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?
Yes, to the tune of about $2000 at one job that I could calculate. I was manually filling out time sheets at a part time office job, and submitting them to accounts at the end of each week. They paid me on time and fully for two months, but after that I was only paid for about three weeks of every four. I raised it with the finance guy in my fourth month there and he was apologetic and said he could backpay. i gave it another month and he then basically said stiff bikkies, we've lost your time sheets you should have kept accurate record yourself.
Cos I was part time, people weren't super open with me but after long enough I worked out everyone there was underpaid, and the lead sales guy was super aggro and would harass others into not raising it with finance because he'd been there the longest and wanted to make sure he was paid first. Very crabs in a bucket mentality. I sucked it up unfortunately cos it was my first proper 'desk job' and I wanted good references.
Towards the end of my time I also had to take regular phonecalls from contractors and run defence when the company couldn't [wouldn't] pay invoices on time. One contractor threatened to come to our offices and wait in the carpark for me to come out. I'd already made up my mind to leave, but I quit the week after that.
Have been time thefted in a later job which was basically not honouring overtime, was doing regular unrecompensated OT.
what a total lack of class consciousness does to an mf
the part about being physically threatened by an unpaid contractor is really scary tho, i'm glad you got out of there
I ain't even mad, like, I was in the exact same position as him. It's a shame the boss had a secure car park otherwise I'd have said sure dude, show up at four I'm the old bloke with the beemer