Some people hate their bosses and some people love them. Perhaps your boss is a petty tyrant who inspires loathing beyond comprehension. Or maybe your boss is a kindhearted family friend who hired you as a favor and happens to be a damn good grillmaster. It could be that your boss is just someone with whom you have minimal interactions at work and who occupies zero brain space when you get home at night.

Whichever of those situations most resembles yours, though, you’d almost certainly be livid if your boss asked you to spend two weeks doing your job for free. And that’s the situation workers at the Long Beach Post were put in at the end of last year.

The Post was acquired in 2018 by Molina Healthcare scion John Molina. He offloaded the property last year, after which it was restructured as a nonprofit. During the restructuring process in November, Executive Editor Melissa Evans told the Post’s fourteen journalists and other employees that they’d be expected to come in for two weeks to continue to do their jobs on a “volunteer” basis until that nonprofit structure was up and running.