A former Chipotle manager worked hard and rose through the company’s ranks, and then he says that he had a decision to make after opening of a new restaurant: he could commit wage theft against his employees, or he could risk losing his job and the relocation bonus he had just received. He chose the latter, and is now speaking out about his experience with wage theft at the burrito eatery.

He spoke to CNN about his experiences (warning: auto-play video at that link), detailing his six years with the company, starting as a teenage burrito-maker and ending his career with the company clashing with his own bosses as a store manager.

He first served as a manager at a very profitable restaurant in St. Louis, and says that bosses didn’t especially care about his anti-wage theft stance there.

He says that he was expected to erase the overtime hours of any employees who worked more than 40 hours per week, and no one particularly cared about his argument that doing so was unethical as well as illegal. The company allegedly fired him for “unacceptable performance” a month after he moved to a different state to open a new restaurant.

He isn’t alone in this: there are currently more than 10,000 plaintiffs who have signed on to a class action against Chipotle. The employees are suing the company for similar patterns of wage theft and being encouraged to clock out and keep working if they wanted to move up in the company.

A Chipotle spokesman wouldn’t talk about the allegatons except to say that the wage theft accusations were not the reason for his firing, and that “All of [Chipotle’s] policies clearly require that employees are paid for all of the time they work.”

My Chipotle nightmare [CNN] (Warning: auto-play video at that link)

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