The first serious job I held was at a bakery-cafe. I worked the mid-afternoon to closing shift as a front end/cashier for about the first year. Then they trained me in opening procedures so I could open the bakery on the two days a week the other person trained to do it had off. This other bakery opener had it so much worse than me, and here’s why:
We worked 1.5-2 hours/day for free. I did it 2 days a week for 9 months. He did it 5 days a week for I-don’t-know-how-long. At the end of those 9 months I moved on to a much better job and at some point he got transferred to a new location. (Before anyone tells me to pursue legal action, I’m not seeking advice, just telling a story.)
So here’s how it worked: the time clock only had a 3-minute grace period before and after your scheduled start and end time that it would let you punch with your employee credentials. Start or end your shift outside of that total 6 minutes? A manager had to override the computer and clock you in. The time clock reset every day at 3am. Even if a manager were present, the clock would literally be shut down until 3am.
Opening shifts were scheduled to come in at 5am for a 6:30 opening time. An hour and a half was not nearly enough time to complete all the opening procedures from brewing coffee to packaging preorders to arranging the pastries behind the display glass to preparing the dining room to slicing bread for the kitchen to make sandwiches with. The scheduling managers at the other stores solved this by having the second person on shift come in at 6 to help before the store was even open. Our scheduling manager scheduled the second person to come in at 7.
This meant if we didn’t want to get written up for not having the store ready for customers by opening, we had to show up earlier than our scheduled time. Hours earlier. Remember how I said that clocking in outside of your officially scheduled time required a manager override? The managers were always scheduled to come in at 6, and frequently walked in closer to 6:30. I was told to just clock in with the rest of the opening crew (two line cooks doing their own boatload of opening tasks) at our scheduled 5:00 time.
I had trouble getting up in the mornings and as such would usually end up arriving at the cafe later than I intended, often sometime after 4, despite aiming for 3:30. I can tell you with certainty, I didn’t have a single day my opening tasks were done on time. I prioritized the most important things like having the coffee, pastries, and bagels ready, and saved the “secondary” tasks whose lack of completion could be temporarily overlooked for IF I got everything else done first (as an example, cleaning handprints off the glass doors). Anything I didn’t finish before opening I would work on in my sparse downtime. Usually this meant not getting finished with the entire opening checklist until sometime after 8. I was good at hiding the little things like that from management.
Openers were scheduled for full 8-hour shifts with a half hour unpaid lunch, so our scheduled end time every day was 1:30. We almost never got to leave on time, as we would frequently still be in the middle of lunch rush and a manager had to come shut down our registers (they were signed in under our names specifically) and count our cash to make sure it matched. Often all of the managers were busy making or running orders. On top of that, state law entitles employees working full 8-hour shifts 2 paid 15-minute breaks on top of their half-hour unpaid lunch. Not a single employee in the cafe ever saw any of those breaks.
Staying a half an hour to an hour later than my contracted time wasn’t too big of an issue for me, because it was overtime pay. But being there for close to 10 hours already made the waiting for a manager to be available to take my register more anxiety-inducing.
This was my experience only 2 days out of every week for 9 months. The other poor opener did this 5 days a week for much longer, with this caveat: he often dragged himself there at 2:30 because unlike me, he refused to let the opening tasks be incomplete at 6:30. If there had even been a manager there to clock him in when he started working each day, the clock literally would not have been turned on to record his time, as like I said, that computer only turned itself on starting at 3. There were many days he worked 11.5 total hours, only got paid for 9 of them, and had nothing but a half hour lunch (taken near the beginning of the shift or not at all) as respite.
In short, there are probably a dozen, if not more employees from this cafe who are all owed hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in retroactive overtime pay, all because of the bad scheduling manager and the store manager who let it happen. We were used and exploited and I’m glad I left and never looked back.
TLDR: We couldn’t clock in until 5am, so we had to work the first few hours of our shifts without any compensation. I had it bad; the other guy had it much worse.
I have more stories from this job if anyone would care to hear them.