Employers should be allowed to punish employees showing up late for work or coming back late from lunch breaks by requiring them to either work for free during their regular shift or to work for free before or after their regular shift. (If the employer requires this time to be made up after an employee’s regular shift, the employer should be sensitive to previously scheduled employee obligations.) The number of minutes late would be multiplied by a certain factor to determine the number of minutes that the employee should be required to work for free. For example, if an employee arrives 10 minutes late to work, that employee’s number of late minutes could be multiplied by 3 so that that employee would be required to work 30 minutes for free, either before, after, or during his regularly scheduled shift, according to what the employer, and to a lesser extent the employee, decides.

These punishments do not need to be fulfilled or satisfied on the same day that the employee was late. In some cases it may be best to have all of these late minutes accumulate to the point where they could all be served in one free day of labor. However, perhaps the best way may be to just subtract each day’s accumulated late minutes (plus the punitive multiple) from each day’s total scheduled labor time. This decision would be up to the employer.