I'm a server in a restaurant in PA, USA
We recently had a menu change and when this happens, my boss will give us servers these little daily quizzes to help us learn the new stuff. It's usually simple stuff, but sometimes there's a couple of questions that trip you up. It used to be really helpful, cause once something was in a quiz question I never forgot it.
Except this time, for no reason at all, boss has decided to make this a punishment. This isn't in response to anything, in fact this is coming after two consecutive 100% evaluations on our quality of service. This time around, if you “fail” the daily quiz, you get sent home. Point blank, you don't get to work your shift, try again next time.
And this is infuriating for a multitude of reasons. Not the least of which is that some people have kids, and we all have bills to pay! It seems insane that they can fuck with our paycheck like that just for not knowing off the top of our head what kind of cheese is on a particular sandwich or the composition of a particular sauce. Also, they've been encouraging us to blame the person who gets sent home if we end up understaffed and struggling because of it, even though it's clearly management's poor decision.
What can I do here? Is this even legal for them to deny us shifts we were promised and scheduled for, when our contract says absolutely nothing about these quizzes?
Please let me know. It seems so crazy to me. Does any other job in the world do this???