Employee asked for payday advances then sued to keep the money

None of it came out of his final paycheck. 

The worker sued anyway. Oregon’s wage protection law – ORS 652.610(3) – only allows payroll deductions when they are voluntarily authorized in writing, recorded in the employer’s books, and made “for the employee’s benefit.” His argument: repaying a debt to the employer is not a benefit to the employee. 

He pointed to a 1999 Oregon Supreme Court case, Taylor v. Werner Enterprises, where an employer had withheld wages as a bond to cover potential damage to its own equipment. The court in that case held the deductions were unlawful because the employee got nothing out of them. 

But this was a different story. 

Here, the worker had asked for the money. He was not entitled to it under his employment agreement. The employer had no obligation to hand it over. The advances gave him cash before he had earned it, and he would not have received those funds without agreeing to the repayment terms.