Ex-Taco Bell Manager Alleges Chain Forced Employees To Work Unpaid Overtime

Taco Bell loves it when you eat round the clock. But they don't seem to want to pay their workers for every one of the hours they spend feeding you.

A former shift manager at Taco Bell is bringing a class-action suit against the restaurant chain, claiming that employees are regularly forced to work overtime hours without pay, according to a report at Law360.

Plaintiff Alicia Sloan, who was a shift manager at Taco Bell for eight years, says that Taco Bell managers in Florida often shave hours from employees' time cards, meaning workers don't get paid for all of the hours they work. Sloan also says the managers themselves are sometimes forced to take on unpaid hours, according to Law360.

Taco Bell's not unique in allegedly not paying workers for overtime. In recent years, more companies have faced lawsuits from workers claiming they haven't gotten their fair share of overtime pay. These kinds of suits have continued to climb even in the wake of the Great Recession -- an economic crisis that allowed many employers to demand higher performance from their desperate workers, while not paying them much more than before.

Nor is this the first time Taco Bell has faced these kinds of accusations. In fact, the scenario sounds like an old controversy that's been reheated.

In a similar case in 1997, a court found Taco Bell guilty of failing to pay overtime to thousands of employees in Washington state. Four years later, workers in Oregon brought a successful class-action suit against Taco Bell, making claims very similar to Alicia Sloan's -- that Taco Bell managers would tweak employees' time cards and not pay them the overtime wages they were owed.

And in 2010, workers sued Tacala, an Alabama franchisee that runs more than 100 Taco Bell locations in six states, for the same thing -- altering work records and not paying over time.

In addition Taco Bell, other major companies have been accused of withholding rightful overtime pay from their employees including Starbucks (at least twice), IBM, Wal-Mart, Groupon and Bank of America.