My Boss Keeps Asking Me to Dock Money From My Own Paycheck. The Reasoning is Absurd.

Good Job is Slate’s advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? Send it to Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir here. (It’s anonymous!)

I’m currently in a work position that absolutely sucks. The pay is at the absolute bottom of the industry—it’s half of some of the positions I’ve seen. I am very frankly very overqualified for this position, too, but because of my spotty work history due to a long illness, I’m having trouble getting hired anywhere else. I’ve never worked anywhere that so blatantly does not care about its workers. But I’m writing about one thing in particular that involves my pay.

They keep asking me to sign out when I have tech problems. I work from home and have a virtual system on my computer that I work through. It’s been very glitchy lately, and when I have to reset it, one of my managers tells me to clock off. There have been other instances, like me having to come pick up new hardware from the office, where they’ve asked me to clock out when coming in. I think any work that I do for the company, whether it makes them money or not, should be paid for. Plus, I very highly doubt that if I had tech issues on-site and had to shut down my computer that they would make me clock out. Do you know whether this is legal?

Gather round, children, and let me take you back to when the government used to at least pretend to care about workers. You see, workers were so badly taken advantage of by rapaciously greedy employers, that unless there were laws to protect them, employers would just do whatever they wanted! (Yes, unions helped a lot with this too!) One of these laws is a fun one called the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and one part of the FLSA is the “Hours Worked” section. There is  a distinction in the law between being “engaged to wait” and “waiting to engage.” If you are being “engaged to wait,” that means you are on the clock and under the employer’s control. This includes dealing with required technology/equipment issues, traveling to the office to pick up work equipment during work hours, or waiting for systems to reset when you can’t do other work. Your employer doesn’t get to not pay you because they have crappy equipment.

So here’s what I would do. First and foremost, you are going to polish up that resume and start looking for a job yesterday. In the meantime, though, you are going to document each and every time they ask you to clock out due to a tech issue, and you are also going to stop complying. You can say something like, “I believe I need to remain clocked in while dealing with work-required tech issues” and tell them to put it in writing that they are asking you to clock out. (If they do this, they are even dumber than I thought.) And finally, you can file a wage claim with your state. Where I live, in California, you can do this easily online. What they’re doing is not OK and I hope you can get justice.

I have an amazing girlfriend. She’s intelligent, funny, successful, and incredibly caring. Plus, she has been phenomenal with my teenage daughter. My girlfriend is also a mother, and has an 8-year-old daughter. I don’t have the same level of emotional intelligence as my girlfriend, but I get along well with her daughter. We read, watch movies, and play board games together. There is one recurrent issue that’s coming between my girlfriend and me: Although her daughter has her own bedroom, my girlfriend lets her sleep in bed with us frequently.