No. That sounds like wage theft. If my boss pulled something like that I’d be on the phone with my state’s department of labor so freakin’ fast. If you worked the hours they have to pay you for it.
Even if it weren’t illegal, it’d be a big flashing neon sign saying, “We will screw you over every chance we get, and you will be nothing but miserable working here.”
Security deposit had me reeling. This was written by a moron trying to form legal words and failing
Refer to your boss in all capitals to indicate interaction with their corporate entity, not the person
No, this both uncommon and illegal (assuming it’s from the US). They’re trying to couch their wage theft in legal jargon to scare the unwitting into accepting it
Others have heavily covered the legality portion of this but I want to point out one other key factor: any employer that tries to pull this kind of shit clearly has a significant employee retention problem, and they’re trying to fix it by trapping their employees financially rather than getting to the root of the problem.
Refuse to sign this agreement and find another job. If they let you join without signing this agreement keep applying elsewhere because you’ll almost certainly learn very quickly why they have such a bad employee retention problem
At my last company, when I joined they gave me an employee agreement to sign that not only granted to them the rights over any software that I developed while working for them even if it was personal projects that I did for myself on my own time (which is standard corporate bullshittery) but also granted to them rights over anything that I had developed in my entire life previous to working for them. I told them they had to be fucking kidding me (like, surely they should have understood that at a minimum that would conflict with the rights of my previous employers who I had developed stuff for) and refused to sign it. They ended up hiring me anyway, without my ever having signed any employee agreement at all - I got like weekly email reminders from HR about it for a year until they finally just stopped.
You don’t have to ask us. Contact your state’s attorney general and/or workforce commission directly. They’ll know.
Edit: I speculate not. For one, my general understanding is “time worked is time paid.” You cannot be deducted pay for the cost of, for instance, mistakes.
For two, I don’t think a contract that doesn’t benefit you in any way is enforceable.
Edit3: The legal term I was thinking of here was Unconscionability
You might start clandestinely recording conversations with your supervisors if that’s legal in your state, just in case they try to pull some “off the record” shenanigans when/if you blow the whistle.
Edit2: There is a pretty good voice recording app in the fdroid repository. I’ve used “Simple Voice Recorder” from there, picked up good audio through my pants pocket, but your phone will vary and you should test the ability to record surreptitiously vs clearly before the recording is needed.
FYI: All the Simple Mobile Tools apps were sold to a really scummy company. The good news is the open source community forked them and they are now known as Fossify.
It’s blatantly illegal, and the fact that they were dumb enough to put it in writing means you have a slam dunk case for your local department of labor. File a complaint, and let the DoL take it from there; The entire department exists to deal with bullshit like this, but they only act on complaints.
