Ask HN: Is there a bad employers (who have a records of not paying) list?

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.

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

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

This is just asking for defamation troubles.

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 but if one is essentially working for free then maybe that is not so bad.

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

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!

How reliable has Glass door been lately?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Make it. I’ll add a few.

These YC founders are not held accountable for their ridiculous behavior

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

Glassdoor?

This is such an obvious feature for Glassdoor, but needs verification to avoid abuse.

How long does a place last doing this?

I would assume they go out of business, or (at least in the US) run into an informed employee who reports them to local state authorities ... and maybe still go out of business.

A startup I worked for many years ago did this. The founder would be like its okay you babe you got 1% equity or whatever And I would also be like I gotta pay my rent and buy groceries though...

That company went under in a year. Surprisingly...

The founder reached out in the years since talking about his new endeavor trying to get me to join the team. Ha. Jokes.