Sepia Concepts hired my mother to shoot pictures of Santa. Sadly, they didn’t pay her fully for the time she worked.

When she tried to contact them to resolve this, they simply ignored her messages and her.

After many broken promises, she still hasn’t been paid for all of her time working there.

The problem came when the season reached an end and my mother found she wasn’t receiving all of her pay.   :-O

It was a hard thing to resolve sooner in part because she only received one statement explaining her pay and that was only for the first pay period. Even this one didn’t contain any explanation of the hours they recorded her working. Add into this the confusion on the company’s part that they think they don’t have to pay overtime and resolving the difference was nearly impossible.

More than two months later and with numerous requests she hasn’t received any further explanation about the deposits made to her account. They have given NO accounting of how they determined what to pay her even though they agreed to send this to her. (Update Feb 2 - They finally sent numbers but without any claims of WHEN they say she worked.)

She started trying to get this corrected at the end of the year, leaving messages for the managers. That was the only thing she could do. No one would answer their phones. For weeks she would only reach voice mail or the receptionist. The receptionist would only say she would “try” to get the messages delivered.

This was better than the voice mail system that simply explained that the the H.R. voice mailbox was too full to allow new messages and then hung up. Messages left in other mailboxes simply were not returned.

She eventually asked me to get involved and help to try and get through. I asked her to give me the log she had kept of her hours, put it into a spreadsheet and forwarded it to one of the managers at Sepia. Again, no response back.

Only after numerous messages was I able to get any response. I estimate we made about 50 calls over a two-week period.

Their basic premise for not paying her was that she wasn’t able to use their fingerprint “time system.” Of course, they are right. When they couldn’t get it to work with her fingers, she was told not to worry about using the time system.

Whenever she asked about it, she was told that “Harry” would enter her time for her.

And apparently he did some of this. But, in a quick review of the hours we just received (Feb 2, 4:15 PM) they have reduced her actual hours worked every day by 1 to 5 hours.

Then in short tern they suddenly announce she needed to fax

back a letter of settlement losing about 80% of what was owed to her or she would be paid nothing. She has only had this paperwork now for about 50 minutes before they expect her to sign, review and FAX it back to them.

Total under paid: Approx. $1,500

Total hours under recorded : Approx. 70