By Harry Sutton

In the winter of 1937, autoworkers locked themselves inside a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. Outside, police and company guards waited. In the plant,, workers slept beside the assembly lines they refused to run. 44 days later, one of the largest corporations in the world recognized their right to a union. Then and now, workers rights and bargaining power have been essential tools in the fight against exploitation. In all industries, workers must be aware of their rights to stand up against abuse from those in power. 

While states like Michigan pride themselves on famous labor victories, it’s not the same in Texas. As a right-to-work state, there are fewer safeguards against such abuses. When musician Mohammed Numan, who records under the name moseph, signed a contract to work at Vivaldi Music Academy — one of the largest music schools in the state — last August, he was thrilled to get to share his musical knowledge with a younger generation of creatives. He had been recommended the job by some friends, and he was told he’d be paid $50/hour. Mo shared his subsequent experience at the company over a call this past February. 

Initially, the job seemed legitimate. He had clients, got along well with his coworkers, and enjoyed the work environment. But by the time his first paycheck was due, Mo had already begun to notice red flags. When he didn’t receive his wages, Vivaldi’s secretary, Misty Munoz, told Mo that there was a typo in his name in their filing. When Mo cited the Texas Payday Law, Munoz sent him his money without a message. 

His second paycheck never arrived. When he messaged Munoz, she told Mo that he wasn’t protected under payday law. Bemused, Mo did further research on the law and discovered that she was right — contractor workers are not protected the way W2 workers are. 

Mo then decided to ask around to see if any of his coworkers had experienced the same issues with Vivaldi. It took him practically no time to unearth that they had. In fact, there was already a strong sentiment of frustration amongst employees when it came to Vivaldi’s failure to compensate workers on time. Someone had even started a shitpost meme account on Instagram dedicated to calling out Vivaldi’s higher-ups, namely the owner Zeljko Pavlovic. 

One coworker claimed they had just received their April paycheck that week; it was September. Another said they hadn’t been paid since June. One teacher claimed she was owed approximately $30,000 in unpaid wages. 

Many of these unpaid teachers were immigrants who feared speaking out due to their need for the job, and a clause Vivaldi had included in each contract called a “liquidated damages clause.” The clause is intended to protect business owners who invest in individual workers, but couldn’t practically be applied to the operation at Vivaldi. Mo says Vivaldi used the clause to threaten its teachers to continue to do unpaid work. 

Mo also said that the business’ founder, Zeljko Pavlovic, would look for a specific kind of potential hire he called “PHDs.” Except he wasn’t looking for employees with degrees, Pavlovic allegedly coined his own acronym, searching for workers who were “Poor, Hungry, and Desperate.” 

“You’re hiring young kids that don’t know any better. You’re hiring immigrants who need a job and a lot of those people are getting W2s because you need a job to have a green card. And that incentivizes them to not speak… I think the music school was hiring people that they thought were ‘marks,’ for a lack of a better term,” Mo said.

In Texas, stories like Mo’s aren’t anomalies. Investigations into the state’s construction industry have uncovered widespread wage theft, with employers exploiting independent contractor classifications to avoid paying workers altogether. With all of the power in Pavlovic’s hands, Mo knew it would be nearly impossible to get the school to actually pay its employees fairly. 

Shortly after learning of his coworkers’ experiences, Mo started encouraging them to strike, explaining that the liquidated damages clause could not be applied because Vivaldi didn’t individually invest into any one of its employees, but rather the school’s facilities. Texas law states that employers must pay out within 30 days of the agreed-upon paydate, a deadline that Vivaldi had consistently missed. 

Mo started the strike in September 2025. He reached out to past and present Vivaldi employees on Instagram and discovered a large WhatsApp group chat of unpaid teachers. The strike quickly gained momentum, with teachers across all of Vivaldi’s locations calling out of work, forcing the academy to contact former employees to cover shifts. 

When rumors of Vivaldi’s wage theft first circled around the media last year, the company blamed the situation on an internal error in their payment system. On September 21st, 2025, Vivaldi sent Mo a cease and desist letter, accusing him of breaching confidentiality and interfering with business operations by encouraging teachers not to report to work. Instead of scaring him off, the cease and desist only hardened Mo’s resolve to expose the academy, “I went into vengeance mode,” he told me. The letter also threatened to pursue the liquidated damages clause against Mo. 

On October 16th, Vivaldi Music Academy abruptly shuttered its doors. Only a few weeks after Mo had started rallying his coworkers to stand up against their employers’ mistreatment, the school was closed permanently. This left dozens of teachers out of a job, with months of unpaid wages left to be fought over in court. 

Further research revealed that Pavlovic, who had been Vivaldi’s CEO for 12 years, has a history of financial misconduct, with multiple publicly available civil lawsuits, including a $2.6 million lawsuit for defaulting on a loan last year, and a bankruptcy filing in 2019. According to Mo, Pavlovic had been “burning through LLCs” since he joined Vivaldi in 2013. 

Pavlovic then attempted to start a new tech company called Brava, using assets from Vivaldi. Mo reached out to one of Brava’s employees who gave him information on the new company, such as a company policy explicitly instructing employees not to mention Vivaldi. Mo then used this information in his Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) wage claim and civil lawsuit, alleging money laundering and the use of unpaid wages to fund Pavlovic’s new ventures.

The TWC investigation determined that Vivaldi owed thousands in unpaid wages to the dozens of teachers on the payroll, and found that Vivaldi had illegally treated 1099 contractors as W2 employees. The TWC issued a notice of delinquency/freeze and notice of levy, freezing Vivaldi’s accounts until they paid the outstanding wages. This action also extended to Brava, as Munoz had paid Vivaldi employees using Brava’s accounts. In the months following the closure of Vivaldi, Pavlovic and Munoz have posted online about a new venture, Arvo, an AI operating system designed to assist performing arts school operations. 

Mo also has reason to believe that Pavlovic and Munoz are also involved in Gramercy Music Academy, a school that launched out of the same location as Vivaldi shortly after the former was shut down. When a former employee of Vivaldi called Gramercy to ask some questions, the employee on the other end of the call acknowledged the “unfortunate” situation with Vivaldi and said “It was bad for a lot of people, but we were given a second chance.”

The strike was successful: the court of law ruled that Mo and his coworkers should receive their wages. The school and its higher-ups were held legally accountable, and their unlawful business practices had been exposed, but it wasn’t quite a storybook ending. Despite the court ruling in their favor, Mo and most of the school’s former employees still haven’t been paid by Vivaldi due to various legal and bureaucratic holdups. 

For Mo, the fallout from the strike was strenuous. After the school closed, he went into “survival mode,” as he put it, with no job, no car, and an unstable living situation. He says that situation gave him the determination to share the story of his and his coworkers’ mistreatment. “I literally had nothing to lose,” he said.

But things have turned around for Mo in the months since. After nearly taking a job at another music academy, he started to focus on his project with moseph. He’s toured around the state of Texas with NC rapper-producer redveil, played a sold-out Houston show with indie duo Orca, started working on music with NYC rapper Perry Maysun, and dropped two singles from an upcoming project. One can’t help but admire the resolve of a working artist fighting for a living wage in an era of rampant corruption, exploitation, and systemic inequality. Mo’s story is an example of the power of organizing, striking, and unionizing, and the hostile labor environment in the United States. The music industry is clearly no exception.

You can support Mo and his art by streaming or buying his music, and following him online.