Company cancels a 25-year-old’s signed contract extension, leaves him unemployed with a new lease to pay, pushing him to sue for everything he can

• The good thing nothing was signed yet line, delivered in the same meeting where the signed contract was sitting right there, is the kind of corporate confidence that only exists when someone assumes the other person has no options and no lawyer.

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• AITJ for suing my company for everything I could after they abruptly canceled my contract?

  pattato0

• I (25M) got an internship at a multinational company during my senior year of college and the facility I worked at was in a rural area with no public transportation, so I had to carpool with coworkers who used company cars. Because of this, I made a verbal agreement to work outside the hours stated in my contract (which was for 30 hours a week). Some days I worked regular business hours, and on days I had classes, I worked from home. The facility also had specific days where they worked overnight, and I would go in to help with activities during those shifts.

• ​The problem started when I asked to extend my internship contract for another year cause during my initial interview, they had actually asked if I'd be willing to delay my graduation to do a second year as an intern if possible, and I had said yes.

• ​By the middle of the year, I started telling my team that I definitely wanted to extend my contract. Whenever I asked about it, they always confirmed (by texts) that they were definitely going to extend it. Meanwhile, my roommate was planning to move out, so I was waiting for the company to officially sign the contract so I could decide my living situation: either rent an apartment near the carpool pickup spot, or move back in with my parents in another city to finish my degree.

• Well, the extension contract finally got signed by the company. So, I went ahead and signed a lease for an apartment and told my team I had done it since I'd be staying for another year.

• ​Almost two weeks later, I got a message from my manager scheduling a 1-on-1 meeting. When I joined the call, the coordinator in charge of the interns suddenly hopped in as a surprise and said: "Unfortunately, we won't be able to renew your contract due to some internal changes. Good thing nothing was signed yet!"

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• ​I started panicking because I had already signed the lease for my new apartment and I told her that the extension contract had already been signed, but she just brushed it off and said it wouldn't be a problem, she could "just cancel the extension contract". I left the meeting absolutely desperate, not knowing what to do or how I was going to pay my bills.

• ​I tried reaching out to ask them to reconsider, but got nowhere. My contract ended, I was left unemployed, and I had to scramble. I managed to graduate, but I spent 2 months unemployed, having to pay the bills for my new apartment out of pocket while trying to find a new job in the city.

• ​Given all this, plus the immense stress and anxiety they put me through, I decided to take them to court. When I consulted a labor lawyer, he recommended that we also sue for doing work outside the scope of an internship and file for full employment recognition. Even though I had those informal schedule agreements with my boss, I was still working overnight shifts and helping out in hazardous areas, which interns are legally not allowed to do here.

• ​So... I ended up throwing the book at them and suing for everything I possibly could. AITJ?

  pattato0

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• The coordinator's follow-up move, casually offering to just cancel the extension contract like it was a streaming subscription, is where the story shifts from frustrating to genuinely interesting. At that point the company had a signed contract, a 25-year-old who had just committed to a lease based entirely on that contract, and a coordinator who apparently believed that inconvenient paperwork could be wished away in a one-on-one call.

• What they forgot, or chose not to think about, was that the informal arrangements cutting both ways. Every overnight shift worked outside the scope of an internship, every hazardous area visit, every hour logged beyond the contracted 30, all of it was now part of the public record of someone who had been treated as a full employee without the protections or compensation of one.

• The lawyer saw it immediately. So did the lawsuit.

• Suing a multinational company for everything possible after they canceled a signed contract, left a 25-year-old unemployed with a fresh lease, and then acted surprised that there were consequences, is not petty. It is just reading the room two months too late on their end.

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