When you work retail, you grow accustomed to things like being permanently “understaffed” despite there being seemingly no effort to bring on more hands, and your constant pleas to management to hire additional hands to help shoulder the burden. All the while you’re creeping closer towards burnout: skipping breaks, working late, while having to argue with those same managers that the overtime you’re reporting is justifiable.
Your requests for a raise are similarly ignored, being consistently pushed out ad infinitum; every quarter, there’s always some new excuse for why you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer.
See, the problem is that by just getting on with it, you’ve proven it’s manageable, leaving them no cause to hire more staff and increasing baseline costs. Burnout and turnover might increase, but they are silent costs that aren’t counted on the bottom line. Even if they eventually lead to a business failing, it won’t appear on the P&L, so no one will ever notice or attribute it to a causal issue. But the brain drain and the slow decline in the quality of the work are very real.
This employee was pushed to her limit when her boss reprimanded her for taking her legally required 30-minute unpaid lunch break. According to her boss, she had let her team down by taking a break while they “needed” her. How or why there wasn’t a shift lead assigning and scheduling breaks is a mystery, and while we don’t know for certain what industry this workplace is in, it seems pretty clear that it is some kind of shift work, likely in retail or service.
If you’ve ever worked retail, you know how this goes: there’s always constant foot traffic during lunch hours, as those working office jobs in the nearby area look for something to do to fill in the time of their own lunch breaks. This means retail and service industry workers can’t ever take their own breaks at the usual lunchtime, and unless properly planned for, breaks end up getting overlooked and then missed, despite the fact that this same dance happens every day.
And then you’re stuck, again, trying to justify the fact that you’re claiming overtime for missed breaks, and eventually you either have to give up and skip your breaks and not get paid for them, or otherwise do what this employee likely did and just take your breaks whether the shift lead has told you to or not.
