When a company refuses to pay for overtime, sometimes the smartest form of revenge is following the rules exactly. This employee’s workplace wouldn’t pay for the extra minutes they had to stay past their shift, claiming it was their “choice” to start early.
So they stopped being early and started arriving at 6:59 sharp, forcing the company to pay them for doing nothing at the end of their shift. What began as wage theft turned into delicious, perfectly legal time theft.
One worker got tired of being shortchanged for early arrivals and decided to play by the company’s own broken rules
Workplace fairness often begins and ends with one word: boundaries. In this story, the Original Poster (OP) found a clever way to balance an unfair system without breaking a single rule.
Their 12-hour job allows flexible start times between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m., but because relief is based on arrival order, starting early meant staying late, sometimes unpaid.
When OP complained, management refused to fix the system or compensate the extra time, calling it “the risk” of coming in early. So OP adjusted, arriving at 6:59, never unpaid, even if it meant idle minutes at the end of the shift.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, wage theft costs American workers an estimated $15 billion annually, primarily through unpaid overtime and off-the-clock labor.
What OP experienced, working beyond scheduled hours without compensation, isn’t just unethical; it’s illegal in most jurisdictions governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
Yet, as employment attorney Donna Ballman notes, “wage theft thrives because workers are often pressured to ‘be team players’ instead of asserting their legal rights.”
By showing up later, OP essentially turned wage theft into time theft, not maliciously, but as a mirror to their employer’s indifference.
Industrial-organizational psychologist Dr. Ben Wigert explains that such “counterproductive work behaviors” are often retaliatory rather than purely lazy.
“When employees perceive injustice, especially in how their time or effort is valued, they adjust their engagement to restore fairness,” he told Gallup Workplace. In OP’s case, arriving last wasn’t rebellion; it was self-preservation.
What’s fascinating is that OP didn’t break policy; they followed it to the letter. The company created the loophole by undervaluing employee time and refusing to schedule fairly.
Instead of recognizing the pattern and correcting it, management now pays for idle minutes that could have been avoided by honoring the basic principle of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.”
See what others had to share with OP:
These commenters emphasized that the employer’s actions were wage theft and illegal
This group expressed disbelief that such a system could exist without backlash
These commenters shared personal experiences with similar workplace exploitation
![[Reddit User] − Had a similar situation years back.](https://dailyhighlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/wp-editor-1761932760425-18.webp "Employee Stops Coming In Early After Boss Refuses To Pay Overtime, Company Now Pays Him To Do Nothing")
This user offered a practical perspective
By turning wage theft into time theft, this employee didn’t just reclaim his pay, he proved that sometimes the smartest form of protest is punctuality.
Would you have done the same, or kept showing up early to “help out”? And how much unpaid time do you think your own job quietly steals each week?
