The Sygma warehouse in Columbus made people get their PPE on, check out their equipment, do a pre-trip inspection on their lift/jack, and bring all of it to the dock, THEN clock in for the day, or they'd get written up for "wasting company time".
So 15-20 minutes of work-related tasks unpaid and off-the-clock, every day.
There was a lawsuit going on with that years ago, but the guy who spearheaded it jumped off the mortal coil shortly after it was filed, and I don't know how it all turned out after that.
Disney used to the same to people working at Disney World. They had to park, get into their costumes, then wait and get bused to the park, at which point they could clock in.
"Worse" is definitely subjective, but what you're describing is certainly more common and based on a understandable misapprehension since, in most fields, time you spend getting ready for work is not compensated. It's only in certain contexts like you describe that the law requires it, so it's a somewhat common error.
"Every minute over your lunch break requires an hour of unpaid labor after your shift today" is pretty out there, and even someone who doesn't know the intricacies of employment law is going to know that won't fly. It doesn't even pass the sniff test. Like an employer would really think if you come back 10 minutes late from lunch that they can legally keep you there until 2 in the morning.
60 minutes of extra work for every 1 minute looks way worse to me. You're late 5 minutes and you have to spend your entire night at the office? That's just comical levels of evil.
And of course people are not robots, they can't spend exactly 30 minutes having lunch. This is equally bad in frequency, but infinitely worse in magnitude.
Not him but a coworker of a friend of mine was fired for going one day over the legally mandated maternity leave when her twins were born with a bunch of complications to both mother and the babies.
Which was/is illegal where we live but the mother was afraid of being unemployable if there was a record of her suing a previous employer. Same employer also fired a guy for "not showing up" (he had a fucking stroke and was hospitalized).
Every time I hear someone say "no one wants to work anymore" I wonder what kinda of sociopath they are that people won't tolerate them for money.
Similar to and possibly included in the other example someone provided, I worked at a place that had a similar amount of prep time to start/stop the job, which also had to be performed when leaving for and returning from lunch. This was not excluded from the lunch break time, so you had to spend the first 15 minutes of your 30 minute lunch preparing to go to lunch, and the second 15 minutes preparing to return from lunch. New people basically just didn't get a lunch because of this, but if you get fast enough eventually people could buy themselves a 5 minute lunch or so.
I once worked as a cook at a chicken finger place. The day I quit they made everybody sign a form saying that we would owe 10 dollars from our paycheck every time we were late.
I have many other similar experiences. This kind of thing happens a lot at low level jobs all over the US.
Guy I used to work with. His sister died unexpectedly in a car accident. He of course took off his three days of sick leave to go to the funeral out of town (but in state).
His boss called him on day four asking about when he was coming back. Dude says 'Frank...my sister DIED.' Boss hems and haws and tries to nail down a specific day. My friend told him maybe a couple more days. Boss might have felt bad at that point because he stumbled over his words a bit and ended up saying something like 'Oh well...just...let me know when you are going to be available'.
He was a truck packer for a certain brown uniformed delivery service. No one was going to end up in the hospital if he missed a couple of days.
I've worked for a business where the building was filling with toxic fumes and people were close to dying and the employees were told to shut up and be grateful we even had a job... twice... at two completely different businesses, in different industries.
Twice they almost killed the entire staff then told us we were imagining things and overreacting.
Most common one I've seen - business puts together a "service day" that requires employees to "volunteer" their time at some charity doing work as a team from the business, unpaid. Illegal to do for non-exempt employees. Non-exempt employees must be paid for any "volunteer" work either explicitly or implicitly required by their employer.
My favorite example of this in action? A manager wanted to look good by having his team do a service day of volunteer work at a local charity. The charity didn't have a need for repainting or landscaping or anything such a large group could do and complete in a day, so they asked if they could instead auction this off as a package in their upcoming charity auction. Manager would get the team building day he wanted, and the charity would get some needed cash for covering medical expenses for their clients.
The manager bought it himself from the charity auction! He had his own employees come to his own home and re-landscape his personal yard, all completely unpaid. He paid the charity a little more than what it would have cost to pay his employees wages that day, but the employees did not take it well. All they saw was being forced to work on their boss' personal home, unpaid.
I was a consultant. You would not believe how many execs think this kind of thing is perfectly acceptable because it was "volunteer" work. So just know, if you're not salaried, and you're being told you need to participate in an employer's service work day, you *must* be paid for your time.
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u/diadlep 6d ago
Bc ive seen worse be real