Starbucks Can't Screw Workers Out Of Their Paychecks Anymore

Recently, a judge ruled that Starbucks had to start paying their employees for all of the work they do. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this issue.

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Recently, a judge ruled that Starbucks had to start paying their employees for all of the work they do. That seems pretty logical, doesn't it? Starbucks can't require employees, for example, to work off the clock. This scam, working off the clock, you know, it just is endless. We see it with Walmart. We see with all the big box stores, and it's just stealing. It's theft. Your time as a worker has a value, so I'm going to steal from you in asking you to do stuff without being paid. Now, you take that, and you take it over thousands of people, and at the end of the year you've made tens and hundreds of millions of dollars by stealing from your workers. Now here you've got Starbucks. I don't know what it is about Starbucks. I don't know. People go to Starbucks, and they get to work their computer because they got an internet service.

The PR has got this brand and this image that, "We're Starbucks. We do it right. You don't have to worry about us. We're going to be above board." They're criminals. I mean, this is criminal conduct. There is no question to me. Now, with under the legislature, they may be able to say, "Well, it's not technically criminal." I think it could be articulated. It's technically, but I've handled these cases just so you know. I handled the one against Walmart, was one of the biggest actually pay theft cases in the country. So, I'm real familiar with what they're doing here. Time is money, and they're trying to steal money from workers.

Well, I think that's the best way to put it. You know, when you have a couple of thousand stores throughout the country, but you only ask two or three people every day at the end of their shift. They've already clocked out. They're about to go home. "Hey, by the way, can you go empty the trash cans real quick? Just real quick. It's 10 minutes." So, you're stealing 30 minutes a day from three different people, but you're doing it at a thousand stores, or two thousand stores, in the case of fast food restaurants who are also horrible with this.

This is the number one form of wage theft in the United States, and of course, the average person isn't going to say, "Well, they took 30 minutes of my life this month. There's not much I can do about it." But, there is. There's some big class actions about all this going on, and if you've found yourself in that situation, you need to report it. You need to look into who is handling these major cases. If you've got documentation, if you've got video tape or recordings, keep those, hang onto them, because this is important.

Let me tell you how this got started. In 1961 or thereabouts, maybe a little bit later, the courts came up with this concept called the de minimus time, and that is, they say, "Well, sometimes it's okay for an employer to do this, but it should be kept at an absolute minimum." Okay? It's called the de minimus doctrine. I think that's the way it's referred to. So, the de minimus doctrine says, "Yeah, you can do this a little bit. You can fudge a little bit, but you can't do it a lot." Starbucks is doing it a lot, just like Walmart did a lot. Just like all these big box stores do. Here's what they do.

They say, "John, or Mary, you're really doing well here. I really think there's a management position for you here if you keep shining." Well, management, keep shining means keep doing all this stuff I'm asking you to do off the clock because it makes me look better as a manager, because we're getting all this stuff done, and you're keeping the cost down for my store. It's all about money. Each store manager has got to report, right? Store manager A wants to say, "Wow, look at the money I saved." Well, yeah, he saved it on the back of his workers.

You know, it's funny you tell that story because as you're saying, that light bulb goes off in my head. I worked at a chain restaurant when I was in college. That exact same scenario played itself out, and it actually played itself out the same way you just said. I was a busboy. I'd finished my shift.