Off-the-Clock Work
If your employer failed to pay you for all the hours you worked, you may be the victim of wage theft in Florida. Wage theft can include unpaid overtime, unpaid minimum wages, stolen tips, illegal tip pooling, off-the-clock work, time shaving, improper meal-break deductions, and misclassification of employees as independent contractors or exempt salaried employees. A Florida wage theft lawyer can evaluate your pay records, hours worked, and job duties to determine whether your employer violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or Florida wage-and-hour laws and whether you may be entitled to recover unpaid wages, overtime compensation, liquidated damages, and attorneys’ fees. If you worked for your wages, you deserve to be paid for your work.
Florida Time Wage Theft Lawyer: When Your Employer Shaves Minutes From Your Pay
Most employees understand wage theft when it is obvious. You work 40 hours, your employer pays you for only 35, and you immediately know something is wrong. But some of the most effective forms of wage theft are much harder to detect. Instead of taking several hours from an employee’s paycheck at once, an employer may take only a few minutes at a time.
Five minutes here. Seven minutes there. Ten minutes before a shift. A few minutes after clocking out. An automatic deduction for a lunch break that the employee never actually received.
Individually, these deductions may appear insignificant. Over weeks, months, or years, however, those missing minutes can add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars in unpaid wages and overtime compensation.
This practice is sometimes called time shaving, time clock manipulation, or time wage theft. When an employer knowingly fails to compensate employees for all of the time they actually worked, the employer may be violating the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and other applicable wage-and-hour laws.
The “Salami Slicing” Approach to Wage Theft
One way to understand time shaving is through the concept sometimes called “salami slicing.”
Imagine a person slicing an extremely thin piece from a salami. One slice is so small that nobody pays much attention to it. Take another tiny slice tomorrow and it still may not be noticeable. Continue taking tiny slices every day, however, and eventually a substantial portion of the salami is gone.
Time wage theft can operate the same way.
Instead of refusing to pay an employee for an entire eight-hour shift—which would immediately be noticed—an employer may shave just five or ten minutes from an employee’s compensable time each day.
Suppose an employee loses only 10 minutes of compensable work time per shift, five days per week. That is 50 minutes per week. Over 50 working weeks, the employee has lost more than 41 hours of compensation.
Now multiply that practice across 20, 50, or 100 employees.
What appears to be an insignificant adjustment to a single employee’s timecard can potentially result in a substantial amount of unpaid wages when the practice is repeated throughout a workforce.
That is the danger of salami slicing: the individual deductions are small enough that employees may not notice them, but the cumulative loss can be enormous.
What Is Time Shaving?
Time shaving generally refers to an employer reducing or altering an employee’s recorded working time so that the employee is paid for less time than the employee actually worked.
Modern payroll and timekeeping systems can record employee punches down to the minute or even the second. Employees should therefore pay attention when the hours appearing on their paycheck do not correspond with the hours they remember working.
For example, an employee may clock in at 8:53 a.m., but the employer changes the time to 9:00 a.m. The employee may clock out at 5:08 p.m., but the payroll system records 5:00 p.m.
The employee worked those additional minutes. If those minutes constitute compensable working time, simply deleting them from the payroll records does not necessarily eliminate the employer’s obligation to pay for them.
The problem becomes particularly serious when the employer’s timekeeping practices consistently operate in the employer’s favor.
Common Examples of Time Wage Theft
Time wage theft does not always involve a manager manually changing a timecard. It can occur through workplace policies, payroll software, scheduling practices, or unwritten expectations.
One common example occurs when employees are required to perform work before they are permitted to clock in. A restaurant employee may be required to prepare a station, attend a meeting, count a cash drawer, stock supplies, prepare equipment, or perform opening duties before the official beginning of the shift.
The reverse can happen at closing. Employees may be told to clock out but then required to finish cleaning, complete paperwork, reconcile receipts, take out garbage, close a register, secure the premises, or perform other required duties.
Another common problem involves automatic meal deductions. An employer may automatically deduct 30 minutes for lunch even though the employee regularly works through lunch, answers telephone calls, responds to customers, handles work-related messages, or otherwise continues performing job duties.
Employers may also improperly manipulate time through rounding practices. A rounding system should not be used as a mechanism that systematically reduces employees’ compensable working time.
Regardless of the method used, the fundamental question is straightforward: Did the employee perform compensable work for which the employee was not paid?
“But It Was Only a Few Minutes”
Employees are sometimes reluctant to complain because each individual incident involves only a few minutes.
That is precisely why time shaving can continue for so long.
An employee who notices six missing minutes on Monday may decide that it is not worth complaining. The same employee may lose another eight minutes Tuesday and another seven minutes Wednesday. The employee may eventually stop looking at the individual discrepancies altogether.
But wage-and-hour violations should not necessarily be evaluated one isolated minute at a time.
Consider an employee earning $20 per hour who regularly works more than 40 hours per week. If the unpaid time should have been included in the employee’s overtime calculation, the value of those missing minutes may involve the employee’s overtime premium, not merely the employee’s straight-time hourly rate.
The financial impact becomes even greater when the same payroll practice affects numerous employees.
A few minutes can matter.
Employees are sometimes reluctant to complain because each individual incident involves only a few minutes.
That is precisely why time shaving can continue for so long.
An employee who notices six missing minutes on Monday may decide that it is not worth complaining. The same employee may lose another eight minutes Tuesday and another seven minutes Wednesday. The employee may eventually stop looking at the individual discrepancies altogether.
But wage-and-hour violations should not necessarily be evaluated one isolated minute at a time.
Consider an employee earning $20 per hour who regularly works more than 40 hours per week. If the unpaid time should have been included in the employee’s overtime calculation, the value of those missing minutes may involve the employee’s overtime premium, not merely the employee’s straight-time hourly rate.
The financial impact becomes even greater when the same payroll practice affects numerous employees.
A few minutes can matter.
Off-the-Clock Work Is Still Work
Another form of time wage theft occurs when an employer knows or permits an employee to continue working after the employee has clocked out.
An employer generally cannot avoid its wage obligations simply by maintaining a written policy stating that employees are prohibited from working off the clock while simultaneously allowing or expecting employees to perform unpaid work.
For example, a restaurant manager may tell employees that everyone must clock out at 11:00 p.m. to control labor costs. If employees are then expected to spend another 20 minutes cleaning and closing the restaurant, the fact that the time clock says 11:00 p.m. does not necessarily mean the workday ended at 11:00 p.m.
The same principle can apply to employees who perform required work from home, answer work-related communications outside scheduled hours, complete paperwork after clocking out, or perform required opening and closing duties without compensation.
The time clock is evidence of hours worked. It does not necessarily determine the reality of what occurred in the workplace.
Employers Have Timekeeping Responsibilities
One of the most important concepts in wage-and-hour law is that employers covered by the FLSA have recordkeeping responsibilities.
Employees should nevertheless preserve whatever evidence they have concerning their actual working hours.
Useful evidence may include photographs or screenshots of timecards, work schedules, payroll records, text messages, emails, POS login records, computer login information, security records, closing reports, opening reports, delivery records, GPS information, and communications with supervisors.
Even seemingly insignificant records can help establish when an employee was actually working.
Employees who suspect time clock manipulation or unpaid wages in Florida should consider keeping their own contemporaneous record of when they begin and end work each day and documenting any occasions when a supervisor changes their recorded time.
Time Shaving Can Also Create Unpaid Overtime
Time wage theft becomes especially significant when the missing minutes push an employee beyond 40 hours in a workweek.
Under the FLSA, covered non-exempt employees generally must receive overtime compensation at one and one-half times their regular rate of pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek.
An employer therefore cannot necessarily avoid overtime simply by deleting the minutes that would have caused the employee to cross the 40-hour threshold.
For example, payroll records might show an employee working 39.5 hours. But if the employer removed 10 or 15 minutes from the employee’s timecard each day, the employee may actually have worked more than 40 hours.
Those missing minutes can potentially transform what appears to be an ordinary payroll discrepancy into an unpaid overtime claim.
Restaurant and Hospitality Workers Can Be Particularly Vulnerable
Time wage theft can occur in virtually any industry, but restaurant and hospitality employees may be particularly vulnerable because their workdays frequently include opening duties, closing duties, side work, shift meetings, cleaning, cash reconciliation, and other tasks performed immediately before or after a scheduled shift.
I spent more than 30 years working in the restaurant and service industry, including substantial time working as a tipped employee. I understand that a restaurant shift does not necessarily begin when the first customer arrives or end when the last customer leaves.
Employees may spend substantial time preparing before service and completing required work after service.
When employers require employees to perform those duties, the time involved should be carefully examined to determine whether employees are receiving all wages required by law.
How Do You Know Whether Your Employer Is Shaving Your Time?
Start by comparing your own recollection and records against your paystubs and employer time records.
Look for patterns.
Does your timecard repeatedly show exactly 8:00 a.m. even though you regularly begin working before 8:00? Does your time always end at precisely 5:00 even though you routinely stay later? Are 30-minute meal periods deducted on days when you never received an uninterrupted meal period? Are managers editing your punches? Are employees told to clock out before finishing their work?
Most importantly, ask whether the discrepancies consistently favor the employer.
A recurring pattern of missing minutes may be far more significant than a single payroll mistake.
Small Minutes Can Become Big Money
Time wage theft works because employees are encouraged to think about each missing minute individually.
Do not just look at one slice of the salami.
Look at what happens when those slices are taken every shift, every week, every month, and from every employee.
Five minutes may seem insignificant. Five minutes taken repeatedly over several years may not be.
If you believe your employer has been shaving your time, changing your timecards, automatically deducting meal periods, requiring off-the-clock work, or failing to pay you for all hours worked, you should consider speaking with a Florida wage-and-hour attorney about whether you are owed unpaid wages or overtime compensation.
FloridaUnpaidWages.com focuses on helping Florida workers identify and pursue claims involving unpaid wages, unpaid overtime, tip theft, time shaving, off-the-clock work, and other wage-and-hour violations.
You worked the time.
You should be paid for the time.
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