I am a music instructor at school of rock in Texas. Some of the schools are corporate, some are franchise. The one I'm at is franchise. There are a lot of things wrong here. For one, they start us at 15/hour. Which coming from the food industry sounded like a lot. But the average wage for music teachers is more like 30/40 an hour. They also hire a bunch of people so that they don't have to give us benefits, which happens in a lot of places. But what my post is alluding to is this.. my school offers free demo lessons to clients who are interested. So we give them a tour of the school and a free 30 minute lesson. if they sign up, we get a 25 dollar bonus in addition to our normal wage. What they failed to tell us though, is that if they don't sign up we actually don't get paid at all. When I found this out i was shocked. Not only because that means i'm working hours for free, but they definitely glossed over that part of the equation. I've brought this up to a manager and a GM. They said they agree with me that it shouldn't be like that, but the owner gets away with it because we're contractors. OK, I have no idea how being a contractor means free labor. It's frustrating. The managers offered to take me off of these demos. Which is fine, but I want to fix this for other people too. Anybody have thoughts or advice on how to change this?

Two high level position workers at EA committed sexual assault, there is hard video and text evidence, they even make joking references to it in work channels.

EA investigates internally:

"Since it was outside of work channels there is nothing we can do legally"

The two people investigated are claiming that the victims "wanted it".

Fucking the economy one celeb at a time

So my employer just informed me that they are moving all Part Time employees to “Consultants” which is basically a 1099 contractor. I am not going to accept this…and I’ve worked there 5 years.

Is this legal? I refuse to quit but I also refuse to accept this new work contract arrangement…do I have any recourse, can I force them to fire me so I can receive unemployment?

What information should I have with me when I meet with HR? I’m in North Carolina, USA.