Yep. I just exit a startup that went broke, had to make do with not paying all their staff for over 9 weeks, and then finally got a massive investor that set them up for 2+ years of burn.
I resigned at 8 weeks of no pay, and couldn’t even legally force my company to give me a redundancy (3 years service) and I’m currently fighting to my right for 2 weeks notice pay (see note 1).
When you work for a startup you don’t have any rights to anything and you shouldn’t expect them to care about you.
Note 1: all this garbage is legal in Australia where all employee rights are hinged on insolvency and “hope for an investor” counts as not trading insolvent, which makes using your employees as creditors without their permission possible.
I’ve learnt my lesson about all of this. I will only work for established companies and I encourage anyone in the job market to think twice about signing with a company.. you need to be as confident in them for their responsibilities as they need to be in you.
To your “note 1” ASIC might strongly disagree with that. Insolvency and directorships don’t go well together.
It sounds like things are a mess, but also see how they are doing on compulsory super (SG) payments. The ATO can get punchy if they are a long way in arrears.
(Been there, had the pain of failed startups running out of $, now working at places everyone has heard of because they do pay the bills on time.)
The problem here is that there is no regulator to force a company to become insolvent like this. The super payments were nearly a year late, but the ATO just added a fine to the pile of debt, and that was that. No external regulator came in and told the company that they had to enter insolvency, despite all of the government bodies (FW, ATO, ASIC) becoming involved. No external regulator told the directors that if they didn't pay out the employees from their own pockets, there would be consequences. They just treated us like interest free creditors, and the company continued to operate with some different money.
Because the company refused to enter insolvency, none of us qualified for the FEG and we all went broke waiting for something to happen. Those of us who had to leave, had to resign by our own doing and lost a whole bunch of entitlements.
FW told me that this was perfectly legal behavior and "unfortunately there's no law against it". The laws are a mess. In my opinion, if an employer runs 7 days or so late for payroll, then you should be able to take a redundancy on the spot, and go get a new job that pays money, and you should be able to debt collect them for that redundancy later. Otherwise you end up with this situation. Bottom line: these companies were refused credit from the bank, so they took money allocated to salaries, held salaries, and used that instead as a form of interest free credit. And some how, for all the ombudsman and bodies that we have, it is legal behavior as long as they eventually pay everyone 9 weeks later, with no extra compensation after we've all been through hell and lived like dung. And like OP said, with an investor, now they’re laughing all the way to the bank.
I resigned at 8 weeks of no pay, and couldn’t even legally force my company to give me a redundancy (3 years service) and I’m currently fighting to my right for 2 weeks notice pay (see note 1).
When you work for a startup you don’t have any rights to anything and you shouldn’t expect them to care about you.
Note 1: all this garbage is legal in Australia where all employee rights are hinged on insolvency and “hope for an investor” counts as not trading insolvent, which makes using your employees as creditors without their permission possible.
I’ve learnt my lesson about all of this. I will only work for established companies and I encourage anyone in the job market to think twice about signing with a company.. you need to be as confident in them for their responsibilities as they need to be in you.