Tl;dr at the bottom
My girlfriend took a job at this “finger lickin good!” place on Wednesday, and is planning to quit tomorrow. Aside from the breaks thing, there are a bunch of other problems that arose that she had issues with.
Issues that have happened in only 5 days (and she never signed any sort of non-disclosure so we can freely tell you all of this):
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She was told to charge separately for sides and bonus drinks instead of adding then to the combo, because it costs the customer more that way (they specifically gave that as the reason). Was also told to charge a 16-piece of legs individually instead of as a bucket, for the same reason.
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Major language barrier. Everyone in the store is fluent in Spanish, but struggles with English. She has to repeat herself multiple times to get the STORE MANAGER to understand her when she is trying to say anything. Given that this is a highly spanish-speaking area, having mostly spanish-speaking employees is understandable, but for the store manager to be barely able to understand English seems a bit unreasonable. My gf doesn't speak Spanish so struggles to communicate with others at work.
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The store manager never helps out with orders. She'll be sitting in the back while my gf has to take the order, assemble the order, pause to take another order, finish assembling the first order and hand it to a customer, take another order, and then assemble both orders, without coming to help. Even if she's not doing anything.
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Hypocrisy. The store manager wears earbuds and listens to music, but told my gf she can't do the same. She will tell the employees not to do something per store policy, then do that same thing later in the day (this was heard from someone else who worked there longer).
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On inspection days, everybody is supposed to get a bonus in pay. According to other employees, the store manager will buy everyone pizza, but they don't seem to get the bonus. They all believe that she has been pocketing all the money for herself. (This part is hearsay, we aren't sure it's true, but everyone there believes it)
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They water down the Mac and cheese (sometimes with the corn water) “so it wouldn't stick as much”. They use powdered mashed potatoes. And chicken pot pies are made using chicken leftover from the previous day. But hey, at least the fried chicken is made fresh…
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Earlier today, the manager tried to blame her for something that wasn't her fault. (From her messages to me about it) “Basically this guy wanted an 8 piece bucket and a 16 piece bucket. But he wanted all legs. So I go and ask the team lead if that's ok. She said yeah but it would be 16 min and told the customer directly with me there. Later, the lead manager finds out, goes to the customer, says they can't do that and tries to change his order, then tries to say “She's new” and blame it on me, but the customer stood up for me and said “no, you were standing there and she asked. You are the manager you should have listened.” In the end the customer didn't get exactly what he wanted and the manager tried to tell me directly we couldn't do that, then the team lead said to charge for each piece instead of a full bucket because it's more expensive. Oh and lead manager tried to argue back and say it wasn't his fault.”
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And finally, the breaks. She gets her required 10-minute breaks, but she has worked two shifts that were over 5 hours (one was 5 hours 40 minutes, the one tonight was 6 hours) and did not receive a 30-minute unpaid meal break. This is not only against California labor laws, it goes against their own break policy. So we want to know where we can report this violation and get the damn place to give their employees meal breaks (another employee said that she often goes a full 8-hour shift and 'voluntarily' doesn't take a meal break because she feels guilty when she does)
Tl;dr my girlfriend is quitting this job for a bunch of reasons. One of which is that she hasn't been given a meal break on two occasions. We want to know where and how to report it (California).