29 Comments

This post exemplifies why I am a subscriber. Thank you for your work. I hope it gets more coverage.

Expand full comment

I remember a lot of attention on the shoplifting. Why would a news organization publish or give air to a story that hasn’t been vetted? Why would they skip a story that has major implications? Is it as simple as ‘because they can’? In fairness to this particular circumstance, we were focused on a little something in November, but this is media deciding what’s news. I’m starting to think I need to find a series of independent newsletters or even news feeds that cover or at least list the top stories in business, economics, healthcare, etc., because it sure isn’t available elsewhere.

Expand full comment

Go Baby, Go!. Way to tell the truth about 1 % corporate scam and the MSM not covering it.

Expand full comment

This is the continued danger of right wing ownership of news sources. It’s not surprising.

I am glad you mentioned the fact that most can’t afford to go to an attorney for employer-related issues.

I fought for money from 2 class-action lawsuits. In both instances, I had access to years of records and copied everything I mailed in.

Then I fought over one year to get money due to me. It’s exhausting and most people can’t do this, nor do people save information from 8 years ago for things like washers/cars.

These rt wingers always have the nerve to complain about anything when they supported a deadly insurrection without consequences. We need the list if their crimes unpunished every time!

Expand full comment

People like to watch a guy ride a bike out of a store with a bag of stolen gear more than they like to ignore a newsreader telling them some numbers and settlement facts. I suggest we smarten up the human race. Alternatively, we could make the class action suits more entertaining by eliminating judge in favor of a large explosion w/ tanker trucks flying around. We could replace the lawyers with laser wielding robots. And the news reader could have four tits. Welcome to America.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Nov 29, 2021
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I don't watch TV. I just read. But then there is a lot of garbage to read, too. In the end, you've just got to be able to ignore the adjectives, the persuasive language, the catchphrases, Etc. And sift out the bare facts. Then make your own call. Sadly, most people do not have the time to do this. Most people are lucky if they hear a few blurbs on the TV while they work their dead end job. Video is too distracting (for reasons that should be obvious.) Nobody learns anything from watching TV. That's just a fact.

Expand full comment

Organized retail theft is real. It is not uncommon and a safety risk to other shoppers. Organized corporate theft is also real and infuriating. Neither should be tolerated.

Expand full comment

It's not about tolerating anything. It's about giving people, at large, the impression "organized retail theft" is a bigger threat to society and you and me than a massive corporate theft that impacts many, many people it varying degrees. The huge, not-talked about thefts are harbinger for worse to come. A smash and grab for $10k could land you in jail for a very long time (in a hard prison.) Meanwhile, a half-billion Dollar dirty-scheme by some corporate board or CEO will maybe get them 6-months (in a prison w/ it's own golf course.)

Expand full comment

From the 18th century:

"The law doth punish man or woman

That steals the goose from off the common,

But lets the greater felon loose

That steals the common from the goose."

Haven't made much progress, have we?

Expand full comment

A poem worth a tee shirt, if I ever saw one. I'm wondering whether we could find a way to squeeze it onto a red truckers cap.

Expand full comment

I'm off to post this elsewhere. I will get rude pushback from some. And I will get silent OMGs from people who had no idea.

Expand full comment

Walgreen's does not have enough medicine to prevent vomiting at a story like this robbery. As with banks, it is always better to rob from the inside, but robbing employees is a new low.

Expand full comment

Wow. Stick it to them, Judd. My hope is that these thieving corporate dinosaurs end their miserable lives as footnotes in a shameful history of greed.

Expand full comment

when will we lock up the thieving trump?

Expand full comment

Excellent article. Just heard about one of the largest employers in our small resort area who charges tips for events but doesn't pass them to workers. The people who own the company are billionaires and the company is notoriously cheap with its staff. This article provides context. This pattern must be exposed on a local level. People do care.

Expand full comment

Thanks Judd for a wonderful article. I’m going to follow up with my Representative and Senators.

Expand full comment

I have to say that I have not researched the Walgreens story, but to equate what Walgreen's supposedly has done to someone walking off the street with a garbage bag and stealing almost $1000 worth of merchandise is truly unbelieveable. Again, I do not know the specifics of the Walmart case and I think that there is alot more to know about this whole story than we have all been privy to. It is never okay for someone to walk in off the street and start wholesale stealing things and implying that just because a company makes a profit is an excuse to start robbing them or stealing from them is wrong. I firmly believe in voting with my dollar and that means not shopping at places that do not treat their employees fairly and with dignity--but that does not mean that I steal from them or condone anyone else stealing from them. This man that performed the grand larcency is not one of the people in the Walgreen's lawsuit and does not deserve anything from Walgreen's-He deserves to be in jail for his crime. You appear to be saying that one crime is justified because SUPPOSEDLY Walmart stole from their employees. Again, IF and this is definitely a subjective IF Walmart had rules about overtime, breaks, and passing through security when reporting to or leaving work, these are rules that the employee agreed to prior to employment. There are plenty of employment laws that are just outrageous and again I do not know enough about the Walmart case to make an educated judgement, but I do know that walking into any store and loading up your garbage bag and leaving without paying is just plain wrong and is never justified. Quite frankly Josh, I have learned alot from you and your column in the past 6 months, but stories like this are both beneath you and do not further your point that main stream media is not to be trusted. This has given me pause to question you and no longer trust you just as I never trusted FOX News or CNN. I have only seen limited stories on what is going on in San Fransisco and Chicago and those stories show a break down in both civil society and law and order. Your example shows none of that and absolutely shows that you may be what you are constantly critisizing

Expand full comment

Judd's point was not that the $1,000 crime was in any way justified. Judd's point is that the media published well over 300 articles on that story, but published only *one* article on the $4.5 million settlement between Walgreens and its employees.

Which of those stories do you think should be more important?

Expand full comment

Both stories are important-do not ask me to say that the Walgreens story is more important because I do not know the particulars of that settlement or what was charged and why Walgreen's even settled. There is a huge difference between the general lawlessness exhibited publically by the man on the bicycle and what ever happened in the Walgreen's case. I do know that now when I pull up to the drive through window at Walgreen's for an RX there is a sign posted that the RX is closed for 1/2 hr daily for the staff to take a break. I am not condoning any kind of corporate misbehavior, but I also know that there is more to the Walgreen's story than either you or I know and I refuse to condemn a corporation because some disgruntled employee didn't get their lunch break when they wanted it.

Expand full comment

Walgreens stole from its employees. They admitted it in court. You not refuse to condemn that, you're not even going to go out of your way to learn anything about the Walgreen's case, either, are you.

Here: https://www.hrdive.com/news/walgreens-to-settle-california-bag-check-suit-for-45m/592225/

Here: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/employment-labor/walgreens-employee-class-action-lawsuit-reaches-4-5m-settlement/

Oh, and here's another Walgreens screw-up: https://www.pionline.com/courts/settlement-agreement-reached-erisa-lawsuit-against-walgreens

The only difference between the two cases is the amount of the theft.

Expand full comment

Thank you for taking the time to foward me the links regarding the walmart lawsuits. As I am not the most computer savvy person, finding this information is not my area of expertise. I have read all of the information on the sites that you forwarded aand in none of these cases does Walgreen's "admit" to anything-they simply settled the lawsuit. At times, it is cleaper to settle than to continue the fight even if the company believes that they are in the right. In reading the information, I firmly believe that if security checks are necessary, that the employee does not need to be paid for this. As someone who worked in the airline industry, I was never paid for the time I spent at a security check point nor should I have been. I knew that I had to be cleared by security any time I was boarding a flight and that I had to go through security or passport control at the end of a flight. Was this easy-no, but it was part of the job and quite frankly I did not want to be on board with anyone that had not cleared security. I worked in management for almost 40 years at 3 major corporations and for a variety of reasons people skip breaks, lunch, or work late. Management should have been well aware of employees who have to skip a break or a lunch or work overtime to complete a task that should have been completed during their 8 hour shift and these employees should have been terminated for cause well before this got to the lawsuit phase. Legitimate overtime should be paid unquestionably and employee that cannot or do not get their job done without skipping breaks or lunches should be disciplined. It is only in this way that a corporation can truly see and measure what a task actually consists of. When I worked at a position that was DOT regulated and I had to account for every 15 minute break and 30 minute lunch, my experience was that employees resented when they were forced to take a 30 minute lunch especially when that 15 minute break caused them to work over 6 hours now necessitating the 30 minute lunch. Additionally, I found it was consistently the same people who could not manage their work load to include scheduled breaks and lunches. When management got involved and engineered the task to ensure that all breaks and lunches were taken and that unauthorized overtime was rigorously managed, employees felt that pay was being taken from them because they could no longer work in exactly the way they wanted. Again, there is no excuse for not paying for unauthorized overtime-Companies should pay it and then discipline both the offender and the manager for allowing it to happen. I am not sure I understand the "rounding off " of fragments of an hour when paying an employee. Any corporation that I worked for paid non exempt employees for any fragment of an 8 minute hour that they were punched in for-ie if you worked until 8:02, you were paid until 8:08 even though you only worked 2 minutes of that 8 minute segment. There are clearly payroll systems that manage this kind of time card reading and this would be easily verifiable by examining the payroll system that Walgreen's uses. If managers were going in and changing time cards to avoid unauthorized overtime, this is clearly time card falsification and the manager should be fired. I have had employees in the past who simply could not get the job done in the time alloted and volunteered to stay late or to work unpaid in order to avoid discipline-this is NEVER acceptable. The manager needs to get actively involved in retraining the employee and making it clear that NO WORK is to be performed unless the employee is on the time clock and discipline up to and including termination needs to result if the employee does not modify their work performance and behavior. I am sorry I am being so longwinded, but I do have considerable experience in this area. Again, thank you for sending me the appropriate links with which to do research. I would hope that you can see now why I view the Walgreen's case very differently from the man on the bike.

Expand full comment

Because they were mandatory before you could go to work, the security checks should have been paid time; you should have been allowed to clock in at a check-in counter, then proceed through security to your gate. Checks required by the airline before you are released from duty are also company time and you should be paid for it. Customs clearance at an overseas destination is a different thing.

As for rounding, my employer processes time cards in tenths of hours: 6-minute increments. If I work one or two minutes of the last tenth, that rounds down.; three, four, or five minutes, rounds up. What appears to have been happening at Walgreens was they were rounding any fraction of an hour down to the whole hour during pay processing. So if the employee worked eight hours and 50 minutes, they were only paid for eight hours, instead of 8.75 or 8.8 hours.

Blaming employees for not taking mandatory breaks and lunches is spurious, particularly in a retail environment. An employee on checkout duty cannot simply walk away from the cash register, he must be replaced. That's the manager's responsibility.

Expand full comment

Dear Nick,

Clearly you have made a decision not to have a productive cooperative discussion and continue to sling insults rather than to admit that someone else may have a point. At no point did I indicate that anything I discussed occurrred in a retail enviroment and I believe that I blamed almost all of the issues on management for not adequately training and monitoring non-exempt employees. I did suggest and strongly believe that non-exempt employees should be held accountable for their choices in the performance of their job. It has been my experience in managing employees for almost 40 years that 99.9% of employees do their job adequately and most superlatively and the remaining .1% can be traced back to inadequate training and/or improper frontline management. That being said, the remaining .1% does need to be held accountable and in fact I believe that it is grossly unfair to those excellent employees when managment fails to hold all employees to the same standard. When an employee fails to manage their performance to within company standards (this includes break, lunch, and unauthorized overtime), managment has a duty and a responsibility to discipline those employees within the confines of the employee development process. This in no way releases the company from payment to the employee for time worked. Again, paying an employee for 8 hours when they worked 8.75 hours is clearly a flaw in the Walgreen payroll processing system and Walgreen's should have been running tests of their payroll system that highlighted this flaw. I do not believe that a non-exempt employee should ever be performing work for a company when they are not being paid-the corporation always has a responsibility to take the high road and whether it is 1/6 or 1/8 of an hour-the company should always err on the side of the employee and if the employee works 2 minutes of a 6 or 8 minute cycle-the corporation should be paying the employee for the entire 6-8 minutes of that cycle. It is up to management to ensure that the corporation works to planned budget and does not incur this 6-8 minute payment payment for only 2 minutes worked. I have seen more managers terminated for time card falsification because they failed to manage the non-exempt employee adequately to ensure that the break or lunch taking or unauthorized overtime was corrected and it was easier to just falsely change the employees time card rather than take the time to re-train the employee and hold them accountable. We have diverged very far from the original issue and I believe that you have failed to acknowledge that this is a multifaceted issue and I additionally believe that you are attempting to simplify it by accusing Walgreen's of stealing from their employees. I have not ever worked in California and do not agree with their stance that anything that an employee is required to do prior to the start of their shift has to be paid by the employer. I absolutely disagree that security checks should be paid for and I also disagree that an employee driving to work in California who gets in a car accident on their drive should be able to claim that accident as a work related injury. Suffice to say, we will probably disagree on these topics and I still maintain that comparing the Walgreen's case(s) to the man on the bike are vastly different situations and comparing them in the fashion that Judd originally portayed them does not nearly reflect the complexities of either case. This in no way releases Walgreen's of their culpability in the underpayment and overall poor management of their employees. I thank you for the time you took to educate me with the necessary links for the Walgreen's case. While my original opinion has not not changed, perhaps my learning lesson through this whole exchange is to teach myself how to search timely, effectively, and accurately on the Internet. I have always lived and worked in the midwest and do not rely on the internet as a major source of information. I found this site by accident after Jan6th and was impressed with Judd's ability to fact check and collate large amounts of data across a wide spectrum and was surprised that he did not do the type or depth of research in the combining of these two incidents as I have seen him do in the past 6 months. Thank you for your time and the education.

Expand full comment

Wow. This attitude *IS* the problem.

Expand full comment

Wow. *THIS* attitude is the problem.

Expand full comment

🤣

Expand full comment

Accidental Satire

Expand full comment

Thank you again, Judd and team, for going beneath the surface, for being open and curious about what often goes uninvestigated. Can this be:"employees are increasingly required to waive their right to sue for wage theft as a condition of employment." ? I find this situation to be analogous to the endless and far reaching cheating thought to be committed by Trump and his family and many associates. They have the money, power, and legal help to avoid paying for criminal behavior.

Expand full comment