Tumble 22 Time Shaving

Who was shorted

Each row is one server's server shifts with paid time removed by a manager edit. Time is in hours:minutes. Money is the removed time at $7.25 an hour, the federal and Texas minimum wage. The last column counts shifts where the server was opening orders in Toast during the time that was cut. That is direct proof they were working while the edited record said they were not.

Click a name for that server's full report. Server shifts only, meaning the LAB Server and LAB Server Train jobs. Kitchen staff and other roles lost time too and have their own reports. Shift edits that removed large amounts of time and could not be checked against order data are left out of this page.

The managers whose logins were used weren't on the clock. Gabe Mora was.

Toast records which manager login made each edit. Every edit here was made under the login of Stella Weinstock or Severiano Santana. Staff report that Gabe Mora, the General Manager, used their logins. Toast's own time records back that up. For each edit, we checked who was clocked in at the moment it was saved.

18 more edits, all under Stella Weinstock's login, were saved on Oct 6 and 7, after the time-clock data ends (Oct 4 shifts), so they are in the totals above but not in this check.

This breaks labor law

Changing time records so that employees are not paid for hours they worked is called time shaving. It is illegal under federal and Texas law. On 64 of these server shifts, Toast's own order records show the server working during the time that was removed.

• FLSA, 29 U.S.C. § 206
  29 C.F.R. §§ 785.11–.13

  Employers must pay at least minimum wage for every hour worked. Work the employer "suffers or permits," such as taking tables before a scheduled start time or closing out checks after it, counts as hours worked. It is management's job to stop work it doesn't want, not to accept the work and delete it from the record.

• 29 C.F.R. § 785.48(b)

  Rounding or adjusting punch times is allowed only if it averages out so employees are paid for all the time they actually work. These edits almost always went one way. Clock-ins were pushed later and clock-outs were pulled earlier.

• 29 U.S.C. § 211(c)
  29 C.F.R. § 516.2

  Employers must keep accurate records of the hours each employee works. Editing records to show fewer hours than were worked violates this requirement.

• 29 U.S.C. § 203(m)

  A restaurant can pay servers $2.13 an hour only by claiming a tip credit. That credit still requires paying for all hours worked, and the employer must meet every condition to claim it.

• Texas Labor Code ch. 61 & 62

  The Texas Payday Law requires full payment of wages owed on each payday, and the Texas Minimum Wage Act adopts the federal minimum wage. Workers can file a wage claim with the Texas Workforce Commission within 180 days of the missed payday.

• 29 U.S.C. §§ 216(b), 255

  Under federal law, workers can recover unpaid wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages, going back 2 years, or 3 years if the violation was willful. Deliberately editing time records points to willfulness.

This page is not legal advice. To report unpaid wages, contact the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division at 1-866-487-9243 (dol.gov/whd) or the Texas Workforce Commission. Calls are confidential, and retaliating against workers who complain is itself illegal under 29 U.S.C. § 215(a)(3).