"I would have thought it bizarre if they did anything different"
25 years ago at the food store, it was explained to me that the owners liability insurance only covered employees on the clock, and customers while the store was open as per posted hours. He would "generously" allow us to walk thru the store uninsured on the way to the exit door, but we'd be fired if we were caught working off the clock uninsured as he had no financial interest in losing the store to someone with a foot run over by a pallet jack or something.
Obviously employers no longer have liability insurance issues like this or they'd be insane to have people working off the clock. If you want to get rid of slavery, make it too expensive by reversing whatever insurance regulation changed sometime in the last 25 years. Could also play an OSHA game where any accident of any sort not matter the facts is automatically guilty if the employee is off the clock under some doctrine of them being a member of the general public not an employee. Either way your best bet is not a morals or ethics argument (businessmen if anything tend to oppose them in general because usually the people making them are usually trying to screw them) but change the game rules to make it a simple financial argument.
Overtime isn't exactly "off the clock". If it comes to such an insurance claim, it may be hard for the insurance company to prove that the worker is "off the clock".
For that matter, the kind of shenanigans employers pull with on/off time and wage theft mostly happen on the books. Even employees don't necessarily know if and how they are cheated on at any particular point in time.
25 years ago at the food store, it was explained to me that the owners liability insurance only covered employees on the clock, and customers while the store was open as per posted hours. He would "generously" allow us to walk thru the store uninsured on the way to the exit door, but we'd be fired if we were caught working off the clock uninsured as he had no financial interest in losing the store to someone with a foot run over by a pallet jack or something.
Obviously employers no longer have liability insurance issues like this or they'd be insane to have people working off the clock. If you want to get rid of slavery, make it too expensive by reversing whatever insurance regulation changed sometime in the last 25 years. Could also play an OSHA game where any accident of any sort not matter the facts is automatically guilty if the employee is off the clock under some doctrine of them being a member of the general public not an employee. Either way your best bet is not a morals or ethics argument (businessmen if anything tend to oppose them in general because usually the people making them are usually trying to screw them) but change the game rules to make it a simple financial argument.