vansau said:
Former Employees Sue GameStop Over Security Checks
If you're going to impose mandatory security checks, make sure it doesn't impose on your employees' lunch breaks.
As someone who worked in retail, I can testify that things like bag checks are pretty routine when you head out for the day (or lunch, if you take your bag with you), but those usually take less than a minute. Based on a new lawsuit filed against GameStop lawsuit, though, the security checks took longer than that and happened a lot more frequently, to the point of violating California state law.
The suit alleges that GameStop's mandatory security checks didn't allow for uninterrupted and/or unrestricted breaks. That's a problem when, according to state law, employers are required to provide a 30-minute break for a meal every five hours worked, as well as a ten minute break for every four-hour shift. According to GameSpot:
The allegations are rooted in GameStop's policy of conducting mandatory security checks of employees when they take meals or breaks. According to the complaint, hourly employees are not compensated for time spent undergoing these security checks.
The suit also makes a handful of other allegations stemming from uncompensated time spent undergoing security checks. These allegations state that GameStop has failed to adequately compensate employees for work shifts that exceed eight hours, as well as not providing accurately itemized wage statements.
The suit is seeking class status, as well as an hour's pay for each day during which adequate meal and rest breaks weren't provided, plus any other damages that the court determines.
Source: <a href=http://www.gamespot.com/news/gamestop-slapped-with-workers-rights-suit-6346464>GameSpot
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Hmmm, well to put things into perspective this is a pretty typical operation nowadays. Being scandalized by this is like being amazed at the rising and setting of the sun. Having read this and watched some of the "Zero Originally" stuff responders linked, I don't think this suit will go anywhere.
When it comes to the security checks, your not considering this from the other side of the equasion. I spent years working as casino security and one of our jobs was to do these checks on employees. This included people like cage workers and drop team members, but also included people working in departments like EVS (Janitorial), the retail stories, food outlets (where I worked it's like a mall/small city in there... they call Foxwoods "The Emerald City" in fact). As security we did random bag checks, and routine ones as people entered and left the building both for concerns over terrorism, and people engaged in theft.
Now you might think that this was because we were concerned over people walking out with piles of chips or money, but really only very specific people were in a position to do that and they got extra-special attention, not to mention that they call "the Cage" a a cage for a reason, and you have to go through mantraps with doors operated from multiple locations at the very least to access most areas where the money is stored (I won't go into all the details I know about, I'm just covering the basics for the sake of arguement).
The thing is that employees will try and steal everything that is nailed down. You'd have people trying to steal vacuum cleaners, food from the cafeteria, tampons, concoms, and other vending machine items, fixtures, construction and maitnence supplies, and everything else you can think of. All of these things cost money. Of course there were actually some human concerns behind this as well, after all when your dealing with many thousand employees at any given times someone deciding they want to steal 30 cookies from the cateteria (which was free) might seem trivial since the casino could afford it, but the bottom line is that the food only comes out so fast and if someone empties out the cookies to bring home it means other people coming in on their break who want cookies won't be able to get any, which of course slots people off. You would be amazed at how many people see a free lunch and decide they want to say carry out a dozen apples in a gym bag, or 20 small bags of chips, or odd stuff like soda syrup.
What's more people are not stupid, truthfully just doing cursory searches given the size and value of items at Gamestop sounds pretty nice. People come up with better ways to hide things on themselves than that, which we've uncovered largely when things have gone wrong. This is not to mention the simple habit of arranging drops, which is where you put something of value somewhere while your working so you can collect it after your exit check. You even have teams of people working with grounds keepers and other people who go outside to set certain things up.
See, if I was going to try and bleed a Gamestop as an employee chances are I wouldn't just try and stuff some games in my bag or under my shirt, though admittedly most people are that stupid so the checks do help, and most importantly act as a deterrant, if they happen every day it makes people nervous knowing that someone is watching.
The point I'm getting at is that the security checks here are reasonable for the product, and actually err on the side of being nice given that your dealing with disposable minimum-wage retail monkeys with nothing to lose, who are frankly the most likely people to try and steal petty crap and minor amounts of product, because the odds of them ever being sent to jail are minimum, with the big penelty being losing a job that is crappy to begin with. While people of all stripes steal, the more someone has to lose from losing their job the less likely they are to engage in petty theft. Of course at the same time with some of those jobs coms the perception that one is too important for those rules and a sense of entitlement to walk out with something which can make things interesting. Someone like say a Food and Beverage Supervisor is likely to have an entirely differant mental justification for why
they can walk out with 30 cookies or a few boxes of condoms, than a Janitor.
As far as the general comments on the job goes, I think Zero Originality kind of amounts to a lot of QQing... sucky jobs suck because they suck (profound!). As he himself pointed out there are plenty of people to provide replacements there. Not to mention it *IS* meniel labour which requires no real skill, since it's pretty much acting like a stockboy in keeping a store organized against a never ending variety of people messing it up, and that's never fun. Almost everyone has worked retail, fast food, and other things, including me, and you'll pretty much never find anyone telling you what a great job that kind of thing is.
In a bad economy the lack of GOOD jobs is an issue, and that's why it's a crisis. Nobody can tolerate that for long and remain relatively sane, but then again those kinds of jobs are not intended to be career material, and of course minimum wages is not enough to support oneself on to any reasonable standard of living, which is something a lot of people routinely complain about. On the flip side however if you were running a store you probably wouldn't want to pay someone a lot of money to do something like move boxes and alphabetize shelves that takes no real skill except for the abillity to endure mindless labour.
They make movies and comedy skits about the horrors of low-end jobs, and what kids find themselves doing for a summer, or older adults moving down from "real jobs" and being forced to do those kinds of things for a while.
The lack of respect for employee breaks is kind of funny, because honestly I can't think of many jobs that DO respect them. You can argue legal requirements aside, but in the end it's something that can't be enforced, even if a class action suit succeeds it just means the people doing it getting fired, a bit of employer paranoia for a couple of months, and then back to normal. In the end most people would rather have their job (even doing a crappy one) than make a symbolic gesture. It's not fair... but well, things have always been that way, and unless society fundementally changes that's the way things are.
From an employer perspective understand that they do these searches for a reason, and go through so many employees there is rarely any personal association or empathy, especially up on the corperate level. For them the time taken doing the searches is time they are wasting in which you are not productive. Say it takes 15 minutes to do a good superficial search by their standards (which I doubt most people do) if they are paying you $8.00, they are spending $2.00 to make sure your not stealing. They would rather do this on your time than theirs, since from their perspective your a grubby thief (and to be honest, while every employee will insist they are totally clean here, I don't think you'll find many who can honestly say they haven't taken anything, even if it's trivial like tape or something, perhaps justified by the crummy treatment of their bosses and entitlement to something they need if nothing else).
Just a differant perspective on things. It sucks, and I am glad I am past that point of my life, but I've seen both sides of the fence. Since I did far, far, more time on the security end I could tell some really amusing stories about employees and the crap they tried and were caught, but this is already long, and it's more or less irrelevent.
