I work in a fresh and wildly profitable sector of retail for a company that is notoriously anti-labor across the board. We ended up unionizing unanimously and since then corporate is coming down hard, including introducing a new manager for the store.
Last night during our closing meetings the manager told us that he would manually change any punch ins on our time sheet if they were more than “2 minutes early” because we’re not supposed to clock in and “get a drink of water”. This is happening at a time when we can barely keep the doors open due to staffing issues derived from their shitty management.
My Q is this: how illegal is it for them to touch our clock in times? I understand now I have to follow the 2 minute rule; but my understanding is that they can’t take time away arbitrarily. Am I right in that? I’m already talking with my union rep I just figured I’d ask Reddit too.