Losing Through Intimidation - Former Salaried, Reclassified As Cal spas Employee Review

I’m a former long-time employee and I know for a fact that the three reviews, “Supervisor”, “Great Pay”, and “Not too bad. Needs more team spirit, tho” were written by Cal Spa employees because they were asked to by management to act as a counterpoint to all of the bad reviews. Which reviews are correct? The bad ones. This is a bad, bad place to work. Every dysfunctional thing you’ve ever read in a Dilbert cartoon happens there, NO exaggeration. If you have to ask your employees to game the system on a web site that reviews your company because all of your reviews are bad, there’s a message there. Some people are paid well, but only because they have jobs that are hard to keep filled because they absorb abuse from top management. After several months, people leave because the pay isn’t worth the stress, which takes its toll on your health and family life. I know, because I was one of them, but my employment there was much more than several months. I've seen a lot there. My review title is a play on the Robert Ringer book “Winning Through Intimidation”, but this place is a loser and the top management are losers. They’re losing business, they’re losing customers, they’re losing vendors, and they’re losing market share. But one thing they win at is intimidation, which is how they do business. I’ll quote another reviewer: “As other reviewers have mentioned, they severely abuse their vendors, especially in regards to credit. They max out their credit with a new vendor, and ask for an increase, ask for another increase, and another. Then about 90 days out the refuse to pay until they negotiate a lower balance (like 40-50% lower).” This is how they do business. There is no win-win, only you-lose. They intimidate their employees with threats of firing for the slightest mistake, and they keep them constantly insecure with constant furloughs at the last minute to make them feel grateful that they’re working at all, even part time. Management genuinely believes their employees should feel grateful for even the limited hours they work rather than sympathetic with the burden their reduced schedule puts on their employees. They routinely, and with full awareness that what they’re doing is wrong, enact policies that are illegal. They have been fined by the California Department of Labor Relations many, many times. I know this from personal experience with the company. They were forced to contribute their share to the matching 401k (when they had one) because they were legally obligated to, and then fired the employee who blew the whistle on it. They were once raided by the police for Disability Insurance fraud. The police segregated the employees in conferences rooms and break rooms while they downloaded the contents of company’s network. A week later, we were being paid by a different payroll system. There was no discussion of this by management at all, ever. I myself was interviewed by the police, but I don’t work in Accounting or Payroll, so my input was limited. The police told us that the raid involved the company’s contribution to the Disability Insurance fund, so this isn’t hearsay, it’s my experience. As mentioned earlier, they intimidate their vendors to get extensions on credit and then threaten not to pay unless the vendor takes them to court. They intimidate their spa dealers until they get so fed up with either losing money because of the low quality of Cal Spa products or their company’s complete unreliability that they drop them. No one wins with this company. Their employees lose, spa dealers lose, customers lose, vendors lose, and now as their business gets worse as their products get worse, management is losing, and they deserve it because of their bad business practices. The market rewards excellence and punishes failure and abuse of the system. This is an abusive company. Stay away.