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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

> The FTC alleges Amazon changed the way it paid drivers in late 2016, lowering the hourly rate and then used customer tips to make up the difference. Amazon continued to tell drivers they were receiving all of their tips, even after receiving hundreds of complaints from drivers, the agency said.

How is this not simply theft? Why does this attract civil charges and not criminal ones?

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> when Amazon steals $62 million from its employees it's "misrepresenting drivers' tips", when Amazon employees steal $130,000 of products from Amazon it's a "theft ring"

~ https://twitter.com/CitationsPod/status/1356779651885133825

Wage theft is by far the largest source of theft by dollar amount in America

Yep. Different rules and semantics for the rich.

Interesting that Twitter is throwing up a sensitive content warning on that tweet. I guess mistakes just happen...

Possibly because of this, wage theft outstrips all other forms of theft.

http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Wa...

It’s not considered a big crime because crime is largely a social construct. For example the news is happy to hype stories about recurring car break ins, but is then quiet about wage theft and other white collar crimes.

> the news is happy to hype stories about recurring car break ins, but is then quiet about wage theft

That's clearly untrue, given the story we're talking about here.

Wage theft comprises, by some estimates, about 75% of all theft in the United States each year[1]. A brief perusal of television news or newspapers in any city in this country will make it immediately apparent that the crime that corporate media likes to focus on is very much not wage theft.

[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Because they were receiving all their tips. They were not receiving the same pay as before.

I suspect they played with words to make people think one thing instead of another.

The FTC uses flimsy words like "did not disclose":

In late 2016, the FTC alleges, Amazon shifted from paying drivers the promised rate of $18–25 per hour plus the full amount of customer tips to paying drivers a lower hourly rate, a shift that it did not disclose to drivers. Amazon used the customer tips to make up the difference between the new lower hourly rate and the promised rate. This resulted in drivers’ being shorted more than $61.7 million in tips.

Which of course isn't flimsy, they are saying that Amazon did not pay wages they had agreed to.

Sounds like Amazon actually stole both wages and tips, then used one to pay for the other.

> they played with words to make people think one thing instead of another

Is that not essentially the definition of fraud though? That they’re being forced to pay it back seems like their “interpretation” here was dead off — they lost the case, right?

Not arguing one way or other, but for many, say, restaurant workers, this practice is the norm in states that allow it (I believe that would be most states). The amount the owner is required to pay a worker is pretty low, as long as they have enough tips to hit the standard minimum wage.

The FTC press release reads like they stated a wage+all the tips and then didn't disclose that they were getting a lower wage+all the tips.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/02/amazo...

In a typical restaurant job, the stated wage is the legal minimum for a tipped role, and then (in theory anyway), the restaurant is required to ensure that the employee receives the normal minimum wage if they don't get tipped enough to average at least that much.

So the difference seems to be that Amazon said they'd pay a certain amount and then paid less than that.

Didn't Instacart get in trouble for a similar thing? I believe they said drivers would get 100% of their tips which was technically "true", however they were using the tips as part of their minimum pay and if the tips weren't enough to hit that guaranteed rate they would top it up to that rate. It's overall a super sketchy practice. When someone sees an offer for "Work this block of time for 15/hr" they assume 15/hr + tips on top, not that they will pay you for an order + tips, and if that meets the $15 they give you nothing extra. It's a slimey practice and it looks like this is two big companies getting in trouble for it.

This gig work stuff really needs to be more regulated because clearly these big corporations treat their employees like slaves and exploit them and do not self regulate at all.

I don't disagree about the "saying one thing and doing something else" part. I was commenting on the general principle of lowering one's wages (even to below minimum wages) if the person gets enough tips, and how common that is.

It's kind of just semantics, but the thought is that tips don't commonly reduce wages, wages stay the same and tips remove the responsibility for the restaurant to ensure that average hourly pay is meeting the general minimum wage.

Another way to put it is that the tips don't normally change the wage structure, which is exactly what Amazon did.

I hear you, I'm not sure how useful this is as a comparison though; plenty of things are fine and dandy if you're upfront that you're doing it and gain agreement from the other party, and illegal if you conceal that you're doing and don't get agreement.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, Washington state requires restaurant workers to be paid the normal minimum wage regardless of tips.

(No clue if they played whatever semantic games in their home state or not. I assume so, but it wasn't clear to me from the article)

Because wage theft is a thing the ownership classes do to the working classes.

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