a few years ago i worked in a shitty little retail shop that was owned by two brothers i never met that lived in another state (the company owned a chain of these stores across 2 or 3 states, there were maybe 4 or 5 total stores). we used this ipad in a stand to clock in and out. you had to take a picture of yourself every time, which i despised. i had been there for maybe 7 months or so when one day i decided to look at the app that was like the user version of the app from the ipad. it had a record of all of my in and out times… and a record of every time they had been edited.
and edited they had been. every single shift, one of the two owners was shaving off between 1 and 15 minutes from clock out time. i brought it up with my manager, who i got along really well with, and got him to look at his. same thing. my other coworker, same thing. i went home and made a spreadsheet containing every single time it had happened for as far back as the records went. it ended up being something like $400 worth of time they had taken from me.
the next day i got a call from that owner, and he explained to me that he felt like i was taking too long to close the store, that it shouldn’t take that long, and that he was sorry (sorry that he got caught!) and was going to add $200 to my next paycheck (half of what he stole), plus from now on all clock in and out times would be rounded to the nearest quarter hour, and asked me if that made it better.
i was in a pretty bad place at the time, financially and mentally, and for as terrible as that job was i did also kind of like it, and didn’t think i could find anything better, so i accepted the money and the apology and let it go.
anything like that ever happened to you? did you do anything cooler than roll over like i did?
For about a year I worked in theatre. During this time I had some acting work which I auditioned for, but most of my time working was with a single theatre group, where I did a little bit of everything (acting, set building, lighting, prop making, costuming, stage management) depending on the needs of the show we were putting on. They wanted us to work six days a week - but it was against the rules to work overtime. I’m sure you can see the problem. Basically, our entire clock was fraudulent - you would write on the time card that you worked a forty hour week, and then you’d continue working for an average of sixty hours per.
This was systemic wage theft and overtime violation, not a one off and not a cheeky scheme by management. Everybody who worked there knew what was up, and I remember the one time I made the mistake of calculating my actual hours against my pay and realized that I was making like $5 an hour. But here’s the thing: nobody could do anything about it, because (as the production manager once put it to me) for every person working in theatre there are five people who want their job. A reliable gig in that industry is one of the rarest jobs of them all, and pretty much everybody is forced to put up with it until you get lucky enough to get onto a major production with a union where the treatment is better (although it’s not that much better unless you really lucked out and got on Broadway or someplace equivalent).
Anyway, I was washing costumes past midnight unpaid and thinking about how I had to get up at six the next day when I decided that, while I liked theatre and I had been a “theatre kid” my whole life to that point, I didn’t like it enough to continue putting up with the bad conditions.
if ever there was a good time to organize, its when everyone there knows what’s happening. i can imagine it being really difficult to keep it on the down low and under management’s nose in an environment like that tho
i’m sorry you had to put up with that
Maybe if I had been further left at that time I would have said something to that effect to my coworkers, but based on my memory of them I’m pretty cynical about how that would have been received. Still, I cope by telling myself I learned a lot about myself and the world that year - and when I was packing my shit the production manager asked if I would stay on for a few more months, telling him “no” was one of the most satisfying moments of my life, fukken nepo baby ass.
