Boss Refused To Pay A Teen Employee Overtime—So He Stopped Working More Than 40 Hours
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What seems to be true all too often is that when a boss tells an employee he’s no longer going to pay him overtime, he doesn’t really mean that he wants the employee to stop working overtime. What he wants is for the employee to work overtime without getting paid for it.
Thankfully, employees are often too smart to fall for this.
In this story, one teenager who works at a hardware store had a boss who told him he wasn’t going to pay him for overtime anymore. The teen agreed to that, but the boss clearly didn’t understand the consequences.
Keep reading to see how the story plays out.
Won’t Pay OT? Well Then…
I was a teenager working in a retail hardware store. This was the kind of old-fashioned store where the customer was greeted with, “May I help you?” and then work with them one-on-one to make sure to sell them what they needed/wanted.
The boss was a boozer.
He’d come to work in the morning, hungover and surly. He’d leave early to go hang out with his buddies at the Moose Lodge and drink.
It was hell working for him, but I stuck around because I truly loved the hardware store environment and learning from the tradesmen that were our customers, and as a 17-year-old, I relished in the role as a “manager.”
He was young but not dumb.
In the summer I worked fulltime and then some.
One week I had put in over 60 hours.
He came to me and tells me because I am a teen, I am not allowed to be paid overtime.
I challenged him on this because, hey, I’m not totally stupid.
He agreed to let his boss have his way.
He finally tells me he’ll pay me, but he was no longer going to pay me OT, no matter how many hours I worked.
I agreed and said no more OT.
CUE THE MC
My scheduled hours did not change. Opening to closing, six days a week, twelve hours a day.
The store closed early that week.
On day four, I closed the store at the exact moment I reached 40 hours on my timecard, sent the part-timers home, and did not open the store the next morning.
At about eleven in the morning, I got a furious phone call from him. “Why the heck aren’t you here? I had customers lined up in the parking lot!”
“Because you told me not to work overtime and I’ve already worked 40 hours this week, don’t you remember that conversation?”
The boss caved.
“Get your butt here, now!!!”
“Am I getting paid OT?”
He yelled, cussed, and threatened, but I stuck with my guns and got my OT. I made good money that summer (for a teenaged kid).
As a sidenote, the job ended not too long after. Boss was throwing away his profits through his alcoholism. He sold out and moved to Florida. Years later I learned he had died of cirrhosis.
Good for him for refusing to work overtime unless he was paid for it.
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Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.
Here’s some praise for what he did.
Another person thinks this was a wake up call for the boss.
Yes, this is a good point.
If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about an employee who decided to push back against time micromanagement.
This is probably true.
His boss told him he wasn’t getting paid overtime. His boss never said not to work overtime. OP did the right thing by inferring that he wasn’t supposed to work overtime since he wasn’t going to get paid for it; although, clearly he realized that’s not what the boss meant.
Don’t expect employees to show up if they’re not getting paid.
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