When you work for a business, you keep track of the days and the amount of hours that you are going to be working in order to help plan your week. Ideally, the schedule will tell you which shifts you’ll be working and what job you’ll be fulfilling. However, when you look at your schedule, the latter information is often left blank. Most of the time, you don’t care what position you work during those shifts, as long as you get to work. That is, you don’t care until you see your final paycheck. What many businesses don’t want their part-time employees to know they do is distort the amount of hours that you work in different positions.

While you may come in to work at the front desk, you may get switched to a different position during the shift. This is a practice that allows businesses to get more hours out of part-time employees like yourself because even though you have worked a solid 40 hours, you have been logged for only ten here, and six there, etc. As a result, your paychecks don’t always reflect the actual amounts of hours worked because you “officially” only worked so many hours in one position and the other hours are counted in another position. Business owners and managers move employees to different positions so that they don’t have to pay them as much, either in overtime or benefits.

Business owners will say that it costs too much to give us all those benefits or that it costs too much to pay us overtime. When questioning why you jump around from position to position, businesses may tell you that they are just training you to do more on the job, making you more valuable to the business. And as employees, do we really have a choice, or are we going to lose our jobs for speaking up? Are we really considered “valuable” employees if our benefits can be withheld without our knowledge?

The next time that you go to work for some “overtime,” make sure that you are in the right place. Make sure that you get your hard-earned money and benefits, because as a valuable employee, you deserve to receive the things you work so hard for.