I took a full-time position in a job before starting graduate school. It only paid $14/hour, but I needed a job and it would genuinely be a good experience for me to learn in my field. After about 2 months of working there, my direct supervisor quit. I was expected to take on her responsibilities while they found new hires, which I agreed to.
Unfortunately, it took ~3months for them to hire people, which means I did the job of 3 people entirely myself. (Of course, they never offered me a raise.) I worked a small amount of overtime (literally about 15 hours total over those 3 months) due to the fact that we were so understaffed, but my manager got upset with me over it. My manager informed me that they would be reducing my hours to 40 in those weeks and letting me take off that same amount of time in the following week while still getting paid. This is an illegal (thanks FLSA) practice that they used to avoid paying time-and-a-half. I let this slide because the difference in pay is honestly not all that much given how little overtime I work (~$100).
The new hires are less experienced than I am, so I was tasked with training them. Somehow, the new hires were offered starting positions that pay approximately double what I make. I brought this up to my boss's boss (who is actually a good person) and is finally getting me a raise.
The final straw came today when I noticed that my direct supervisor (who approves my hours) is just removing hours over 40 without telling me. Two months ago, I texted them to get it in writing that they were “saving” hours of overtime, but they never responded to those texts. Instead, they appear to just be hoping that I never notice that they removed those extra hours.
In practice, the money I'm missing out on won't make a big difference. I'm not well off by any standard, but I don't live paycheck-to-paycheck. In principle, I am fucking sick of being taken advantage of. I've bent over backward to help this company. Without me, they would lose about a dozen middle six-figure accounts.
I'm collecting all the evidence I need to have definitive proof that my employer is breaking company policy and, more importantly, federal law. I am planning on waiting a week or two to gather more evidence and then giving them one chance to make it right. To me, that means an apology and increased back-pay for all the time they missed and a retroactive raise for underpaying me a fair wage for all this time. Even if they do that, I'm planning on filing a complaint with both the state and federal departments of labor.
I'm then going to quit. My company will likely lose a couple of million dollars worth of accounts, but such is life. If you shit where you eat, you'll end up eating shit!
My company is doing this to multiple people and it needs to stop. Any advice is appreciated.