she'd be forced to quit), and in the end there's a good chance she would lose the case even if she's in the right and they are in the wrong.

Oops...sorry for double post.