I got a job two weeks ago as a waitress in a part-time function on the weekends. Work is brutal. The restaurant / café / bar is big and sometimes you're alone in charge of 15+ tables. Clients come and go, there is no way to tell who arrived first because you have to keep doing rounds on the place, and everyone complains. Payment was also not very good but I put in mind that I just needed to stay a couple of weeks until I got an offer for something better (summer is approaching and everywhere is hiring, although the conditions are always similarly shitty). When I got the job, I was baited by the existence of a bonus that I later on found out that it didn't actually exist yet, so I was already pissed.
I'm supposed to work 8 hours but I'm scheduled for 9, with the official reasoning being that I have an unpaid hour to divide during the day to have my breaks. The problem is that nobody takes the full hour, and they don't pay extra hours for that time not spent either. So I made sure every day I was taking the whole hour, to the annoyance of my coworkers, even if I tried to take my breaks when the restaurant was relatively tranquil.
Yesterday my shift was ending, but I still had 20min of unpaid break to take. I talked to the one of the main staff that I could either leave since there was 20min to the end of my shift, or I could just sit around and read and wait those 20 min. He complained that everyone had to power through Sundays. I pointed out that I didn't got paid for those breaks. He retorted that he didn't either, to which I said “so maybe you also should be making sure you have a full hour”. All my tables were clean, set, and organised. The restaurant was in fact empty. There was literally nothing else to do, and I still had the 20min until the end of the shift. He groaned but didn't say anything else, so I left. A couple of hours later I get a message from one of the bosses telling me that I'd 'abandoned my shift', even when I explained what happened and that last 20min were not part in fact of my work schedule, and said that due to 'leaving my duties earlier', I was fired. I'm not disappointed, more like good riddance. I calculated this place earns 5-7 hours of free labor every weekend from staff not taking their whole breaks throughout the day.
Never let employers make you work for free.