Wal-Mart Stores Inc. managers regularly locked employees in stores after night shifts and forced them to work off the clock, a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit accusing the company of wage-law violations testified.

Customer-service and store managers would insist that workers clean up before leaving, even if they had finished their shift, Michelle Braun told a state-court jury today in Philadelphia. Braun said she routinely missed a night bus home and would ask her father for a ride. He showed up at the Franklin Mills Wal-Mart store in Philadelphia at about 1:15 a.m. one morning and complained, she said.

"He started banging and punching the door: 'Let my daughter out. Let her out. She was done at 11,'" Braun said. The next day, Braun's father escorted her to the store manager's office demanding an explanation, she said. Braun was fired two days later.

Braun and another former Wal-Mart worker, Dolores Hummel, accuse the world's largest retailer of forcing hourly employees to skip lunch and rest periods and work off-the-clock without pay. The two women seek as much as $300 million in damages in their wage suit, one of more than 70 filed against Wal-Mart in federal and state courts.

Braun and Hummel are suing on behalf of about 186,000 current and former employees in Pennsylvania. Wal-Mart's focus on curbing payroll led hourly workers at stores in the state to skip more than 33 million breaks and 2 million meal periods between 1998 and 2001, attorney Michael Donovan said during opening statements on Sept. 8.

Braun worked as a cashier at the Franklin Mills Wal-Mart for about two months and Hummel was a cake decorator at a Sam's Club in Reading, Pennsylvania. Sam's Club is Wal-Mart's chain of warehouse stores.

Braun said fellow employees complained constantly about late hours and working off the clock, and some suggested they would skip breaks if it meant they could leave earlier. Braun said she was regularly denied rest periods, and managers would deter cashiers from taking them through threats or by jamming the light switches they used to signal a break.

"It's starting to look like Christmas out there," was one manager's response to a break request, Braun said. "Stop flicking those lights!"

Lawyers for Braun and Hummel say the Bentonville, Arkansas- based company violated wage laws in part because of a policy that based stores' staffing levels on their sales, rather than the amount of work that needed to be done. The policy encouraged managers to limit employees' compensated hours, the lawyers say.

Wal-Mart denies any violations of wage and hour laws. Under the company's policy, 30-minute meal periods granted after six hours work are unpaid, Wal-Mart attorney Neal Manne told jurors last week. Rest breaks are paid, with employees who work more than six hours allowed two 15-minute periods, he said.

Shares of Wal-Mart fell 15 cents to $48.22 today in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have risen 3 percent this year, valuing the company at $201 billion. Wal-Mart reported net income of $11.2 billion in the fiscal year through January, on sales of $312.4 billion.

Managers Aware
Yesterday, Castural Thompson, a former regional vice president, testified that managers knew store employees regularly skipped breaks and viewed the wage-law violations as sometimes necessary to meet the company's financial targets.

Thompson, who supervised stores in Ohio, Pennsylvania, northern New York and Virginia from 1997 through 2000, said Wal- Mart executives pressured managers to stick to staffing budgets through conference calls, meetings and threats.

Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Mark Bernstein has said the trial is expected to last four to six weeks.

The lawsuits are: Braun v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., March Term, 2002, No. 3127, and Hummel v. Wal-Mart, August Term, 2004, No. 3757, Common Pleas Court, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania.

© 2006 Bloomberg News

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