As an hourly worker, time clock records determine how much you receive in each paycheck. Your compensation can change from week to week based on your schedule, which can make it easy for you to overlook discrepancies between the hours you work and what your employer pays you.
Employers often seek to take advantage of the unpredictable income earned by hourly workers. Thousands of businesses every year engage in intentional wage theft by depriving hourly workers of compensation for their work.
According to data from 2021, wage theft costs hourly workers at least $15 billion in earned but unpaid wages every year. How do you determine if you are a victim of wage theft?
Maintain and compare time clock records
The quickest way to determine if your employer has adjusted your time clock records to avoid paying you the full amount is to keep your own records of when you clock in and out for each shift.
Although it can be tedious, maintaining those records and comparing them to the paycheck that you receive could help you show that you didn’t receive payment for the full amount of time that you worked.
Document inappropriate company policies
Wage theft doesn’t always involve a company altering time clock records. Sometimes, companies do little to hide how they steal from workers. If your boss trained you to come in early for unpaid work before your shift or if the company has a no-overtime policy that they enforce by not paying you for hours worked beyond 40 while still scheduling you for that many hours, their policies may be a way to unfairly deny you the compensation that you deserve.
If your employer has engaged in these practices while training you or issuing your paycheck, they may have done the same thing to numerous coworkers. A wage and hour claim can have a lot more impact on a company’s policies when numerous people band together to hold their employer accountable for denying them appropriate hourly wages.
Taking action when you discover that you are a victim of wage theft can compensate you for the time you worked and compel your employer to change their practices.