California Overtime: “Why are they getting away with this?”

[Hand]

"Can you imagine being in a huge building, and they lock the doors and they have this woman who's been given enormous power over you saying over the loudspeaker that if you laugh you will not go home, and you're sweating because they've turned off the air conditioning and it's so hot in there?" asks Cathy Merino. Worse yet, neither she nor any of her fellow employees were paid overtime when they were kept after hours, in clear violation of both the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and California overtime laws.

She knows whereof she speaks, because that happened to her during the three years she worked as a beauty consultant for JCPenneys in Laguna Hills, CA.

Merino worked a full-time shift that was supposed to end when the store closed at 9:30 pm. But, she says, "They would actually force us to stay until they told us we could go home. When they closed the store, they turned off the escalators, they turned off the air conditioning; it was so hot in there that you were actually sweating. A few times they locked the doors, but they stopped doing that when some of the employees asked, "What if there's a fire? What if there's an earthquake?'

Merino and the others found that their unpaid overtime involved work they weren't hired for. She says, "We had to go through the entire store and fold all the clothes and the make sure the hangers were all the right way. We're talking three levels here, and we had to walk up the stairs because the escalators were shut off. The store gets really trashed in the course of a day. You have purses on the floor, you have shoes—we had to put everything back on the shelves."

:grr:

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