Boss Secretly Changed Employee's Clock Every Day — Causing An Hour's Pay Loss Every Week

Nov 23, 2021 by apost team

Each day you clock in for work, you most likely expect to get paid for the amount of hours you actually work. While some companies worry about their employees wasting time at work and getting paid for doing little to nothing, many employees have raised concerns over the years about their employers not paying them what they deserve.

An employee took to Reddit in October 2021 to voice some concerns they were having about their current timesheets and the pay they were receiving. They had previously been instructed to clock in a few minutes early to make sure that everything was set up and ready to go before the workday officially started. However, their boss had been changing the timesheets, so it didn't reflect this extra amount of time.

It was never communicated to the employee that this was going on behind the scenes. After finding out the truth and realizing that they were losing money every single day, totaling to about an hour's pay each week, the employee knew that they needed to do something. They were losing valuable time and money, and it was clear that their employer had no issues doing this to them.

This type of maneuvering can be described as wage theft. In order to take real action, the employee needed to prove that this was happening to them and show just how often it was happening. The worker went to Reddit in October 2021 to ask users for any tips they had about how to move forward and finally get the pay they deserved.

Losing Time And Money

Starting off their Reddit post in the r/antiwork forum, the original poster (OP) explained that they are losing about 15 minutes of pay every day that they work during the five-day workweek. By doing this, it appeared that their boss was committing a crime that can best be described as wage theft.

According to NBC News, wage theft can include paying less than legal minimum wage, not paying overtime, not allowing workers to take breaks, or requiring people to work off the clock. Some companies do this to help cut their costs and raise profits. Unfortunately, some labor researchers have found that it can be tricky to measure wage theft since so many people are worried about complaining to their bosses and potentially losing their jobs.

Continuing with their post, OP said, "When I trained for this job, they told us to clock in 10-15 minutes early to set up all of your software for the day. So I clock in at 6:45 every morning to get logged in and open all my programs (help desk)." However, it seemed like OP wasn't getting paid for this extra time.

"Well a few weeks ago I was checking in ADP on my timesheet and I noticed… my clock-in was getting adjusted to 7 a.m. every day," OP said. "So I started clocking in at 7 a.m. and then setting up my stuff because I'm not working for free." Unfortunately, the boss decided that OP still wasn't going to get paid for this extra time.

apost.com

Seeking Advice

The boss then pushed OP's clock-in time back again, making it look like they were signing in at 7:10 a.m. OP continued, "How should I address this? I'm losing over an hour of work every week for months now. That's cash down the drain…" Fortunately, Reddit users were there to help OP and gave them some much-needed advice. 

One user wrote, "Make sure you have the receipts. This is wage theft." Another agreed and said, "One thing I said that really scared management (because they don't care about me) is 'wage theft is tax evasion. By not paying me you're also not paying taxes on my work.' IDK how true that is, but it definitely got their attention."

Another user offered some useful tips and said: "It's possible there are other people affected by this at your workplace. This could open the way for a class action lawsuit. Law firms would likely be very interested if there are multiple class members. Given the costs of litigation, most labor law firms will not be willing to take on (a) case involving one person over the span of a few months." The user also encouraged OP to file a complaint with their state department of labor to get back the money they were owed.

Updating their original post, OP thanked Redditors for their help. "Reached out to a labor law firm to see what my options are and provided four pay periods worth of clock-ins that had been adjusted," they said. "Thanks for the support gang."

Have you ever had something like this happen to you at work? Let us know, and feel free to pass this along to your family, friends and co-workers, too.