Have you ever heard of anything like this, or work somewhere that you're fined cash for being late?! WITAF?!?!?!
my employer fined me $90 for being late
I am not the OP.
(Original)
My company has a ridiculous late fine policy: you will be fined $2 for every minute, starting from 9:01 a.m. So if you come in at 9:05 a.m., that’s $10 you gotta pay up in cash. (This is not somewhere where down-to-the-minute coverage would be essential. It’s just typical deskbound, back-end work. I can see why the receptionist who gets the calls will need to be there smack on the dot, but the rest of us — not really.)
I’ve been here for over a year, and have been fined maybe three times. They were for 9:01 a.m., 9:02 a.m. and 9:08 a.m. I was intensely annoyed and embarrassed, but okay, I can still absorb the $2-$16 financial pinch.
I hate this policy because it nickel and dimes employees down to the first minute, and at a very high rate. I hate this policy because coming in at 9:01 a.m. does not makes you any less productive than the dude who came in at 9:00 a.m., whose bloody computer is still starting up.
A few days ago, I overslept for the first time. I somehow slept through my usual TWO alarms and woke up with a start at 8:30 a.m. — an hour late. I immediately texted my manager that I had overslept and asked if it was possible to get an emergency, UNPAID, half-day leave. I had calculated that coming in an hour late would result in a $120 fine, which is painfully difficult for me to absorb. I’m a junior employee.
My manager said no. She wanted me to come in anyway because “it’s the right thing to do.” I cried some tears of frustration, but told her okay and rushed like hell down, but not before racking up 45 minutes worth of late fine — $90.
Alison, I understand that she wants me to be punished accordingly. I accept that sleeping through two alarms was all on me.
At the same time — and I don’t know if this matters — I’m a relatively high performer at work. I truly enjoy what I do and do a decent job at it. I just received a glowing annual appraisal and got publicly commended by the director, in spite of my young age (this is my first job out of college) and junior position. Furthermore, I work overtime every day because my workload is high, even though we don’t get any overtime pay. And I’m not chronically late — this was my first time oversleeping.
And yet, my manager rejected my request for an UNPAID, half-day leave. Technically, she is right and I deserved it. But I don’t think being rigidly strict here was warranted. Am I just entitled for feeling this way? If you divide my monthly salary by 30 days, $90 is what I earn in one day. I will have to cough up an entire day’s salary (worth three weeks of lunch expenses!) for this, and my manager was cool with that? I’m fuming, yet I don’t know if I have the right to be.
Part of me wants to talk about this with my manager to see if it could’ve been handled differently — if I could’ve been given the unpaid, half-day leave. Is this worth revisiting with her about, and if so, how should I approach it?
(Update)
As I waited for the day where the accountants would swing by my desk to collect the cash from me as they used to, that day somehow never arrived.Turns out, the company received several scathing anonymous reviews online for this practice, and they were pretty upset about it tarnishing their image.So they quietly scrapped the policy without telling anyone. We just figured it out through hearsay and experience over time when the accountants were no longer coming up to us to collect our fines.I’m glad we no longer have to bleed cash at such a high rate, but we still have a strict punctuality policy down to the minute which is taken into account in our performance reviews and is still deeply embedded into our culture.Think people cursing and getting anxious in the elevators stopping at every other floor at 8:58 am; texting the admin with a PICTURE of us that we are not late – our elevator has just broken down and we’re trapped; and people running like a madman to the office gates at 9:00 am before it strikes 9:01 am.I love what I do and my coworkers otherwise, though, so that definitely helps a lot.