sorry for the long post. for context i live in michigan.
so i just recently quit a job at a food service chain. i believe my location is technically a franchise, but the owners own at least 10 locations in i believe 3 different states (5 of them are within 10 miles of my location) and have a corporate style structure (GMs, RMs, an HR department, and owners). i’m adding this info because i’m not sure if the process/laws are different for franchise locations vs corporate locations vs a group of franchise locations owned by the same people.
this job sucked for SO many reasons but some are more legally questionable (or outright illegal) than others. the worst one is the wage theft. in michigan minors are required to take a full 30 minute unpaid break if they work 5 hours or more, and there are no break requirements for adults (i’m unsure if this means we aren’t even legally entitled to breaks, but it definitely means we aren’t legally required to take them). several months ago, i noticed on my time sheet that a break had been put in for me on a shift where i did not take a break. i asked around and a couple other people told me the same thing had happened to them. we were under the impression that it was automatically put in by the system for some reason and decided to say something to our manager if it happened again, but didn’t do anything about the instances where it had already happened. about a month ago, corporate (or whatever the franchise owners’ version of corporate is) sent out an email that said EVERY employee is REQUIRED to take a full, 30-minute, unpaid break on EVERY shift of 5 hours or more. around this time i was also told by one of the assistant managers that those breaks that got put in for us were put in manually by my management. i don’t have any explicit proof that my management was directed by upper management to do this, but i have reason to believe that this is the case—i’m close with both the GM and the AM (this is how i know of the email) and they have repeatedly expressed dislike for upper management’s policies and have made comments on more than one occasion that they have to do what they’re told or they would be fired. but again, i don’t have any evidence that they were specifically told by upper management to put in breaks when we didn’t take any.
obviously, this is wage theft. it only happened to me twice, and i could procure evidence of when it happened to me, but my (ex) coworkers are largely reluctant to contribute any of their instances, which would make it more difficult for me to bring a complaint to the board because they prioritize issues that affect groups of workers rather than an individual.
another thing has to do with the minors’ rights. for a long time (until i pointed it out), minors were being scheduled past 9pm, which is illegal in michigan. my management was unaware of this (which is ridiculous that they didn’t know, but they weren’t doing it intentionally) and fixed it once i brought it up. however, on my last day at work my AM told me about a new email from corporate that set a LOT of limits on what the minors are allowed to do (not handling knives, not opening the cooler doors [which doesn’t make sense but whatever], etc.) the one that bothered me was that now minors apparently aren’t allowed to be scheduled past 7pm. like i said before the law here says 9pm. i’m wondering if this restriction could be construed as age discrimination or something similar—the kids all go to school during the day and tend to work shifts like 4-9pm, and some of them want their full 24 hours per week when school is in session as permitted by law but have certain days they can’t work due to extracurriculars and the like. the 4-9 or similar shifts were getting them those hours but now they can’t get them all and they’re frustrated. i know this specific issue is shaky at best but i’m just wondering if there’s anything that can be done to advocate for them since some of them WANT to be working past 7.
it’s my understanding that these new minor restrictions came as a result of another one of the locations in the area getting audited for violations of minors’ labor rights, so this is corporate’s way of damage control and avoiding another hit. i suspect there’s a similar motivation behind the break requirement mentioned earlier, although there is zero legal reason to force the adult employees to take breaks and ABSOLUTELY zero reason to commit wage theft when employees don’t take a break.
my concern is that the effect of that audit and of corporate’s new regulations in general is only hurting employees who didn’t do anything wrong (as well as my management, who SHOULD stand up against this but won’t for fear of losing their jobs) instead of the people actually causing the problems, namely, HR and the owners. i don’t want to take action that will only result in making my coworkers lives miserable.
i suppose i have two main questions: 1) do i even have enough of a case at all to go to the labor board, or will it likely get ignored/thrown out? and 2) if i do have a good case, is it worth it to pursue it knowing that the likely outcome will hurt the employees more than it will corporate?