Wal-Mart gets spankedFollow

I think Shadowrelm missed the South Park reference.
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or mabe he ignored the referance? as it added nothing to the discussion?

there used to be lively debates here. now, there is a post, then a wave of south park referances finally ending in a discussion about the rating down or up of people on the web site.

mabe this is the evolution of web site forums? mabe this is a fair cross section of american society? mabe. the people in the whitehouse make a good argument to support this theory.

Heaven knows the world, including this forum, somehow revolve around the US of ***. New topic for debate: How much pie would be required to get SR below filter. My guess - none.
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how much pie would it take to get shadowrem to give a crap about his rating to begine with?

1 piece.

adn i would care untill it was gone.

***** you guys I'm going home.

Most hourly jobs these days in places large enough to have actual departments devoted to payroll and time record retention.... they will can you for not clocking out/in properly if you simply can not or will not learn to follow that basic rule. A lady I work with complained to me today that her son got canned from Burger King for working without being clocked in. He'd been warned multiple times, but he didn't take it seriously. She didn't either. Her words were, "It's just Burger King, for Christ's sake." Now, this lady is responsible for retaining our own time records and will rip a supervisor a new one if they let a shift get closed down without making sure everything is in order. I found that to be...ironical.

Overall, I'm sure Walmart was aware of the labor laws in each of its areas of operation. But the truth is, a skipped lunch here and there ain't gonna kill anybody. It's just a calculated business risk and I don't blame Walmart for taking it. There are so many laws on the books, you're always going to be violating something somewhere. That's what they pay lawyers for. Walmart gets sued something like once every 6 minutes.

At least that's how we always did it in the past. Admittedly, I haven't worked hourly for quite some time, so things could have changed. Even the hourly workers at the company I work at don't check in and out for lunch. You fill out a time card at the end of the week and write down your hours (with charge numbers depending on what you were doing with you time). It's the total number of hours mosts people track. Not when you went to lunch.

Again. Show me that Walmart is alone in how they are handling hourly labor and time cards, and you might have a point. So far. I'm just not seeing it.




No. They probably were not aware that someone would sue because they didn't make a point to *prove* that their employees were allowed to take breaks and lunches on time. That's the issue here, right? It's not like 116,000 Walmart employees were asking to take their lunch each day and their managers told them no every day, and those same 116,000 employees then asked for an hours pay instead and their managers denied them that pay for two years straight and finally the employees decided to sue the company.




Depends on how you define "everyone". A "handful" of former employees started the suit in 2001. It didn't become a class action until 2003. So yeah. I think that 116,000 minus "a handful" is pretty close to "everyone" in this case. It's certainly more correct to assume that in most cases, these employees did not mention or demand that lunch hour pay (and in most cases were probably not aware of the change in law), then to assume that they all did, all demanded pay, and were all told to stuff it.


Every single statement I've seen indicates it went the other way. Employees worked through lunches as needed and when needed because that's what hourly employees do. They didn't demand pay for that because most weren't aware of the law, and probably most didn't care that much about it because they were ok with taking a later lunch or skipping it. In the vast majority of cases, it really was an after the fact thing. Unless you can show otherwise, I'm going to assume that most of those 116,000 employees did *not demand penalty pay for missed lunches until after the class action suit got rolling. It's just far more likely.[/quote]

It is. Really, how hard is that to understand. That's what the law requires. One would hope they'd develop policy to make sure they were following the legal requirements for doing work in that state.

Since we're playing the "Gee, where *I* worked..." game, the company I work for now employs several hundred people, most of whom are hourly workers. We have, on site, time sheets and cards for everyone going back ten years. After ten years, we have the records microfiched and stored by some data storage company or another and the paper records are shredded. The comptroller of the company could literally go back to the 60's and tell you when people worked, when they took lunch, etc. You're going to say as a defense that WalMart isn't capable of doing the same? Bullsh[/i]it. No doubt the corporation hires more people but, per store, they can't have much more, if more at all. When I worked chain retail, we punched a clock for breaks and lunches. Breaks on the top half, lunches on the bottom half since lunches weren't paid. Again, the cards were all stored and archived in case they ever needed to prove anything and you [i]had to take your off-time unless you wanted to catch sh[/i]it. When I worked hourly for some insurance outfit, we punched a clock (technically, we swiped a card) and all our breaks and lunches were recorded and stored electronicly. Missing a break or lunch was a punishable offense in that no-nonsense, corporate HR department sort of way. Likewise, my stint in fast food, timesheets from when I worked as a laborer and, of course, all my Master Control timesheets were stored as a matter of FCC record. I've never, ever worked a business in an hourly position that didn't keep permanent records of my comings and goings. And, except for the exceptions I noted the other day, they [i]all had mandatory break/lunch policies.

If no place you ever worked was capable of keeping track or enforcing scheduling, all I can say is you must have worked for some damn incompentant businesses. Likewise, if WalMart isn't capable of keeping track and enforcing their scheduling, they must suck pretty damn hard. You can sit and say "Oh, well ALL businesses do this or that" but I have yet to see that played out in the real world.

Again, WalMart either failed to keep records of when their employees were taking lunches/breaks or else they simply didn't have records because the breaks/lunches weren't happening. You can try to pretend that everyone does it, but that's just you pulling guesses out of your ***.

Well apparently Wal-Mart had some interweb troubles as of this morning. While viewing the Planet of the Apes DVD page you are given an option, something along the lines of "People who bought this, also got this." When you would click on the link the item list was books and videos about Martin Luther King Jr and Black history.

oops.

When I worked at Opryland Hotel, they were one of the fanatical ones about making you take a break. We had to have two 15 minute paid breaks and 30-45 minute unpaid lunch break. If we didn't take those breaks, we could be written up or even fired. Only in extreme cases were we allowed to skip (such as the hotel being overbooked and we were too busy).

Opryland had to be like this since it's such a huge hotel and they used to get hit hard by the labor board.

There you go, all 5 stages of grief in emoticon form. It's so hard to be 6.3



Edited, Fri Jan 6 10:02:26 2006 by xythex

god, you are such a dweeb.

Die.

Chipping in that Blockbuster is another large, national, retail chain that is extremely **** and meticulous about taking breaks and punching in/out for them.


Not that we needed any more evidence against Gbaji's B.S. in this thread.