The Wages of Sin

The particular Sin of which we speak is the Sin of not paying Wages -- a tempting outlet for all that is chintzy and bad in the shrivelled hearts of restaurant owners and all manner of managers in the service industry.

Everything centres around time clocks and their use by one of my present employers, which we shall call the Haunted House. This appellation is appropriate enough: the alliterative starting consonants match the actual, horrid, place's to a tee (or an H, as it were); working there is actually a pretty frightening experience; and, with most haunted houses being mansions of a sort, I found myself inspired by this passage from the institution's comically illiterate handbook of (haunted) house policies:

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Customer Complaints:

• If a customer has a complaint do your best to solve the problem in a calm and friendly manor.

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I suppose the idea is to remove from the haunted manor to a kinder, gentler environment less likely to intimidate the guest. Sound enough advice, I think. But I digress.

Before I go on, though, I must stress a rule in effect for the remainder of this post. I love little bits of Latin, and the bracketed "sic" is one of my favourites: what better way to one-up whoever it is you're quoting!? Be that as it may, sheer exhaustion prevents me from so annotating any excerpt from the place's house policies. I think "[sic]" would appear with greater frequency than the letter E. Whew. And now, to the point!

For that point, we shall look to the authoritative source itself:

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Clock-in/out:

• Servers should never punch in before they have received their first table, first person scheduled for morning/evening shift, or management instructs you to do so.
• Workers should be dressed and ready to work 15 minutes before their scheduled time.
• You must puch out before you begin your cash-out.

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These are interesting policies indeed. On the one hand, the Haunted House is seizing the authority to compel it's employees to physically be on its premises and ready for work at a particular time. On the other, it states categorically that it will not pay the employees for that time (employees of the HH receive wages only for time on the clock -- and that if they're lucky...). In practice, I've seen people sit around (myself included) for up to two hours in their HH monkey suit, ready lest any scintilla of work should come their way. In the worst cases, they are then sent home without having punched in at all; it's "too slow".

Cash outs are probably less of a net burglar of wait staff wages than pure waiting to wait (though I'd not stake my life on it!), but here again the situation is quite clear: servers are obliged to be on the premises performing work -- in this case, reconciling records in order to remit to the big bosses precisely what is owed from the shift's sales -- but are not being paid for it.

All this not paying is so very curious that we now turn from the amusing stab at written English that is the Haunted House house policy book and head to the drier and so much less entertaining legalese of a document known only as "Employment Standards Act, 2000: Ontario Regulation 285/01 (Amended to O.Reg. 92/06) -- Exemptions, Special Rules, and Establishment of Minimum Wage". Whew! What a mouthful. It appears there's a little section about "work deemed to be performed". Let's take a look.

When work deemed to be performed
6. (1) Subject to subsection (2), work shall be deemed to be performed by an employee for an employer,

1. where work is,
   1. permitted or suffered to be done by the employer, or
   2. in fact performed by an employee although a term of the contract of employment expressly forbids or limits hours of work or requires the employer to authorize hours of work in advance;
2. where the employee is not performing work and is required to remain at the place of employement,
   1. waiting or holding himself or herself ready for call to work or
   2. on a rest or break-time other than an eating period. O.Reg. 285/01, s. 6(1).

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Those are my italics, of course. Now, it goes without saying that the actual text of the law requires employers to pay employees for work that is "deemed to be performed". As minimum wage employees, servers have to look no farther than Part IX -- 23. (4) of the actual text of the act itself. The legal position of the ghouls in our sinful Haunted House is starting to appear ethereal, nay, diaphanous.

Time runs short, here. I actually must be at work soon. But not paid, you see! One final bit of analysis. The end of the house policies has this statement:

I give the [Haunted House] permission to deduct my paycheque for uniforms and, N.T. cards, and realize that my paycheque can be deducted or held for cash out/cash box shortages.

I have read, understand, and agree with the above [Haunted House] policies!

This is followed by two horizontal lines, one on which we are expected to sign our names and the other to receive the date. Now we can already see that the document is illegal, so the Haunted House has no legal grounds for forcing us to sign it; furthermore, I have grave doubts that any of it is enforceable for this same reason. Further study of the Act suggests that even the closing paragraph is crooked. If you take a look at Part V (pertaining to Payment of Wages), you see that an employer simply cannot withhold wages because of "faulty work" (which is what a cash shortage would be, presumably) and that on no condition can an employer withhold wages without either written, specific, authorization of the employee or authorization under a court order or a statute of Ontario or Canada (I'm no expert on what statutes exist, I confess...).

It doesn't appear as though a general "permission to withold" is specific enough (in the first case) and, in the second, that an employer can compel the employee to give that permission. What it does appear is that the Haunted House's house policies are a whole lot of hokum, or worse.

The endemic flaws in management at the House that make resorting to foisting such cheap and felonious schemes onto generally unsuspecting and unsophisticated minimum wage employees appear so attractive are the subject of another day; simply put, an overhaul in management style, hiring, expectations of employees, and so on would translate into savings that someone who'd steal a quarter of an hour's wage at $6.75 on the hour couldn't even dream of.

In any case, I can't in good conscience sign onto these house policies, nor would for all the tea in China. I haven't yet decided what I'll do (maybe I should consult some tea leaves?) but do something I shall. Whether the Haunted House ends up reaping the whirlwind or simply swallowing a lump of pride is to be determined when I've ruled upon the Wages of Sin!