My employer is breaking labor laws?

[torin7]

Okay. I work for a franchise smoothie place and I've been there for a couple months now. For eight dollars an hour, I feel like this job is completely stressful they it needs to be for part time. Our managers will have you work 7 or 8 hours for general workers and will not give you a break. Mainly you work seven hours alone a day, with no other employees working with you; you even close the door, clean up and count the money alone at night. So if you have a rush randomly, you're really busy and only one person has to make 13 drinks and get it out on time. I think it's unfair that there isn't two people working at a time since our employers are penny pinchers. They assume all their employees will do is sit around and talk on a slow day, but slow or not, we still get rushes during lunch time or when they're out of class. So it get's busy and even customers ask us why it's just 1 person working and not two people at all times. Not only that are managers are rude and get after you for everything. It'll be so busy that it was difficult to clean up while we're working - and instead of caring that you were busy - they're mad at the mess. When they teach us how to close, they threatened to dock the last hour of you working if they don't think you cleaned right. It'll be spotless and they'll still find something wrong with your cleaning. The managers are stressful and one of them continues to insult my common sense because he'll tell me to do something and when I question him to make sure I understood him - He's immediately annoyed with me. One night when the alarm went off, they asked an employee to go back and check up on the store to make sure everything was all right. That wasn't his responsibility and what if there was an actual break in? I've been working here for four months now and I thought this job would be fun. I love my coworkers and everything about it; But my managers make everything so difficult. They even like gossiping about other employees and it just makes me think - "What are they saying about me?"

We don't get lunch breaks for working 7 or 8 hours, especially when it's busy, we have no time to eat. They don't want to hire a lot of people because they don't want to pay more for a better run store. Needless to say, one person can't do it all when it's soooo busy and they treat their employees poorly. So is this illegal? I want to report their actions, but I'm not even sure what to do about this. I can't leave right now either since I do need the money and everyone has already hired for summer. I want to give myself a year here, but I don't know how much I can take of this. What do you think should be done about this?

[shen86]

What labor laws do you think they're breaking? How old are you anyway? You do understand that for a company to stay in business, they have to control costs so they can make money? Sure, they could hire multiple people and have them there all the time so when a rush came, there would be plenty of people to handle it. And since much of the time these extra people would be waiting for a rush of customers, pretty soon the business would be losing money and would go out of business, and nobody would have a job there any more.

As far as breaks, some places they're required, some aren't, and you don't say where you are. And even where breaks are required, there are often exceptions for places with just one person working.

And your smoothie place is so busy for 7 or 8 hours straight that there's no time to eat? You talk about rushes - so eat when you are NOT having a rush.

[yehudi]

the state you are detrmines if you get breaks or not, working alone is not illegal, paying you to do your job is also not illegal, stress is subjective, welcome to the real world