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?
Small business stores are so bad for this shit, I’ve worked at two different ones, and have been wage thefted both times. Also, both hired me to do technical jobs (maintaining websites, hardware in store, etc.) and then just decided “nevermind we need more cashiers and floor sweepers etc. so you have to be that now”
One of the stores was so bad on wage theft that he’d often “forget” to pay people or “put the wage rate in wrong” on fuckin’ zendesk zenefits which is an automated system THAT HE HIRED ME TO SET UP AND MAINTAIN AND THEN LOCKED ME OUT OF so he literally had to be doing it manually and deliberately and covered his ass in the dumbest possible way. I talked to other employees about this, and literally nobody cared and everyone instantly rolled on it so I just quit after a couple months of trying to get people to organize.
yeah, although i’m not convinced that large corporations are all that much more innocent of this.
the changing of roles/expectations from what you were hired on to do it always a huge red flag. i learned that one when i got hired to do a very specific computer/digital media job at one place and they told me I might “occasionally need to scrub the toilets”
Worked a retail job in high school where they completely flipped on me and all of a sudden all cleaning of the entire store was my job and mine alone. Hired as a cashier and was still expected to do cashiering in addition to all cleanup. Nobody else was expected to clean. I called the Labour Program so fast when they tried to get me to do Hazmat cleanup for minimum wage.
Large corporations do it via much more impersonal nickel and diming. Like they’ll ensure that employee unpaid breaks are 30 minutes long, but the employee is expected to be back at their desk after 25 or else they’ll be considered to be taking an hour long break and lose pay accordingly. Sometimes it can be as simple as just not giving employees increasing wages to keep up with inflation or lowballing people when they first start working there, promising raises that never manifest so you have employees working at an entry level wage 5 years after they started working there. very rare for it to actually be illegal in most of the west, they make sure it is all “above board”
literally nobody cared and everyone instantly rolled on it so I just quit after a couple months of trying to get people to organize.
This has been my experience with every unjust working situation I’ve been part of.
What does anyone ever do about this? How do you convince people to care when it’s not safe to care?
The junction between “not safe to care” and “safe to not care” makes a lot of retail/customer service jobs difficult to organize. Children that are working there literally could not possibly give a fuck about anything that happens to them or anyone else. Adults who work there are in extreme precarity and fear for their income severely.
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.
Amazon delivery driver here. It seems pretty common for people to do prep work before they let you clock in. The guy who I did my ride-along with skipped his 15 minute breaks.
When I worked at an Amazon warehouse it was expected to already have items pulled up to your station by the time a break was up, which required logging back in and sometimes waiting a few minutes for a robot to cross the floor. There were a lot of people who would just lay on the floor next to their work station so that they didn’t spend several minutes walking back and forth from the break areas.
A criminally underpaid friend of mine had this happen (has an advanced med-adjacent degree, works in a lab, practically runsthe place but still makes like two steps above poverty wages).
iirc it was a coworker, not even the owner, and she was editing their times just enough so that they never got paid for the multiple hours of overtime they were doing each week. They did report it up the chain and got all of it paid back, but she wasn’t even fired… They should have quit after that but they still haven’t
yuck. imagine thinking your coworker doesn’t deserve their overtime pay and that it is just of you to take it from them, to no benefit of your own.
my mom didn’t get paid for two months one time. she needed her boss to write some special recommendation or sign off thingy for cooking school (the job was at a local cafe) and didn’t want to anger her boss by raising the issue. also didn’t get a lunch break either. sometimes she’ll recall that and go “man that was pretty fucked up huh” and i’m like uhh YEAH
