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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Lawsuits Say Wal-Mart Forces Workers to Toil Off the Clock |
Current rating: 0 |
by New York Times
(No verified email address) |
25 Jun 2002
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Class-action lawsuits charge Wal-Mart with routinely forcing workers to do unpaid work. |
By Stephen Greenhouse
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — After finishing her 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift, Verette Richardson clocked out and was heading to her car when a Wal-Mart manager ordered her to turn around and straighten up the store's apparel department.
Eager not to get on her boss's bad side, she said, she spent the next hour working unpaid, tidying racks of slacks and blouses and picking up hangers and clothes that had fallen to the floor. Other times after clocking out, she was ordered to round up shopping carts in the parking lot.
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Some days, as soon as she walked in a manager told her to rush to a cash register and start ringing up purchases, without clocking in. Sometimes, she said, she worked for three hours before clocking in.
"They wanted us to do a lot of work for no pay," said Ms. Richardson, who worked from 1995 to 2000 at a Wal-Mart in southeast Kansas City. "A company that makes billions of dollars doesn't have to do that."
But she and 40 other current and former Wal-Mart workers interviewed over the last four months say Wal-Mart has done just that, forcing or pressuring employees to work hours that were not recorded or paid. Federal and state laws bar employers from making hourly employees work unpaid hours. Wal-Mart's policies forbid such work. But many current and former workers and managers said an intense focus on cost cutting had created an unofficial policy that encouraged managers to request or require off-the-clock work and avoid paying overtime.
Accusations like these are at the heart of a wide-ranging legal battle between Wal-Mart and employees or former employees in 28 states. In class-action and individual lawsuits, workers assert that these practices have helped Wal-Mart undersell the competition, push up profits and become the world's largest retailer.
In the process, these lawsuits contend, the company has cheated Wal-Mart employees and workers at its warehouse-store division, Sam's Club, out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Wal-Mart officials insist that the off-the-clock phenomenon is minimal considering that the company has 3,250 stores and a million employees in the United States. The officials say the company, based in Bentonville, Ark., has a strong policy against such work, a policy that is spelled out in the handbook distributed to every employee.
"Off-the-clock work is an infrequent and isolated problem, which we correct whenever we become aware of it," said William Wertz, a Wal-Mart spokesman. "It is Wal-Mart's policy to pay its employees properly for the hours they work."
Mr. Wertz said managers who required or requested off-the-clock work were subject to disciplinary action, including dismissal.
Two years ago, Wal-Mart paid $50 million to settle a class-action suit that asserted that 69,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees in Colorado had worked off the clock.
But legal papers and interviews with workers suggest that the off-the-clock problems go far beyond Colorado. In depositions and in interviews with The New York Times, Wal-Mart employees in 18 states described these types of off-the-clock work:
¶Former employees at stores in California, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Washington said that many evenings when their stores closed, managers locked the front door and prevented workers — even those who had clocked out — from leaving until everyone finished straightening the store. Workers said these lock-ins, which aim to prevent theft, forced many employees to work an hour or two unpaid and enraged parents whose school-age children worked at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart officials acknowledged that employees were sometimes locked in but said the policy was to pay workers for every hour they were.
¶Employees at stores in six states said managers ordered them to clock out after their eight-hour shifts and then continue working.
"We worked off the clock pretty much every shift," said Shannon Snyder, who worked two years ago stocking the health and beauty aids department at a Wal-Mart in Paso Robles, Calif. "The manager said if our jobs were not finished, we had to clock out and finish our jobs so no overtime would show up."
¶Some employees said they frequently took it upon themselves to clock out after their regular shift and then return to work, with their managers' knowledge and approval. They said they feared that if they did not finish their daily tasks before going home, they would be written up or fired.
"You have to accomplish your job for that day," said Charlotte Johnson, who worked at Wal-Marts and Sam's Clubs in Georgia, Oklahoma and California for a decade before retiring this year. "If you don't finish it, you're more or less in hot water with your manager."
¶A dozen Wal-Mart workers, including four in the payroll department, said managers deleted hours from employee timecards to avoid paying overtime. Wal-Mart officials said the company strictly forbade this practice and disciplined managers who did it.
Several current Wal-Mart employees said that despite the lawsuits, the problems continue. Alan Peto, who works at a Sam's Club in Las Vegas, said he worked off the clock several times each week while overseeing the electronics and hardware departments several years ago.
"They give you a lot of work to do, and there is no possible way to do that in the seven and a half or eight hours you've been assigned," he said. "So you feel pressure to clock out and do what you need to do."
... [for the whole story follow the link to the original article] |
See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/25/national/25WALM.html
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oops |
by JF
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
25 Jun 2002
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note: "Advertisement" (3rd paragraph) is not part of the original text -- it resulted from clipping the text out of a web page. |
