2 Amtrak workers charged in overtime fraud scheme

Unfortunately this is not uncommon in many industries. When I was at Polaroid, many years ago, there was a draftsman who would go in early every morning and stay late. Everyone thought he was "such a hard worker". It turned out he was hardly working and instead would play in the internet during the day, or nap at his desk. Since he was hourly he would put in overtime for when he stayed late, which was most days.

He would position his drawing hand carefully on the desk to appear as though he was busy drawing something. Eventually he got caught and terminated immediately after his manager noticed that his hand hadn't moved for sometime from the same spot on the drawing board!

In another case, a Lawrence MA cop would go to work and sleep behind the police station in his cruiser. It's not like he would drive off somewhere out of the way. He got caught, and charges were brought up against him after his antics were spotted on the CC-TV camera. DOH!

I'm sure there are many other employees doing the same thing and I'm glad they got caught. We pay a lot of money for this service and what we don't need are individuals skimming off the top for a free ride on our dollars.
 
that is a good way to get fired from railroad companies like Amtrak, the 2 workers in question should have known that the railroad industry does not tolerate those kinds of actions, but what John is basically saying, and I'm adding on to that, by saying that this was not and probably will not be the last time this happens but only hope it does not again, if anyone who has been working in this particular industry should know the rulebook from beginning to end, the do's and don'ts, that way not only preventing accidents which results into a hospital visit or worse,but, at the same time, crimes like this one and other offenses which are preventable and keeps you out of prison in the first place.
 
Last edited:
Hi everybody.
Here in the UK very little overtime is paid to employees in the present day as most workers are on contracts which stipulate a monthly or yearly hours total. in the foregoing should you work excessive hours in any one week/month then that workers hours are reduced in subsequent weeks bringing the total in line with the number of contracted hours per month/year.

in many office jobs no hours total are written into the contract of employment whatsoever. Workers receive a stipulated monthly salary and anything extra is paid as a bonus which is usually assessed on the company income derived from the workers hours.

Of course in years gone by things were very different. In the early 1960s when I first qualified as a heavy goods vehicle driver overtime payments were very much part of the job. There were no mobile phones or tachographs for employers to check what hours were being worked by their drivers while away from the depot. Everything relied on the honesty of the drivers timesheet which you completed at the end of each day.

With the performance of the vehicles we had in those days along with the fact that there were no motorways or city by-passes most journeys were worked out on an average speed of between 13 and 15 miles per hour with allowances for each delivery added on top of that. Of course even in those days we could achieve far better average miles per hour than the above in out of town situations, and therefore throughout the whole haulage industry in Britain what we as truck drivers put on the timesheet as hours worked and what we actually did were two totally different things.

In the late 1960s employers came up with the idea of introducing “clocking in machines” which for companies made things worse rather than better. I was working for a company named Western Transport at that time as a young driver and all drivers normally commenced work at 6:30 a.m in the morning. The thing was that all being good “work mates” the first driver into the depot on the morning would always invariably clock himself and everyone else in (LOL).

It's very often happened that a driver would not even report for duty, but at the end of the week still get paid for the day he had not worked as the wages office who received the clocking in cards never seemed to speak to the traffic clerks in regards to what drivers have done what work on what day (LOL AGAIN). in the foregoing, equally the traffic clerks never seemed to look at the clock in cards

Of course, tachographs and telematics have for many years now ended all the above. Indeed, it was probably us with all our numerous “overtime fiddles” in the 1960s-70s that speeded up the introduction of such technology.

In regards to the Amtrak employees now facing severe court action for their “ overtime fiddles” the report seems to demonstrate that the offences go back over a considerable number of years. I believe that if the cases were being heard in a British Crown Court or Industrial Court much questioning would be placed on the employer in regard to the monitoring of the employees timesheets so as to allow such a situation to go undetected for so many years.

I am very sure that High Court judges or tribunal chairman in the UK would be very critical of any company in this situation which almost certainly would be considered when handing down penalties to these offenders.

Bill
 
Where I work, we clock in using computers located at desks at the many departments in our store. Every employee has their own I.D. number, which tends to be seven numbers long, and a password that is changed every three months. The passwords appear on the screen as just a series of black dots, and must be at least eight symbols long, and must meet three of the four requirements:
1. There must be at least one capital letter
2. There must be at least one lower case letter
3. There must be at least one symbol
4. There must be at least one number

I try to meet all four requirements, and only combinations that I would understand.
 
In some ways I blame their manager or supervisor for auto-authorizing their overtime. Every timesheet I ever filled out had to be approved by my higher-up. In my last job, even with my reporting manager in Redwood Shores, California, and myself in Burlington, MA, My hours had to be approved. If I put any overtime down on the timesheet, it had to be approved first by my manager and the timesheet form would be rejected when submitted into the system.

As Bill noted in one place I worked we had to punch in and punch out the time clock. There was one guy who would punch in his buddies and this went well for them for a time. One day he got caught and he along with his buddies were reprimanded.

John
 
Back
Top