So, my fiance finally had enough of her job… It paid awful, she was on-call 24/7, schedule changes happening up to 10 minutes before a job. For some odd reason, her tips all dried up during her final 6 months. We asked the employer, and were told that people just weren't tipping. Oh well, hard times and all that, it's not required. She started to feel like her efforts weren't appreciated, though. She kept on it for a lot longer than most, because she loved the actual work itself… just not the administrative aspects or the pay.
When she eventually began telling folk she was quitting, she received a lot of love from clients. They told her how grateful they were, and how much they would miss her. And then one client asked “Do you receive all the tips we give you, or do you split it in a pool?”
This raised a red flag, because she hadn't received tips in months. I did some investigating and found out that the system she uses for jobs/pay had a hidden export. Listed every job she ever did.. how long it took… the job type… and tips.
Turns out, the employer had been stealing her tips the whole time. The last 6 months, the employer had been stealing all the tips, but even before that, they had been taking more than half of them for themselves.
I was able to calculate over $4000 in tips stolen. We were even able to cross-reference with pay stubs, and with the aid of clients and their credit card statements, verify all tip amounts exactly. It's clearly posted that tips are supposed to go to the worker (fiance) when they are paid, as well as tips being listed as supplemental pay in the job description.
But we dug even deeper. She was forced to clock in and out at weird intervals, usually related to driving. And she had to drive her own vehicle, and pay for her own gas. (Currently, if you remove her costs, she sometimes made less than a dollar for 1.5 hours of work.) Turns out, our state requires a mileage compensation ($0.555/mi). (Guess what she never got?) And I have a database now of every mile she drove while clocked in. Just for the clocked-in mileage.. it came out to about another $4,000.
And then there were the hours. I manually recalculated all of her hours and her rate of pay, to make sure the tips weren't just rolled up into the paycheck. Turns out, there was additional wage theft on top of everything else. Every “minutes” for the day was added as a decimal instead. So if she worked 4 hours and 36 minutes, she was paid her hourly rate for 4.36 hours… instead of 4.6 hours. It's not as big as the first two, but it is a few hundred dollars worth. This person used to be an accountant for years, too… so it's hard to think of this as not deliberate.
There may even be tax fraud charges, if the employer tried to claim the mileage as a tax credit.. or if they didn't list the tips they stole as their own income.
We're slowly collecting all the data, compiling witnesses, and will drop what is hopefully an open/shut case in a lawyer's lap. I'm just wondering what other corners they might have cut or if they did this to their other employees. All of them really need justice.