A retail worker says he was written up for taking his legally required lunch break, only to find out he’d never been paid for it in the first place. What started as a disciplinary action quickly escalated into a wage theft complaint, and now the company may be on the hook for a lot more than just one worker’s lost time.
Lunch Breaks On Paper, Not In Practice
In a recent post on Reddit’s r/antiwork, the employee explained that his retail job offers a 30-minute unpaid lunch break for shifts over six hours. But when he took that break during a busy shift, his supervisor accused him of “abandoning [his] post.”
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When he pushed back and said he was legally entitled to a break, the manager responded, “Everyone knows you’re supposed to eat at the register when it’s busy. Just keep working and log your lunch break anyway.”
“Wait… what?” the worker wrote. “So they expect me to work through lunch while still clocking out for 30 minutes?”
That comment raised a red flag. After checking his timecards, the worker realized he had been automatically clocked out for lunch even on days when he never took one. After eight months, that added up to about 60 hours of unpaid work—roughly $900.
He documented everything and filed a complaint with the labor board. That's when his manager panicked and tried to walk it all back. “My manager is now panicking and offering to ‘fix the misunderstanding’ if I drop the complaint,” the worker said.
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The post blew up, with hundreds of people chiming in, many of them outraged. “He wants to ‘fix it' because in some states you’re entitled to triple damages. Don’t back down,” one person warned.
Another noted that this kind of behavior is what sparks class action lawsuits: “If OP went to a lawyer with this, the lawyer would be asking questions like, ‘How many people work here? Have you asked anyone else if they’ve noticed the same in their timesheet?'”
The Redditor said he's not backing down. “The panic on my manager’s face was priceless. Amazing how quickly ‘company policy’ changes when the labor board gets involved,” he wrote in a follow-up.
He also added, “They tried to gaslight me at first saying I was ‘misremembering’ until I showed them the pattern in my timecards.”
Another commenter summed up the mood: “Wage theft is the largest theft in the U.S. by dollar amount. People get all worked up about shoplifting, but nothing is said about the billions stolen yearly in wage theft by sh*tty business owners.”
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