Is your spouse an exempt employee? Is there some kind of union agreement that addresses over-time? Finally, has he contacted wage and hour? If he does this and loses his job he has another claim for retaliation.

Last Tuesday (July 21) he worked 7am to 11pm with a couple breaks for food. NO OVERTIME for nearly 16 hours of work! Other times it was 50 or 60 hours a week. But what really makes me mad is the company owner’s wife is a member of SHRM here in Florida, and KNOWS their employees receive no overtime pay! And on top of that, they don’t even have up-to-date insurance! How do these people get away with this and how do still sleep at night???

Despite violating the policy, always pay the overtime. There is no law that says that you can’t terminate employees who violate a known policy.

They either arrive early, clock in, and then go to the employees lounge to drink coffee until it’s time for work. Another tactic they use is when the work day is over, the go to the lounge and hang around for half an hour before clocking out.

Cutting their hours is not an option in our case. We are a school and must abide by the DOE’s student to adult ratio. Cutting their hours would result in a violation of the DOE policy.

A rock and a hard place?

Finally the supervisors got together and reduced the scheduled work days of people who continued to work unapproved overtime. In CA, you get paid OT for any work over 8 hours in a day, you can’t just round out the week. By taking away a full scheduled workday for repeat offenders, they lost the financial incentive and also were hit with peer pressure by the team members who had to pick up the lost shifts. And since paid time off was calculated by actual hours worked for hourly staff, they also lost the opportunity to earn those increments of PTO when their hours were reduced. If they got their act together and stopped working unapproved overtime, their work hours were restored the following month.