OK Walker Luxury Autoworks in Peachtree City, Georgia, built Ford Mustangs for Clint Eastwood’s film “Trouble With the Curve” and for an attempt at a world speed record on land, according to its website. Now, the state-of-the-art machine shop has acquired another rare distinction: it has been accused of paying cents to a former employee.
To be more precise, it is 91,500 cents, adding up to $ 915 in wages due – although Andreas Flaten, who was A OK Walker manager until last November, did not count them to make sure he would get paid until the last penny. He said his former employer left him a lot of cents at the end of his driveway on March 12 to punish him for resigning and persistently demanding his last payment.
Since his girlfriend posted a video of the cents on Instagram on March 13, he has attracted the sympathy of thousands of people who also maintain strained relations with their employers in the midst of the pandemic.
“It would be one thing if it were just a few cents,” said Flaten. “I wish it were just a few cents.” But the coins are covered with a sticky and pungent substance; Mr. Flaten suspects that it may be a power steering fluid.
Miles Walker, the workshop owner, did not respond to a request for comment. He told CBS46 that he couldn’t remember whether he dropped his pennies in his former employee’s garage. “It doesn’t matter – he was paid, that’s all that matters,” he said.
Flaten said the basis of his dispute in the workplace had to do with his employer’s lack of sensitivity to the need to pick up his son at daycare at a certain time. Walker, the owner, recruited him, he said. And he accepted the job because they had an agreement that he could leave at 5 pm.
This arrangement became even more important during the pandemic, when day care centers started to close earlier. But the promise has evaporated, said Flaten. That, and some other unpleasant exchanges, prompted Flaten to warn at the end of last year that he was planning to resign and then quit his job even earlier than planned.
Months later, when the last wage of the week had not yet arrived, Flaten filed a lawsuit with the United States Department of Labor. The agency confirmed that it had contacted the workshop three times.
Around 7:00 pm on March 12, a video recorded by Flaten’s doorbell camera shows a young man with long wavy hair on his porch.
“Hey, your money is at the end of the garage, buddy,” says the man, who Flaten said he believed to be a current workshop employee.
About an hour later, when Mr. Flaten tried to drive to the store, he found his way blocked by a mountain of pennies. Placed between the stinking coins was an embossed envelope with an expression of unmistakable disapproval. Inside, he found his paycheck, but no check.
Mr. Flaten and his girlfriend, Olivia Oxley, spent the next few hours hauling about 500 pounds of pennies up the slope of their steep driveway into their wheelbarrow garage. (The weight of the cents has since caused the wheels to collapse, he said.) His girlfriend posted about the discovery on Instagram, where he captured the imagination of many.
“This is an oil change,” wrote one person. Another suggested that, due to the recent shortage of coins, perhaps pennies were worth more.
Several pointed out that if the pennies were covered with used motor oil, the former employer effectively dumped hazardous waste on the property and asked him to contact an environmental agency. (Mr. Flaten, who has a freshwater stream at the base of his hill, thought this was smart. The Environmental Protection Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources told him that “they had never heard of anything like this before.”)
Reflections on the eviction also spread in Yelp reviews of the workshop, where a user wrote: “The owner paid an employee his last check in cents covered in engine oil. If he does this with his own people, it’s probably not worth it to trust his car. “
But back at A OK Walker Luxury Autoworks, advertising only helped business, according to a woman who answered the phone on Wednesday afternoon, but declined to be named.
Flaten said that one night he spent two hours cleaning his pennies so he could throw them in a coin-separating machine. He spread them in a giant tank of Dawn detergent, white vinegar and water. That failed. He found that to remove the fatty solution, he needs to clean every penny individually. It took him about two hours to clear the $ 5 in cents.
He has already considered filing a lawsuit, but he knows that what happened may not be technically illegal.
Asked in an e-mail message whether it was legal to pay an employee in dirty and greasy coins, Eric R. Lucero, a spokesman for the US Department of Labor, wrote: “There is nothing in the regulations that dictate currency the employee must be paid. “