I work for a smaller retail business (just under 100 employees) with a few locations in San Antonio and some in a couple other cities. This business has made some changes of late, basically taking away all of the things that made me overlook things that I believe (based on my non-lawyer understanding) are against the law and violating employee rights.
The first thing is that they use the fact that different store locations have different tax IDs to say that's why they don't pay overtime if you exceed 40 hours between two locations. Same company name, different brothers own different stores, but each one can make decisions about any employee. When questioned about it, they explained to me the tax ID portion and said that was just some of it. They failed to explain the rest. My understanding is that even just having the same name qualifies as joint employment and the tax ID thing is moot for consideration of wage calculation.
The next thing is that they recently made a change in the tipping structure. We used to pool tips, splitting them equally between all employees at the store (even managers). Managers can't take tips from a pool from my understanding, but I overlooked it for a bit. Well, they changed it to be divided based on hours worked, now ensuring that managers actually get the lion's share of the tip money.
These are the two things that I was able to easily spot and do minimal research on, but they are undoubtedly breaking other laws.
The advice I'm seeking is what to do about this. The overtime thing hasn't impacted me yet, as I simply won't work at different stores under the current circumstances. The tip thing is absurd, but not a life changing amount of money for me. I'm already seeking new employment; just wondering if I should do anything to hit them legally or if that would be a waste of time and money?