Transperfect Translations hires people on false pretenses New York, New York

After 15 months of unemployment, networking paid off and I received an interview form this company and passed their test with flying colors.  I was brought in for a second interview and asked to go to work straight away.  I was placed in the seat of an employee who was on vacation and told that a new seat would be found for me soon.  At my initial interview, I was told that they were looking for full-time, permanent positions, and this was what I wanted.

After several hours of work, they called me down to human resources and told me that the position pays $38,000 with benefits after a two-week formal probationary period in which I would be temp-to-perm at $18 an hour.  I worked very hard for this company, staying over by about 15 minutes (without reporting as such) the first two days I was there.  My co-workers checked over my work, being new, and they said it was just fine.

My third day, a Monday, the vacationing employee returned, stunned to find someone else in his seat.  After my lunch break, the coworker who had been checking over my assignments told me that I had made "a lot" of errors on the project I worked on that morning.  The story was obviously canned, based on her delivery and that the errors that she was pointing out were the most obvious that one could make, and knowing this, I had been very attentive and could not have made more than one or two in the nearly twenty pages that I typed before lunch.  She could not show me the errors--she claimed to have conveniently corrected them all, as well as accusing me of being slow.  This came from someone who had had a long phone conversation with her mother on company time that very morning while I was working.  I received an e-mail from human resources to go see the woman who signed my time sheets.  She gave me a completely different story, that I had been hired to fill in for the vacationing employee who was now back and that my services were not needed for that reason and that they might hire me again.  She reassured me that it had nothing to do with my performance, and that I had been hired for only two and a half days.  I told her that it would have been nice if someone had actually been up front about this, and she seemed ignorant that I had not been thus informed.

My friend was profusely apologetic and said that he, who had formerly worked in the same department, thought that there were shenanigans going on there, and was glad to have been transferred to another department in another building.  He said that it seemed like a lot of people were being dismissed for very slight reasons, and that my termination confirmed his suspicions, which he didn't think were strong enough to not recommend a friend in need of a job.

Even though I had filled out direct deposit forms, I was told the following week that I would not be paid until a physical check was sent out nearly a month later.  When I complained that the whole situation had caused me several hundred dollars in overdraft fees over the lack of an expected direct deposit from either them or from unemployment, they expedited the check to me, and I received it the following week--one point in their favor.

To top it off, the company responded to my resume on Craigslist, which was identical to the resume that they have except for the lack of my name and contact info.  I told them that after my experience with the department in question, it would have to be in another department, and I never heard back from them.

In New York, for some reason, it is not illegal to hire someone under fraudulent pretenses, even though I have a friend who had that happen to him earlier this year (a temp job presented as a permanent one), burning a bridge with a real permanent job in the process.  The Department of Labor told me that as an "at-will" employment state, there are no laws pertaining to such hiring practices.  Because of how easy it is to abuse job seekers with this practice, I contacted my state senator and assemblywoman and told them that something needs to be done about this.

I present this report to blacklist Transperfect for this unethical practice.  Any company that does this should be avoided.