I work for a food chain. We got our labor cut last winter, and so instead of closing with three and then two people every night (3rd person gets off at 9 and other two stay til 9:30) It's usually impossible to get everything done before 9:30, when we are supposed to leave. All my supervisors decided we should start clocking out and finishing no matter how long it takes. Their reasoning was that our manager is very harsh on them when the close goes horribly regardless of the circumstances. She is also very strict about having us leave on time. My supervisors decided they'd rather work for free every night then have her be mad at them.
This has only made the problems worse in my eyes. My supervisors have been doing this for months and now they've set an expectation for the closings to be perfect, so I can't convince them to stop doing this.
This has also lead to almost all of the people I work with doing this every night. Now the 3rd person will clock out at 9 and stay and work for up to an hour as well. A lot of these people are minors. The supervisors have good intentions and don't try to convince other people to join them. They let me clock out when I'm supposed to and I sit and wait for them to finish. But I still think their actions are wrong because they're setting the example for younger workers that this is okay.
I'm sure each person has worked at least 50 hours of unpaid labor in the last year. This is really unacceptable in my opinion.
At the same time I'm not sure if I should report it because I'd hate to get everyone possibly fired. People need their jobs. I try to reason with them that if they clock out on time and leave the store a mess, that might be what it takes for corp to add more labor. It's very important not to work for free.
I am the only person amongst my 15 or so coworkers that doesn't work off the clock.