An update sent to Sprawl-Busters from a Massachusetts Attorney Robert Bonsignore, suggests that Wal-Mart is facing a serious class action lawsuit because of its prevalent “time shaving” violations against its workers. Bonsignore charges that Wal-Mart has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from its workers across the country. “Time shaving” is a form of theft in which the company fails to properly credit its employees for all the time they worked. According to Atty. Bonsignore, “Our case is going well. We have filed in a number of states and have had interest expressed in several more. We have proof that Wal-Mart secretly manipulated the time records of their hourly rate employees, robbing them of about $1,000,000 per year per store. We can prove they did this through objective electronic evidence from 1997 on. This conduct is not only despicable, un-American and anti-American way, it also provided them with an unfair advantage over local small to mid-size businesses, and allowed them to push them out as they came in. Wal-Mart also deprived local and national governments of related tax revenue. Our case shows that Wal-Mart is damaging to our country.” Bonsignore has filed lawsuits in at least 13 states, and has been requested to file in several more. According to one complaint developed in Utah, Wal-Mart is being sued “for its systematic failure to pay its hourly employees for all time worked, as well as Wal-Mart’s failure to provide employees with accurate itemized wage statements as required by law.” The class action case says that “the allegations herein are supported by recently discovered evidence, including the videotaped admission of a Wal-Mart executive and Wal-Mart memoranda, showing that Wal-Mart deleted thousands of hours of time worked from employees’ payroll records during the relevant time frame — a practice known in the industry as “time shaving” — and that Wal-Mart required hourly employees to work hours that were not recorded in payroll records — a practice known in the industry as working “off-the-clock.” Plaintiff believes Wal-Mart perpetrated this practice in at least five different ways: (1) altering employee records to make it appear as if the employees’ workdays ended one minute after their meal period concluded, effectively denying employees their pay for the three or four hours of work they performed after the meal period (i.e., the “one-minute clock out” practice); (2) deleting overtime hours that employees worked in excess of forty hours (i.e., “the 40 hour club”); (3) deleting employee punches so that employees would not be paid for an entire day or afternoon of work; (4) altering employee time records to make it appear as if employees took meal periods when in fact they did not, resulting in unauthorized deductions from the employees’ paychecks; and (5) failing to pay employees for all reported time. Hourly employees were never and could not have been aware of these wrongful time shaving practices because Wal-Mart wrongfully and willfully concealed such facts from them… In addition, data recently produced by Defendants in similar cases in other jurisdictions revealed that hourly employees are commonly required to work “off-the-clock.” As a result of Wal-Mart’s wrongful and illegal conduct, the plaintiffs seek redress on behalf of all persons who are or who have been employed by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and Sam’s West, Inc. as an hourly employee at any time on or after January 1, 1997. Such redress includes payment of all money wrongfully withheld, plus applicable liquidated damages and penalties, interest, attorneys’ fees and costs. The Plaintiffs also seek injunctive relief, disgorgement of all profits that Defendants wrongfully obtained as a result of their failure to pay hourly employees for all regular and overtime hours worked, and punitive damages sufficient to deter Defendants from continuing the practice of stealing wages from hourly employees.”
For further information about these “time shaving” cases, contact Atty.Robert Bonsignore at: [email protected].
