I recently started working at a clothing retailer in a small Utah town, this is a big corporation, but I’ll just leave the company name out of it.
Our manager has an expectation that we are always on our workplace communication app, we are required to download it on our phones, and she sends us messages constantly wether we are at work or not, if we aren’t reading and responding to her messages outside of scheduled work hours, she gets upset with us when we are at work, that we aren’t volunteering our time out of work to stay caught up on communication, the app itself when we sign in gives us a message we have to accept to log in, that says if we are caught using it outside of work hours the company will discipline us, up to and including termination.
Aside from the companies communication app, the manager requires us all to have group me downloaded on our phones, and we are required to react to every single message she sends us, again, wether we are at work or not, we are required to respond. I used to work for Barnes and noble, and we used group me there for awhile, until upper management found out we were being communicated with outside of scheduled work hours, which implies not receiving compensation for our time outside of work. Which is in direct violation of labor laws, and we were forced to stop using it for communication.
I am termed as a full time employee, but she schedules me 30 hours a week, which means I no longer meet the legal requirements to be considered a full time employee.
Our company gives us an ads(average dollar sale) goal each month, and expects that we dress in our companies clothing, our employees are lucky to work 4 shifts a month, all of which are between 2-4 hours max and take home a paycheck between $40-$80, but some how she expects that when our part time employees purchase our clothing they are required to spend the companies ads goal, or the manager on duty has to coach them on their commitment to the store, and note that said coaching took place on our nightly paperwork.
Previous managers have stood up to the free labor expectation, but have been retaliated against for doing so, using methods like refusing to communicate with her as a punishment, up to demotions, and cutting hours.
I’m feeling as though this aside from being a toxic work environment, is breaking multiple labor laws. What can I do?