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Employer charging for cell phone overage with no contract

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Lilmosey

Junior Member
What is the name of your state? FL

I'm not sure where this should go, so I'm going to post it here and hope for the best.

Staring about 4 years ago, my husband's employer required that all the managers carry a cell phone, so they could be reached 24/7. For the first few years, $20 was deducted from his salary to cover unlimited minutes. We don't know when they stopped deducting this, but it was some time last year.

Last month, he received an email from the accountant of the company, stating he owed $72 in "overage" charges and long distance access charges for his cell phone. There was no warning. We know for certain that he has used far more minutes in prior months than he did during the month in question, and that he has always had long distance access charges every month.

My husband never signed a contract of any kind about this phone. In fact, he was never even told how many minutes the company plan had.

I could understand if they had sent out a memo in advance stating that as of a specific date, any minutes over (what we now know are) 600 or any long distance access charges would be billed to that person. But they didn't. They just sent an email saying "you owe....".

We offered to pay this in installments of $10 per month, since we had not budgeted for this expense AT ALL. My husband was told not just "no", but "hell no". We could have 2 months. Period.

Is this legal? If he signed no contract, never knew the limit on the minutes, had established a precedent long ago of using far more minutes and long distance expenses than in the month they decided to start billing their managers, can they legally require him to pay that? If THEY demand that he have the phone and he isn't allowed to turn it off, how can they make HIM pay for it, especially when they gave no notice whatsoever?

Thanks for any advice you can give us. This is a small business of less than 75 employees in Jacksonville, Florida.

I need to add that I work from home and am alone all day. I have a heart condition, so my husband needs to call and check on me. Some of the calls were between he and I. His employer stated that he could use the land lines for those calls. We disagreed, since they tape all telephone conversations in order to provide "quality service". We do not want our personal conversations listened to by these people. While we now know that we will get our own cell phones to talk to each other, my question still remains that since this has gone on since the beginning and a precedent was set during prior months, can they legally just decide out of the blue to bill him for this?
 
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cbg

I'm a Northern Girl
Did your husband use the cell phone SOLELY for business calls or did he use it for personal business as well?
 

Lilmosey

Junior Member
It was for both. When they gave the managers the cell phones, they put no restrictions on it. They said we were paying the company $20 per month for unlimited minutes. That was it. They never said they were going to stop deducting the $20. Their direct-deposit pay stubs changed last year to reflect a lump sum of deductions instead of itemized, so we simply never noticed that the $20 was no longer being deducted.

All of the managers have used the cells phones for both personal and business. One manager lives out of the city and he gets about 10 calls per day from his wife and children. He did not receive a bill, yet we did for a $1 long distance access. Last year, after what we now know is after the deductions stopped, we had to leave town due to a hurricane. We were gone for 4 days. We made multiple long distance calls to check on things here at home and even had roaming charges, based on the cell phone indicating it was roaming. He was not given a bill then.

They singled out only 3 managers to give these bills to. The rest didn't even know about it.
 

Lilmosey

Junior Member
Yes we did. That was the first time we ever knew there was a 600 minute limit. The accountant broke out the long distance access charge, and charge for 411 information and the overage minutes plus the taxes.
 

Lilmosey

Junior Member
The latest in this saga happened on Friday. Managers are paid monthly at this company. The accountant had called my husband on Thursday and asked him if he was going to be giving him a check for half of that cell phone bill. He had told us we had 2 months to pay it off.

My husband had been out of town on business. (Another issue.......they made him take his OWN vacation time to go because one of the days was a trip this vendor wanted to treat him to, which was a tour of one of the Harley plants in Milwaukee, yet the rest of the trip was for tours of their own facilities, meetings with their executives, etc. The vendor paid for his air fare and hotel, but my husband had to pay for everything else himself and was NOT reimbursed for ANY of it by the company.)

He told the accountant that he would bring in a check for 1/2 of the charges the following day, which was 7/1. When I checked our bank account, I noticed that his deposit was less than usual.......by an amount equal to 1/2 the cell phone bill. The accountant usually doesn't even come into work until after 3 p.m. (so he doesn't have to answer calls from all of their creditors), but he never came in at all on 7/1. My husband waited until 6:30 p.m. (Another issue........all other managers are only required to work 8 hours a day. My husband is required to be at work at 7 a.m. since he manages the shipping and receiving department, but he can't leave until he makes a final paper order at 5 p.m. and has to wait for all acknowledgements for those orders before he can come home, since he is charge of purchasing.)

Only the accountant has the direct deposit pay stubs. Sure enough today when he got his, they had deducted 1/2 of the cell phone bill. He never told my husband he was going to do that. I'm sure he hoped we wouldn't notice and would give him the check AND he would have that deduction and then he would collect 100%, even though he said we had 2 months to pay for it.

So, again I ask is it legal for him to be billed for this at all? Shouldn't some sort of advance notice have been given? Shouldn't ALL managers be made to pay it and not just to the 2 who were singled out? Can they selectively decide who will/will not have to pay for this? We would have no problem IF they had warned him. He didn't know how many minutes were even on the plan, since we thought they were unlimited. If he had had advance notice, I would have given him my cell phone to take to call me. It's not the fact that they are wanting the money. It's the fact that they did not give any notice after 4 years of allowing all managers to use those cell phones for any and all types of calls and then out of the blue deciding to charge for overages we didn't even know were there.

And now, to take it out of his salary without even telling him he was going to do it brings yet another question. Is THAT legal? Can they just take money out of his check without notice, especially after specifically asking if he was going to be bringing in a check?

My husband basically works in Hades. Every single person there is on some sort of antidepressant or anxiolytic. Almost all of them are in therapy or thinking about it. In the past month, 5 people have left and one was fired (because she found out they were cheating one the customers who was her account as a customer service representative and she threatened to tell him about it.....she was told she used "threatening" tones and fired her).

The owner has demanded that if someone makes an error that costs the company even 10 cents, they are to be formally written up and put on warning. Since a week had gone by without any of those types of memos coming across his desk, he told the managers they had 2 days to go out and find mistakes, get the write-ups done and on his desk or THEY would be written up and possibly terminated.

The managers have not had a raise in 5 years and have been told they will probably never get a raise again.

They have cameras in all areas of the plant (they do NOT do confidential printing of any kind, mind you) and you can see them sitting in the monitor room laughing at people. They record all phone conversations, even though only 5 people actually talk to customers. But they do not provide the standard "this call may be monitored for quality assurance" warning the way all other companies do. They just record them and listen to them whenever they feel like it.

They pay nothing towards the cost of employee health insurance. Yet, the owner is allowed to cover his 80+ year old parents on the plan, even though premiums are based on claim experience, so all those medical bills for his aging and extremely ill parents (his father has cancer) increase the premiums for the employees by at least $50 a year. It is up to almost $1000 a month for family coverage. It was $700 for just my husband and myself until I was able to find a job with decent benefits. They tell them they are lucky that they don't just stop offering health insurance altogether.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Our doctor simply sits there with his mouth open when we tell him about all of this. Then he gets out the Rx pad without question to prescribe meds to help my husband survive.

Yes, he is actively looking for another job. But the market is slim pickings for a 52-year-old man with only a high school education. Even with a walk-on-water letter of recommendation from one of the owners of a company who does on-site inspections of printing companies, everyone wants a college degree for a manager. My husband manages the warehouse, shipping & receiving, purchasing and maintenance. He cut staff from 20 to 4. He reduced their quarterly costs by over $250k and continues to do that. But, they won't give him a raise and finding something else is turning into a nightmare.

My husband had a verbal complaint filed for sexual harassment because he hugged a co-worker who was in tears one day after being publically humiliated by her boss. That same boss was crying one day, and the plant manager, knowing about the reaming my husband had received about the hug he had given, hugged that SAME WOMAN. Nothing was said by anyone. My husband had been told "no touching of any kind" or he would be fired. Yet his boss can hug the very woman who filed the verbal complaint against my husband and nothing is said at ALL?

This cell phone is just one more in a long list of incredibly low things that this company is doing. I realize none of what I have listed is actionable. I just wanted to give some background of what this place is like. But I do need to know if they can legally single out my husband one other person for these overage charges and legally deduct it from his paycheck, even though he was specifically asked if he was bringing in a check to pay 1/2.

Thanks.
 

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