I'm sorry in advance as this is a long story.
Pre-pandemic I worked for a family-run adult store company. This company had 7 + stores (some closed during my time there), and the man who owned it had been running it since the 1950s. An essential factor to know about this story is that a select number of these stores had “peepshows”, Not live people just videos in little booths where you use tokens to keep the screen running. The shifts were 12 hours, paid straight through, we were not unionized. Some locations were open from 11 am to 11 pm, other locations were 24 hours so the clerk would work 8 to 8. There was only ever one person on shift at a time.
To start let's talk about pay for a regular clerk, ( I'll get into my pay a little later as that gets complicated)so someone working a 12-hour shift when I started the job in 2011 would be paid minimum wage plus commission. The commission rate was 5% of your sales during your probation period, then you would get an 8% commission afterward. So while you can't legally pay less than minimum wage, the commission rate changed multiple times during my time in that job. How it was when I left was a 2% commission unless you hit a specific sales goal during your shift (a goal that management constantly increased to make it harder to reach) and if you hit that goal you would get 4% of sales. Essentially by the time I left that job, while I was technically making more since the minimum wage went up, I actually took home less money than what I was told I would be making when I was hired.
As for breaks, we did not have them. As I mentioned there is only one person working in the story at any given time meaning in order to have a break you would need to close the store. How they got around that is they paid right through the breaks and because it isn't a super busy sort of business management just expected you to be able to sit and have a break during the time between customers, of course, if anyone walked in you had to stop what you were doing to greet and help them. Needless to say, getting any sort of proper meal was extremely difficult. You may be asking, “how do you go to the bathroom?” The answer, not without difficulty, you had to close the store and run to the bathrooms which were in the back near the peepshow rooms. If people were lingering in the store you just had to hold it, I absolutely pissed myself at that job and had to make an embarrassing call to a friend for new clothes. I actually began carrying extra clothes in my bag just in case it was a crazy day. Also, you need to consider the peepshows, people could be back there for hours, and as you can imagine, a good portion of the patrons in the back area were not the most savory of people. So if you had to go you had two options, try and kick everyone out before wetting yourself and tell them to come back in a few minutes while risking them complaining or refusing, or you could do what I would do which is risk it, lock the store door, run back there, put a sign across the entrance to the back, and just hope you don't see anything too nasty. I knew male clerks who would just piss in the mop bucket because it was easier than leaving the storefront.
Let's talk safety for a moment, I'm a female who worked there between the ages of 21 and 29. Thankfully I'm a take-no-shit type of person so I just rolled with issues and dealt with them. The same can not be said for some of the other staff. I won't speak for them and I won't go into EVERY incident but I had a guy OD and die in the back, I had a guy get locked into the store with me due to a malfunctioning security lock who threatened to bash my head in with a pipe and threw things at me and kicked me, I was groped by guys, had my shirt pulled down, I was followed on the same bus home by a man despite my hour-long commute. I had one stalker who harassed me for 6 years straight cause I banned him, would shout things like “you get fatter every time I see ya” or just moo at me outside the door. A few of us got spit on, I know a couple of the male clerks got punched. These incidents would happen but we would all just have to continue on with our shifts. There was the dead guy the paramedics had in the middle of the floor, and I just kept putting away stock and working around them. There was no sort of mental health leave, I worked the next day.
Now the question I got asked a lot is “what about overtime.” We didn't get it. Now non-union and under labor standards where I live employees who work a 12-hour shift can work up to 60 hours a week without overtime, that being said, any hours above the 60 are paid time and a half and must be paid retroactively for all hours above 40 hours. As all our staff worked only 3 to 4 shifts a week, no one reached that point, except me.
Finally let's move on to my treatment, my role, and how I left that job. I started the job full time 48 hours a week, and within a few months I ended up being a “store manager” really these were just the long-term employees who worked consistently and put out the stock, we didn't have those titles or else we would have had to be paid as such. There used to be a member of the management team who would do all the hiring, firing, and scheduling, they worked at the warehouse and that was their only job. The third year into my employment the woman who had the job was fired for some dramatic reason we all kinda guessed at but don't know for sure what happened. The owner calls me up he asked me to take on the scheduling role for a bit until someone else was found to replace them. He offered me $50 dollars a week. I took it thinking it would be temporary, but as you can guess, it was not temporary. So on top of my role as defacto store manager at one of the busiest locations, I also did all the hiring, firing, training, and scheduling, I wrote up warnings, I wrote the manuals even when we changed POS systems, I even wrote up the work safe manual and took care of a couple of disputes with the labor board. Eventually, after a year and a half when it was clear they were not going to hire someone to take the scheduling position, they did begin to pay me $150 dollars a week. I did also ask for a job title change to human resource manager, it was a little petty that on my ROE it is listed as “scheduler” because it meant when I left that I could not put my 5 years of HR experience towards getting my CPHR, all cause it didn't have the words, but I digress.
As you can imagine, getting anyone willing to work alone in a store where x-rated stuff is happening in the room beside you is no easy feat. We were often short-staffed, the problem being without the clerk who was supposed to work their shift, the store would need to close. As hiring was my job I felt responsible for this as such I worked on average 72 to 94 hours a week, a few weeks I even worked 108 hours. I worked 24-hour shifts at least once a week, I even worked a 36-hour straight shift. Since I did the schedule, I never got paid overtime for those hours. I'm sure management would argue that I didn't HAVE to do it, that I chose to do it, but when the other option was closing the store and it's my job to hire staff how long would I keep that job with multiple stores closing every week?
Now, as for how I left that job. It's March 2020, the world is shutting down, and my staff is scared, I see the writing on the wall, an adult store is not an essential service, and we have to close. Unfortunately, the owner's wife feels differently ( I should say she was the owner at this point as the founder had passed a year or so previously). My staff start telling me they won't be coming in for their shift, totally understandable, this is a job that had excessive hand sanitizer use long before it was cool. As mentioned above, if people don't show up then the stores closed, we had no choice. The owner wanted action taken against staff who didn't show up, but I refused. At this point I'm mad so I tell her I'm not firing anyone who doesn't show up, and I won't be in as of Monday. Close the stores. Management of course had to cave and close the stores. Fast forward to the end of April 2020 and they are talking about reopening already, they put up plexiglass barriers and think that's all we need. Malls, clothing stores, and bookstores were all still closed, but they wanted us back to work. Then I get a call from the general manager, the owner's son, he asks me if I will be coming back but lets me know I won't be coming back in the scheduling position I had been doing for 5 years. He asked me to come back to a job unwilling to consider safety for 600 dollars less a month. I declined. I'd do it again. I did the right thing by my staff and I won't apologize for that. I do take a little enjoyment in the fact that none of their stores are 24 hours anymore cause they don't have a workhorse like me willing to pull 24-hour shifts.
I feel like I let down the staff who did return, the family didn't know the staff and hadn't met most of them. I know one of my best workers fell back into addiction after I left and the job definitely contributed to that, she died in 2021.
Anyway, we are coming up on 3 year anniversary of this all going down, I never reported any of this or sought any negative action against my former employers. I do wonder if that was the right thing to do, I still have my pay stubs, I have text messages, emails, and pictures, and I even have all the schedules that show the hours I worked.
My question to you all is if you made it this far, do I do anything with this information? Is it too late to do anything?