Can your boss withhold your pay if you do something they don’t like? 

Everyone who has ever had a job where they are supposed to clock out has, at some point, forgotten to clock out. It’s just one of those true things that we all do. I don’t know what it is about it, but you’re usually in such a hurry to close things down and get back to your life that occasionally you forget to clock out. You try not to make a habit of it, and you inform your manager when you remember, but it happens. That’s okay. People make mistakes, and not everyone is immune to forgetting simple stuff. This is part of running a business, and it should be treated with a sense of normalcy, not a sense of punishment. Sure, it can be annoying for management to have to comb through hours to see if anything is abnormal, but it’s part of their job. And it shouldn’t be that difficult to do if you’re glancing over paychecks and you notice a strange discrepancy. It’s part of regular bookkeeping. But the manager in this story wanted to make it everyone else’s problem. He was tired of his workers forgetting to clock out every now and again, and he thought of a way to de-incentivize it. The problem was, what he was trying to do was definitely outside the law. His employees quickly caught on, and it exposed a lack of knowledge or care for his employees.