Peachtree City, Ga. Luxury Autoworks, an OK Walker, has produced Ford Mustangs for the Clint Eastwood film “Trouble with the Curve” and, according to its website, strives on a world record for land speed. Now the high-end car repair shop has gained another rare distinction: it accuses a former employee of paying in pennies.
To be precise, that’s 91,500 pennies, adding up to $ 915 in wages – although Andreas Flatten, who was a manager at A-OK Walker until last November, hasn’t counted on him to make sure he got every last cent. He said his former employer had left him a shiny mound of pennies at the end of his driveway on March 12 to punish him for leaving, and continually demanded his final salary.
Since his girlfriend posted a video of the pennies on Instagram on March 13, he has been sympathizing with the strained relationship with thousands of his employers amid the epidemic.
“It would be a matter if it was just pennies,” Mr. Flatten said. “I wish it was just money.” But pennies are covered in a sharp, sticky substance; Mr. Flatten suspects it may be a power-steering fluid.
Repair shop owner Miles Walker did not respond to a request for comment. He told CBS46 that he could not remember whether he dropped Penny on the path of his former employee. “It doesn’t matter – they got paid, it all matters,” he said.
Mr Flayton said the foundation of his workplace dispute was the lack of sensitivity by his employer to raise his child from daycare at a certain time. Mr. Walker, the owner, recruited him, he said. And he accepted the job because he had an agreement that he could leave at 5 pm
This system became even more important during the epidemic when childcare facilities began to close early. But the promise was over, Mr. Flatton said. This is why, and some other unpleasant exchanges, prompted Mr. Flatten to give notice at the end of last year that he was planning to leave, and then left from the job even earlier than planned.
Months later, when his final week’s wages still had not arrived, Mr. Flatten filed a claim with the US Department of Labor. The agency confirmed that it contacted the repair shop three times.
On March 12, around 7 pm, a video recorded by Mr. Flatton’s doorbell camera shows a young man waving long hair in his front field.
“Your money is at the end of the driveway, bud,” says the man, whom Mr.
About an hour later, when Mr. Flatten tried to visit the store, he made his way through a mountain of pennies. There was an envelope among the fake-smelling coins, created with an expression of unmistakable disapproval. Inside he received his salary stub, but there was no investigation.
Mr. Flatten and his girlfriend, Olivia Oxley, spent the next few hours transporting about 500 pounds of pennies, which were driven down the slope of their wide driveway to their garage by wheelbarrow. (The wheels had caused a collapse since the weight of the pennies, he said.) His girlfriend posted about her discovery on Instagram, where it captured many people’s imaginations.
“Now it’s an oil change,” one person wrote. Another suggested that because the coinage had recently been lacking, perhaps the pennies were of more value.
Many reported that if the used motor oil covered the pennies, the former employer had effectively dumped the hazardous waste on the property and urged him to contact an environmental agency. (Mr. Flatten, who has a freshwater creek at the bottom of his hill, thought it was smart. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources Department of Environmental Protection told him that “he had never heard of anything like this before.”
Thoughts on dumping also appeared in Yelp reviews of the repair shop, where a user wrote: “The owner paid an employee his last check-in pennies covered in motor oil. If he does this with his people, he Maybe your car is not worth trusting. “
But the publicity back at A-OK Walker Luxury Autowarks has only helped the business, according to a woman who answered the phone on Wednesday afternoon but refused to be identified.
Mr. Flatten said he spent two hours a night cleaning the pennies so that he would be able to drop them into a coin-sorting machine. He kills them around in Dawn dish soap, white vinegar, and a huge watt of water. he failed. He has found that to get a smooth solution, he has to wipe each penny separately. It took him about two hours to clean the $ 5 denomination penny.
He has thought about filing a lawsuit, but he knows that what happened may not be technically illegal.
In an email message asking if it was legal to pay an employee in a dirty, grease-covered penny, U.S. Department of Labor spokesman Eric R. Lucero wrote, “There is nothing in the rules that dictates in this currency that the employee must pay.”
