"Caution: Weasels at Work" is about the old but newly discovered corporate theft device, known as time-shaving. "Shaving time" is when a corporate manager sneaks into the records and deletes some of the hours worked by each of his/her employees. That's right: time-shaving is the corporate policy--unwritten, of course, it's always passed on verbally to managers--of cheating its employees of money they have earned.
As a former member of the Air Force military police, as a play-by-the-rules guy, Drew Pooters said he was stunned by what he found his manager doing in the Toys "R" Us store in Albuquerque, N.M.
Inside a cramped office, he said, his manager was sitting at a computer and altering workers' time records -- secretly deleting hours to cut their paychecks and fatten his store's bottom line.
"I told him, 'That's not exactly legal,'" said Pooters, who ran the store's electronics department. "Then he out and out threatened me not to talk about what I saw."
Pooters quit, landing a job in 2002 managing a Family Dollar store, one of 5,100 in that discount chain. Top managers there ordered him not to let employees' total hours exceed a certain amount each week, and one day, he said, his district manager told him to use a trick to cut payroll: delete some employee hours electronically.
"I told her, 'I'm not going to get involved in this,'" Pooters recalled, saying that when he refused, the district manager erased the hours herself.
Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect -- a simple matter of computer keystrokes -- and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.
Workers have sued Family Dollar and Pep Boys, the auto parts and repair chain, accusing managers of de-leting hours. A jury found that Taco Bell managers in Oregon had routinely erased workers' time. More than a dozen former Wal-Mart employees said in interviews and depositions that managers had altered time records to shortchange employees. The Department of Labor recently reached two back-pay settlements with Kinko's, totaling $56,600, after finding that managers in Ithaca, N.Y., and Hyannis, Mass., had erased time for 13 employees.
Officials at Toys "R" Us, Family Dollar, Pep Boys, Wal-Mart and Taco Bell say they prohibit manipulation of time records, but many acknowledge that it sometimes happens.
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Danner said her employees could not do all the unloading, stocking, cashier work and pricing of merchandise in the hours allotted. "The message from the district manager was, basically, 'I don't care how you do it, just get it done,'" she said.
So she altered clock-out times and inserted half-hour lunch breaks even when employees had worked through them. "I felt horrible that I was doing this," she said. "I felt pressured, absolutely. If I refused, I would have been terminated easily."
After five months, she quit.
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Danner, the former Family Dollar manager, praised the system at the McDonald's restaurant she managed for seven years. At day's end, she said, employees received a printout detailing total hours worked and when they clocked in and out.
"We never had any problems like this at McDonald's," she said.
So managers are stealing money from employees who make $8/hr to make sure they get a bonus that may be more than that worker's entire salary. And if a few kids have to go without food or a doctor when they're sick, that's less important than that the manager rake in his extra $15G's every year.
But it's hard to blame the managers, after all. The multi-millionaire owners and CEO's of these companies have them in a stanglehold. If you're only getting $30K/yr and a third of it--or more--is contingent on its being stolen from other people a little at a time, you may very well feel you don't have any choice unless you're willing to join your employees in starving to death. America, you may have your high productivity but there's a catch: You have to steal it.
In BushCo America, even morally contemptible and savagely unethical practices are apparently acceptable in the name of increased profits and personal enrichment. Elaine Chow's Labor Dept has investigated not one of these cases. Wal-Mart can lock its janitors in at night and demand that their workers put in hours for NO pay at all without any fear whatsoever of govt reprisals--this is a Federal law, like the 40-hr work-week (also routinely ignored) and time-and-a-half, and part of the job of the Labor Dept is enforcing Federal labor laws. But enforcement, when it comes, comes from the legal system--the corporations are so far up the BA's ass they can smell Elaine Chow's toast burning. They are making it necessary to sue them just to get paid, and the Labor Dept, golly whiz, doesn't know a thing about it. I bet they're shocked, shocked to discover that such things happen.
