Wife’s Former Job Refusing To Pay For Over 50 Days Now Due To “poor Performance” (texas)

Location: Texas, Southeast region near Houston.

My wife worked for a marketing agency job a few months ago. It is technically a contract employment job but they tracked hours like a standard W2 employee job. They hired her, put her to work for a week, and then let her go because they claimed they didn’t have the time and resources to train a new employee. She worked her butt off for that week, to the point we postponed our 1 year anniversary plans so she could meet an impossible amount of deadlines it took her until 2am to complete. In the phone call my wife got from her ex-boss, she told my wife while on speaker that they had her hours logged and would get her paid for the work she did.

Fast forward to today, after a few email exchanges the ex-boss is refusing to pay her for the week of work she did because she claims the amount of hours it took her to complete the tasks she was assigned was unreasonable and she shouldn’t be compensated for poor performance.

To add onto it, she has further indicated that she will not communicate via email or phone call anymore and will only entertain any further conversation by meeting in person. We are hesitant to agree to meet in person because we’re concerned this is a strategy being used to eliminate any more paper trails being made on their end of the situation.

What should we do? We have contacted the Texas workforce department and they are reviewing a claim we put in, but they said it could be months until we hear back from them about our claim. We’ve also applied for legal aid and were denied.