Surely if your business is only viable with coerced labour then it isn't a viable business?
Or maybe if you need employees help to run it without pay them then they can be given a share of the business so they can benefit from the future returns that their efforts provide?
Overtime rules say that if you work overtime (and the definition of overtime varies by state), they have to pay you 1.5x your salary. In this case, they were only paying their regular salary.
No one was working for free.
edit concrete example: Blockbuster Video. Shop closed at 11, the time I stopped getting paid. At that point I had to lock up and do accounts stuff, clean, and general admin (plugging the CC machine into the phone line so it could phone home and get lists of updated cards to watch for) etc. Would usually take about half an hour ISTR.
The worst part is it was probably just some shitty manager making 35k a year looking for a good year end review or a tiny bonus.
There is no way the corporate policy was unpaid overtime.
The only time you are allowed to work unpaid overtime is if your job is considered an 'exempt' position. There are a number of rules that have to be met for a job to be considered expempt, including a high enough salary, autonomy over your work, and a few other rules as well.
They expected us to show up 10-15 minutes before the start of our shift to open and if we were on the later shift, they expected us to work 10-15 minutes after the end of the shift to close.
I refused to work for free.
I have never regretted losing that job.
Not worth your time, nor return on time invested.
These labor boards tend to be pretty vocal about defending the rights of employees. However, employees don't always know to invoke their help, and they don't have unlimited resources.
A company not paying wages for time that employees have worked is a pretty open-and-shut case for them to handle.
Labor boards don't give a "stern talking to," they investigate violations of the law, issue fines, and even force companies to pay back wages, with interest, and other forms of compensation directly to employees. I just did a Google and this first thing that came up "Walt Disney Co. has agreed to provide $3.8 million in back wages to thousands of hotel- and timeshare-resort workers after the U.S. Labor Department investigated violations of minimum wage, overtime and record keeping rules."
I once reported a bank to the CPFB (not a labor board but similar) and it took 10 minutes to fill out an online form and they took care of investigating the issue for me. Ended up getting the $500 I was owed as well as an apology.
My co-workers might have gotten more out of it but since I got fired and they didn't, they should have been the ones to call.
It's just as bad as taking money out of an employee's paycheck, and way more corrosive to society than petty theft.
When I was ready to leave, I filed a Department of Labor complaint and got a few thousand bucks.
[EDIT:] That isn't even the worst thing here. Why should any hourly worker not get time-and-a-half, just because they're doing work that makes food less perishable? Is this some ancient tradition of screwing over the hourly workers who are least likely to have any other options?
If the food spoils, no one's going to force "Maine residents" to eat it. Rather, the person who hires and schedules workers will lose some money. Next time he'll do a better job of scheduling. Or maybe he'll go out of business, and his competitor will do a better job of scheduling. Since she's not such a skinflint, she'll pay both the fishermen and the packers more. Then she'll charge the customer more, but that's OK because the low-cost competitor just went out of business. If fish costs too much, then the government can subsidize it.
Agricultural subsidies and time-and-a-half are both more widely established Chestertonian traditions than this weird northeastern "screw the packers" thing some lobbyist dreamed up. Trust the market, dude.
I bet a large amount of companies are not viable due to dumping even more tasks on employees each year and also expecting unpaid work.
Even in just the last ten years it seems so much burden has shifted to lower rung employees. I can't imagine what business will expect ten years from now.
We fight against it, and have won certain protections in the laws of some countries, but that desire is permanently a part of the human psyche! Don't ever be surprised when you see it.
Think about it from the opposite direction: a business owner could state I have never fully understood the insistence that employees get paid when they are using the restroom.
It would be insanity.
I attribute a lot of this to the unreasonable demands from some unions to create job definitions that are impractical ("driver cannot be the person who loads truck"). Fortunately, unions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.