Comments on: Employee “loses track of time” due to disability

By: DensityDuck

DensityDuck — Tue, 29 May 2012 19:48:02 +0000

Biggar: It’s a “workers’ rights” thing, an attempt to ensure that employers don’t force their workers to go flat-out for eight hours in a row. A result of the bureaucratic-primacy mindset that anything which isn’t banned should be compulsory.

By: Mark Biggar

Mark Biggar — Tue, 29 May 2012 18:07:42 +0000

Mandatory break times (enforced to the minute) for employees that deal with customers is insane. BTW, the is time to talk from your station to the break room on or off time? What is the employee suppose to do, drop a customer cold at break time (bad customer relations), refuse to serve a customer if it’s to close (how to determine that) to break time because they might go over (also bad customer relations and wastes real employee work time). There really need to be looser rules of customer facing employees.

By: DensityDuck

DensityDuck — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:42:58 +0000

Amusing protest idea: One day, all the workers at a Wal-Mart say “hello” to a customer one time during their lunch break. Book it as “time worked”, and then report it to the government as “required to work during mandated lunch break”. (If Wal-Mart fires you instead, file a “wrongful termination” lawsuit.)

By: DEM

DEM — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:52:22 +0000

Thanks Walter — it is as I expected. Employment law continues to morph into a game of “heads I win tails you lose” in favor of employees.

By: Walter Olson

Walter Olson — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:31:07 +0000

On the extreme personnel practices that employers adopt (especially in California) to avoid meal break liability under wage and hour law, see this post and this one. Note that in each case (including this latest) the company feels constrained to fire the workers because they are putting in too much work, not too little.

By: DEM

DEM — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:54:00 +0000

The SacBee article refers to her “disability” several times but nevers says what it is, other than to say it makes her lose track of time. is absent-mindedness now a protected “disability” under the ADA?

One also wonders why Target would have a borderline no-tolerance policy towards employees who are late taking breaks. I am going to guess that failing to ensure employees take all of their breaks would also open Taregt up to liability. It’s rather easy to imagine a nation-wide class action alleging that Target failed to enforce break times and is therefore liable to pay overtime to a huge class of plaintiffs who claim that their mamangers did not enforce break times at their stores.

By: Jane

Jane — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:38:23 +0000

16 year employee fired “because she was late taking a meal break three times in 18 months” – once by three minutes. Are ALL of their other employees robots because if this was all she was guilty of, she sounds like a really great employee.