Minimum wage workers lose $15 billion annually to time theft by employers

By getting people to work on breaks and lunch hours minimum wage workers alone collectively lose 15 billion dollars a year which amounts to wage theft.

So I was listening to this podcast by the Planet Money team on NPR a few days ago all about this nurse who did the math on the amount of time she was losing to time theft by her employers. It turned out that she was losing about 90 minutes a week of her break and lunch time because of a survey that her patients take which asked how quickly they were responded to when they rang their buzzer for assistance, and it would be trouble for the nurses that did not answer in a timely fashion. Now the nurses were also given surveys that asked if they took their full breaks and lunches and if they answered that they did not take this time in full they would get in trouble for that as well. It turns out that 90 minutes ended up equalling a loss of about $2600/year for her. When this article came out she was suing her employer.

About a day later I saw this post by @mattbbpl showing that the SCOTUS recently made it easier for employers to commit wage theft by making it prohibitively expensive to fight in court. I've been meaning to make this thread for a couple of days now since I saw what the SCOTUS did which probably has ruined this woman's lawsuit.

Link to the story (only nine minutes)

Link to the Transcript

The laws pretty simple on this. When I was a manager, it was black and white. But I get how companies or uneducated (on the matter) managers might abuse it.

Yup, definetly being abused. The thing is, at least in this nurse's case, to fix the issue the hospital would have to hire more employees which is bad for their bottom line, but in my view good for the country's bottom line.

Next time someone tells you minimum wage workers deserve to earn less because they don't add value to the company just quote them that number, 15 billion annually.

Yeah really lol.

I think people underestimate how common this is.

When I was a landscaper in college I never got my last paycheck. After calling up the owner he said, "Tough," I filed a complaint, and never got a response.

My wife had a national company force them to work through lunches. She didn't mind much until they they started docking her time by an hour a day to make it look like they were allowing lunches. She won a class action lawsuit for that one.

A buddy of mine installs car audio systems, and his company doesn't pay him for hours he spends working on systems that are under warranty. I told him he's being taken advantage of, but he doesn't want to risk losing his job.

Another buddy of mine is a salaried engineer. He's often required to work overtime which is fine, that's part of being salaried. What's not fine is that during slow periods the company docks his salary in half and sends him home. I told him that's not legal as well, but he doesn't want to risk losing his job.

This kind of thing happens all the time.

@mattbbpl: At my work, people work through breaks all the time. It wouldn't bother me so much, except that the company makes the biggest deals out of the smallest things. Like getting your coat before you punch out, which literally takes 30 seconds, but saves employees from having to walk to the other end of the store and back again. They probably get a solid hour each day from employees missing breaks, but they throw a fit over the collective two minutes they lose from this. It's the typical attitude employers nowadays have towards their employees: our time is important, yours isn't.

Easiest to abuse...