They even steal our crumbs

Bosses who scratch out overtime or cleaning time

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.

They even steal our crumbs

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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.

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 building. 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 foreman. 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 dumbass, 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 bullshit 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 happens. 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 documentation 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 won't.

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'

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From Firebrand No 3

Firebrand is a newspaper for rank and file workers in Portland. It's aims are building the power of rank and file workers and fighting the bureaucrats, bosses, and politicians who are our enemies.

To view the paper online, go to www.nafederation.org or download the PDF version from http://www.nafederation.org/issuethree.pdf

Firebrand is a publication of the Firebrand Collective, a member collective of the Northwest Anarchist Federation.