Heh, to make it more fun… it wasn’t actually clear if they were overpaying or underpaying. Underpaying is actually a lot easier to deal with than overpaying. If you underpay someone, the easy solution is to write a cheque and include interest and/or some other form of compensation for the error.

If you overpay someone… getting that money back is a challenge.

To make it more complicated still, there was an element of “we’re not sure if we overpaid or underpaid” but there was also an element of “we gave person X an overtime shift but person Y was entitled to accept or deny that shift before person X would have even had an opportunity to take it”. That’s even harder to compensate for.

Thank you for the reply. I was only commenting that wage theft is still wage theft even when there is no malicious intent. Clearly, reality is much more nuanced.

Or overpaying them. Or sometimes underpaying and sometimes overpaying them. Or paying them the right total amount, but incorrectly labelling subtotals.

There’s no reason to leap to ‘stealing’ (which requires intent) from ‘ambiguous rules.’ Those ambiguous rules, incidentally, may have been agreed to — or even insisted on — by the union!