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My employer recently started several additional companies (all under one LLC), that are housed in the same building. Originally they had dedicated employees, however after they quit, all the responsibilities for those other companies were passed on to me.

Am I obligated to work for those companies even though they once had dedicated employees, and still have separate company names, proprietary credit cards, tax ID's, any everything else that goes along with it?

I enjoy working for this company, and feel fortunate to have a job that allows me opportunities normally outside my reach. So I'm not angry per-say, more just concerned / worried that I'm being taken advantage of, in addition to not being properly compensated for the additional effort. I also don't want to burnout or get in trouble for not doing what is asked of me...

Any help in understanding how this works would be greatly appreciated.

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    It's time to ask for pay raise now.
    – Nobody
    Commented Sep 23, 2015 at 4:36
  • 2
    Welcome to the site James. You may want to have a look at this blog post: my boss is assigning me to work for his wife’s company for a few weeks. It's a fairly different situation but the key point is the same: "There’s no regulation that prevents it". I've also edited your title to describe the situation better: keep in mind that in at-will employment you're never obligated to do anything.
    – Lilienthal ♦
    Commented Sep 23, 2015 at 8:37
  • @Lilienthal whether there are regulations or not strongly depends on where the questioners works.
    – David Aldridge
    Commented Sep 23, 2015 at 11:32
  • @DavidAldridge That holds true for the US, which is where the OP is based according to his mention of an LLC (I've added a location tag). AFAIK, in the absence of a contract, no state offers legal protection preventing an employer from changing an employee's job duties going forward.
    – Lilienthal ♦
    Commented Sep 23, 2015 at 12:09

2 Answers 2

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It really doesn't matter whether the extra duties were originally done by other people or in other companies. If you have an employment contract and the duties are sufficiently different from your core responsibilities, it is possible that there would be some verbiage there that you could leverage. But in the vast majority of cases, the duties would be reasonable "other duties as assigned" from the employment contract or there is no contract in place. So your employer can almost certainly instruct you to do the additional work.

As your responsibilities grow, it is certainly reasonable to consider whether it would be appropriate to ask for a raise. If you were hired to do the accounting for one company and you're now doing the accounting for 10 companies, it's certainly reasonable to expect that you should be compensated for that. Of course, the fact that a bunch of people quitting haven't been backfilled with new hires may indicate that the company is having financial problems that would prevent it from giving raises.

Since this is tagged "time management" and "burnout", if your real issue is that you're being asked to do more hours than you signed up for (or than you're being paid for), it is entirely reasonable to bring that up to your manager. If you signed up for a salaried position that would be expected to require 40 hours a week most weeks with the occasional busy week and now you're spending 60 hours a week working in a good week, it is entirely reasonable to ask your boss to help you prioritize the work so that you can get back down to a reasonable number of hours. For that discussion, it would be helpful to figure out roughly how many hours you're currently spending on your different tasks along with any options you have to reduce that time. If there are tasks that other people could reasonably do or tasks that could be automated or tasks that you could reasonably stop doing, I'd definitely bring that up at the meeting.

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If you are being properly compensated for all your hours, and you aren't working more hours than you committed to, then you aren't being taken advantage of any more than if you were supporting several departments in a single company.

If your hours have increased and your compensation hasn't, that's a problem.

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