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What is wage theft exactly?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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One of the most common versions I’ve seen is managers being able to “correct” employees punch in and punch out times. Useful if you forgot to clock in. However, often used to always chop off extra minutes accumulated from being there a few minutes early (“on time”) and staying a few minutes past your shift (until someone else can take over). But don’t you dare to be a few minutes late because you will get some points on your record and risk disciplinary actions.
I fucking hated retail jobs.
A variant of this is time clocks that round your clock in and out, but not just to the nearest 15 min: clock in is rounded forward, while clock out is rounded backwards.
So 9:01-4:59 would end up paying you for 9:15-4:45. 28min stolen. At 15$/hr thats over $1800 per year.
I've had this happen in a job. People would just aticipate it. They would be like "oh shit, it's 9:01. I'll be taking a shit first" or they'd smoke or drink coffee or whatever before clocking out. It was a mutual destruction kind of thing. You fuck me, i fuck you.
Got a manager fired when I told a couple people he was chopping off 5 minutes from each shift. Apparently I'm one of the few people who ever checks time sheets.
I convinced them to start filming themselves clocking in and out. Phones are permitted as long as you don't pull them out on the floor. Offices are a-OK. So the camera captures your number input and displays the time in/out in big pretty easily distinguishable numbers.
Called up the district manager, sent a single email with all the videos and after-payday time sheets, and within two hours the district manager was in the store (which means she was already nearby or she was hauling ass to try and do damage control)
The following five minutes can be summed up with the now-former manager being escorted out by two of the largest stock room guys on the clock and the DM escorting the manager out of the building, all the contents of his desk and computer being hastily stuffed in a box and mailed to a corporate office, the DM begging us not to sue the company, giving most of us the recorded promise of a 10% raise in addition to all backpay and a week of PTO "starting today"
Now to modern me, this all screams "you have a legitimate lawsuit that could blow up in our faces and balloon to other stores so we're trying to cover it up and get you away from other employees and keep you from talking about it" but nobody else seemed to care and i am not the man I am today. Potentially fighting a solo lawsuit against a multi-billion dollar corporation isn't exactly the same thing as going over your managers head to get them in trouble.
The replacement manager had no problem shittalking the previous, criminal one. Apparently his reasoning was "it's the time it takes to put on your uniform which is unpaid because it's unproductive" which.... Yikes. Luckily corporate didn't agree, at least at the time.
For the record, everyone came in dress code. "putting on the uniform" required putting your lanyard badge on.
15 seconds if you're taking your time.
Last I checked, by law you are supposed to receive pay for any actions taken on site that are directly work related. Which includes getting into uniform. So that dude's reasoning was bunk anyway.
Yes, that would be the entire reason the whole thing happened.
I am also aware of a manager at my job who got fired for playing those games. Fired and security-escorted out.
Knowing the department director and how she felt about the employees, she was probably enraged when she found out what the manager under her was doing.
Here it's very difficult to fire an employee after the probationary period, but managers are relatively easy to fire. There's a three strikes rule for managers. Whenever a PIA manager starts being extra nice to everyone, you know they just got reported to HR for a second time.
Screwing with time cards in the U.S. is extra double bad because of federal law.
If the employee can prove the manager has done it, they've proven that their employer is both guilty of wage theft, and also that they've destroyed the records showing how much time you actually worked. So usually the employees get to say how much they are owed, and the employer has no way to argue against it.
If I recall correctly, if it was an honest mistake, the employer has to pay back two times what was owed. If it was intentional, then they have to pay back three times what was owed.
There aren't many worker protections in the U.S., but that particular set of laws is ok. Of course, there could be additional protections in state or local laws.
Edit: clarification and typo.
Retail truly is hell. A previous employer chopped off our time after closing, regardless of how much time it took to close the place. In the two years and some I spent there, including 9 months full time, they must have saved hundreds of hours in unpaid wages just in the 3 stores I worked at. That was a major chain, mind you. It’s a good example of wage theft for OP, actually lol
Rest assured that when I was closing at 9PM by myself, by 9:01 I had signed off on the day’s deposit, and by 9:02 I was out of there…
Report them to the Department of Labor. Give as much info as you can and they will follow up in the investigation and litigation.
If all goes well, you don't have to do much and when the investigation and litigation is done you'll get paid out.
Oh, after they moved me from store to store then fired me, I did. I’m in Quebec, Canada, so it’s through the CNESST. They’re all too happy to take cases against this specific employer. Still, after 2 years of back and forth and a depresssion later, I resorted to an undisclosed settlement.
Even if the institutions exist to go after a previous employer, it’s also not always doable. And you gain a big resume gap unless you want to keep talking about that ex-employer you sued…
God that pissed me right off. When I first started working in my first 'proper' job (fast food) I always liked to be 5 minutes early and not head to clock out until after my shift finished. We could clock in or out up to 5 minutes before or after our scheduled start/finish times.
One day I clocked in 2 minutes early and out a whole 3 minutes after I was meant to. then that night I got a notification my shift start and end times had been adjusted. Apparently that day the big manager was reviewing all clock times and decided the 5 minutes of overtime was too much. It's not like I wasn't working or anything either, I started serving people as soon as I'd clocked on and I was only clocking out late because I was busy making people's food (because for some funny reason you can't just up and leave in the middle of assembling a burger)
From then on I wouldn't walk in until 1 minute before my shift was due to start and would stop working 5 minutes before my shift was due to finish to walk to the break room, grab my bag and leisurely stroll around to say goodbye to everyone before clicking out the exact minute I was due to finish, because fuck you. What kind of stinge bag removes 5 minutes of overtime? What kind of stinge bag even tracks 5 minutes of overtime??
They should track 5 minutes of overtime, because you worked it and God dammit you should be paid for it.