A-Infos (en) US, NAF* Firebrand #3 - They Even Steal Our Crumbs by Patrick Star

  We trade our labor for wages, its how we survive. The crumbs
we get, our wages, bosses even steal those from us. The bastards
swindle us by lying about the hours we put in on the clock.
Whether it's by deleting a half hour here and there when they
do payroll or even more boldly and miserly, they tell us to keep
working even when we've punched out. Shaving time, that's what
some folks call it. I call it stealing our crumbs.
>>>>> We've got to get >>>>> organized at >>>>>  work if we're
>>>>> going to fight >>>>> back against our >>>>>  shitty bosses.
  My cousin works at Wal-Mart. At my family get together for
Christmas he was telling me how
the managers would tell him and his
co-workers to scratch out the half-
hour of overtime they all worked.
Why? Cause the higher-ups at Wal-
Mart don't want the store my cousin
works at to go over budget. So what do the lower down
managers do? They cut time off of my cousin and his co-
workers time cards. To the manager, this may mean some
bonus that'll pay for his vacation to Hawaii or some shit
like that. To my cousin, that half-hour of overtime meant
changing the oil in his car or a tank of gas that would get
him to work that week.
 At first I just though, 'oh well, that sounds like something
those tight-wads at Wal-Mart would do.' Then it happened
to me.
  Normally at my job we have an electronic time clock we
punch in and out of. But we only had that time-clock
when we were working on the main house we were build-
ing. When we had to pull off that job for a while because
the concrete and HVAC folks got behind, we used time
cards.
  As an apprentice carpenter, I got paired up with the fore-
man. He was just like any other foreman out there, a
sniveling bastard who sucked up to the boss however he
could. Hell, he even thought he was on the same level
with the boss. Fucking dumb-ass, he drives an F-150 and
the boss drives an F-350, there's a reason for that. Yet he
still would do anything to help the boss out, no matter
who he was fucking over to do it.
  In construction, you get paid for rolling up tools at the
end of the day. It's part of cleaning up. Well, this shit-head
foreman would tell me and my co-
workers at the end of the day how
many hours we had worked. If we
worked from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and
took a half hour lunch break he
would say we only worked eight
hours, instead of eight and a half.
   One day I got fed up with him
stealing that half hour from me and
just yelled out before he could how
many hours we actually worked,
wrote that down on my time card
and then got in my car and drove
home. The next day, when he and I
were working by ourselves, he told
me I had to scratch out that half hour.
Even though all my co-workers thought
it was bull-shit that he stole that half hour
from us, but we never stood up to
him together and told him to get
his shit straight. Collectively, me
and my co-workers probably lost
a few thousand dollars in wages
because of that foreman. To me
that meant not being able to buy
new work boots and having
soaking wet feet every day at
work. To my co-worker, that
meant not being able to buy his
kid a uniform for the JV baseball
team.
  Well, we all know this shit hap-
pens. But what the hell can we
do? The best suggestion I've
heard is to document the hours
you work on a separate time
sheet and to document how many hours the boss said you
worked. If we can get our co-workers to do the same
thing, then when we have a couple weeks of documenta-
tion that our bosses are shaving time off our time cards,
we can all show him the time cards we kept. Who knows
what the boss' response will be. Maybe she'll make things
right and tell the manager or foreman that they need to
stop shaving time, maybe she wont.
  There's always ways to get the time back. Stealing from
work, fudging time cards when the manager doesn't know
how many hours you worked, bullshitting around the
time-clock for five minutes everyday before punching out,
or just working slower while the manager isn't around.
  These are only temporary solutions. We've got to get
organized at work if we're going to fight back against our
shitty bosses. We've got to get creative. Most importantly,
we've got to have the guts to take a stand. It's not easy and
I personally still have problems getting shit started at
work. For more ideas on what we can do to get organized
for our interests at work, check out the article titled
'autonomous workplace committees' on page six.
----------------------------------
* Firebrand is a publication of the Firebrand Collective,
a member collective of the Northwest Anarchist Federation
(NAF).
FIREBRAND - A VOICE FOR PORTLANDS RANK AND FILE WORKERS
ISSUE 3 Spring/Summer 2005 Federation)

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