California High Court Rules Starbucks Must Pay for Off-The-Clock Work

The disparity is important to point out. Companies -- many, speaking in general -- will go through contortions and "chain of command anger transmission" over any overtime, and efforts to avoid same.

Likewise, efforts to keep employees below the number of clocked hours that would qualify them for benefits. (Some places, this is or used to be 30 hours / week.)

On the other side of the coin, though, many employees have to buffer their time to make sure they don't clock in a second late. (And, once you're there ahead of shift, often you will be asked or expected to "help out" with something, on an "impromptu basis". This also uses personal loyalty to effect unclocked work; your co-workers may be your friends, and how can you say no to them when they could use the help? When actually, if the place is short-handed prior to your shift start, this is a workforce and scheduling problem on the part of the employer.)

And, for example, employees have to struggle between providing the expected level of customer support and patience, with lingering or last-minute customers -- which takes away from overlapping scheduled closing preparations -- while not (officially, at least) going over the mandated hours limit completing the delayed closing.

Businesses try to squeeze out every second of possible idle time, while shoving the responsibility and expense for any variations that cause overages, onto the employees.

In the "salaried" pay domain, in the U.S., many employees are required to be present 40 hours / week, even when things are slack. If they perform better and get their workload done early, they are required to stick around like an hourly employee (and may get more impromptu work assigned, as a "reward").

But, when demand is higher or a crunch hits, they are expected to stay as much longer as it takes -- for no additional pay.

The benefits of a salaried position's fixed pay rate, accumulate mostly to the employer. Any actual schedule flexibility for the employee, devolves to their manager and HR. Who may try to be "fair" (and, as I've seen, often more senior management and HR policy hamstring immediate managers in doing this) or who may play favorites -- or just try to make themselves look better with the appearance of a "dedicated", "hard-driving" staff -- that they've "obviously motivated".

In the U.S., we have a lot of overall wealth. We could make a lot of lives better, spending a bit of it on more appropriate staffing. But we don't.

And, no one will act in a way that makes them "less competitive" (e.g. "higher costs"), unless there's a common requirement -- a level playing field -- one that has effective teeth.

THAT'S what 40 hours, and laws and regulations about overages, are meant to be. Compete -- that's fine. Just, you can't -- none of you -- step over this line, where we define employee abuse as starting.

And why do we have government enforcement? (And unions, etc.) Because it's awfully hard for an individual employee to fight a business, with its much more substantial resources and influence.

(Also, there is already tremendous complaint about lawsuits and torts and... Does anyone really want more of that? Arguably, many businesses would rather have common standards defined and enforced. Less legal hassle -- and, if everyone has to abide by them, still a level playing field on which to compete.)

AND NOW, add a world economy to the mix, with vastly differing standards.

What does that do to your domestic labor marketplace? (This is a rhetorical question.)

Back to this case and the U.S. I'm glad circumstances like these are getting called out and addressed. People need to think more about these matters, not less.

The short excerpt you can read for free says this is more about stuff like the two minutes between clocking out at closing time and locking the door on your way out. It might be wage theft in some sense but isn’t the same thing as requiring hours of unpaid overtime. On the other hand, I suspect the part of the article you can’t read for free is about an employer who tried to cover a substantial amount of work under this exemption and now the court has to ruin things for everybody to prevent abuses.

This should also be a crime.

I would suspect that the marketing cost of lowering wages by 1% is far more than the money saved by lowering wages by 1%.

>If you're having employees track the time that they work, it's weird to ask them to clock out before doing a little bit of end-of-day work.

"weird" isn't the word I'd use. There needs to be a word for fraud that nets the fraudster not very much money because they are defrauding someone who already has very little.

To me, that seems especially economically destructive, as you are transferring money from someone with little (who therefore places a high marginal value on dollars) to an entity that has much (and therefore has a lower marginal value on dollars.) - I mean, on top of the usual distortion and value loss caused by fraud.

It's a commonly held misconception that businesses must raise prices by the same percentage that wages rise.

Wages and benefits are probably around 20% of the cost of running a coffee shop. A simple example P&L:

  Sales      60000
  Rent, COGS 25000
  Labor      12000
  Op Exp      9000
  G&A         5000
  Taxes       2000
  ----------------
  Net Income  7000

So if you take wages up 1.0% to $12,120, you only need to increase revenue by 0.2% to maintain the same net income.

It must not be a rounding error then. Here in Korea, I see the Starbucks employees sticking around well before opening and closing times doing all sorts of preparations and cleaning. I always wondered whether it was considered part of their shift.

Is it? They already charge the amount they think meets the perfect balance of "as much as possible" and "not so much that less people buy".

Your frappuccino would also be cheaper if it were made by slave labourers, chained to their workplace.

How about we pay people for work that they do?

My frappuccino costs exactly $0....

People willing to pay $5+ for 20oz flavored water are not going to stop going because the price goes up by $0.05...

Starbucks is already MASSIVELY overpriced to begin with