6 years later, this still angers me

Fingerprint Bundy clock. The way of the future I suppose

Something that has always bugged me in my working life happened fairly early on in it. Its one thing to know that the company you work for is stingy beyond belief, its another to KNOW they will screw their employees willingly.

I've never worked for the government, so my only work experience is in private enterprise, which I split (mentally) into "big" business and "little business".

Little business doesn't neccessarily only mean "small/family" business either. I would put all of the retail sector into "little" business. And there are some companies that are floundering in between, having neither quite made it into "big" business category, but they're trying.

When I was at school however, one of my first jobs, as with so many others, was in the retail sector. I think perhaps because the "bottom line" is so "easy" to see in retail, they feel comfortable being so much stingier with their employees.

For years I thought I was the ducks guts getting a Calendar and a box of chocolates at christmas every year. The Christmas party was a pay-your-own kind of affair, and essentially only the full time workers chose to attend. It never occured to me that the second largest Supermarket line in the country could probably afford something better.

Then I moved onto my next job, and we got jewelery as an incentive at christmas. You made budget, you got something pretty to wear. I figured this made sense, the buy price for the stuff compared to the retail I figured they could afford it. We also got, SHOCK, $10 per head toward some sort of christmas get together. Nevermind the fact that due to the crazy hours we were open over christmas, the only time we could actually manage to go to dinner was at 9.30 PM on Thursday night after late night shopping, and we all had to back in at 8am. (well that didn't stop us, we just didn't go to bed and had a massive bender! Good times)

I managed a couple of good, free pieces of jewlery those years (hello solid gold bangle), but nothings like proper cash eh?

My Next job I moved into the "real world" with a big, fully paid for party at Star City Casino. It was a lavish affair, fully catered, fully boozed, and the employees felt entitled to their party. This was a world of expensing lunches and activites to the miscellaneous category of "Staff Morale".

By this time, I'd met me now husband, who introduced me to another corporate world entirely. A world of hundreds of dollars spent on bar tabs so that people could just get wasted (not responsible I know) and not seeming to have any relation to work at all. Corporate Amex's flying like so many green leaves falling from trees.



So I find it interesting that I still can't let go of a practice in that retail job at the start. I worked in the Cash Office, where all the pay roll was done. We had a bundy clock to log the times everyone started and finished. Everyday a report was printed, detailing the differences in the times everyone clocked in and out, compared to what they should have worked. It would be say 40 entries long each day generally. 40 people who had clocked in either more than 7 minutes early, or clocked out more than 7 minutes late. 7 minutes is the standard used to pay people you see. If you clock in with more than 7 minutes difference you get paid for a full 15. Well, so you'd think.


Everyday the Office manager would go through this report and if the difference was more than half an hour, the dept manager of the person would be asked to either explain and approve the difference or deny the difference. Almost invariably though, the entire report would consist of remarks such as "Chatting" "Smoking" "having coffee" as reasons cited by the Office Manager for why the extra time was being denied. I would then go into the payroll system and manually adjust these entries to reflect a clock-off on the hour (or whenever they were MEANT to have started/finished).


No doubt if this wasn't done, there would be loads of staff taking advantage of the system which is I'm sure why she was so jaded. But it was galling to have to do your own clock-ins or clock-offs when you KNEW you weren't chatting, you were counting your drawer, but you started a few minutes later than you should have because a customer demanded you serve them NOW. For the checkout people, this is mostly what is was. Not walking up to grab the stuff from your locker before you clocked out.

This is STILL bugging me.