"Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits" is the headline to a front-page story in the Sunday NY Times that I found shocking. It details how managers alter worker' time records at a number of chain stores across the country. According to the story, managers do it because they are pressured to save money and increase the bottom-line, or to allow off-the-clock work. Some quotes:
Rosann Wilks, who was an assistant manager at a Pep Boys in Nashville, said she was fired in 2001 after refusing to delete time. She said her district manager told her, "Under no circumstances at all is overtime allowed, and if so, then you need to shave time." At first, she bowed to orders and erased hours. Some employees began asking questions, she said, but they refused to confront management. "They took it lying down," she said. "They didn't want to lose their job. Jobs are hard to find." When she started feeling guilty and confronted her district manager, she said, "It all came to a boil. He fired me."The practices at a large number of companies are detailed. These quote particularly caught my eye:Bill Furtkevic, Pep Boys' spokesman, said his company did not tolerate deleting time.
In the punch-card era, managers would have had to conspire with payroll clerks or accountants to manipulate records. But now it is far easier for individual managers to accomplish this secretly with computers, payroll experts say.This brings up interesting parallels to the computer-voting issues we've written about elsewhere. Posted by Marcia Oddi at April 4, 2004 09:55 AMMr. Pooters, a father of five who left the Air Force in 1997 for a career in retailing, talks with disgust about photocopied Toys "R" Us records that he said showed how his manager made it appear that he had clocked out much earlier than he had.
"Unless you keep track of your time and keep records of when you punch in and punch out, there's no way to stop this," he said. * * *
Employees at Wal-Mart and other companies complain that they receive no paper time records, making it hard to challenge management when their paychecks are inexplicably low.
Ms. 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.