Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

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> 1: stealing wages

why is Better.com using that language? all that workers can do is sell their labor time, while the property-owners they work for do not (since they earn rents from ownership). in this case, the workers create and develop some intellectual property (software), yet do not own the fruits of their own labor and are instead paid a wage. in other words: workers work on things that are not democratically held in common ownership (even actively made artificially scarce as an intellectual property).

my point is: we could argue the workers are rightfully taking back more than what they are paid under our current economic system, since the property-owners take too much to begin with; they steal — to use your word — by not sharing the (intellectual) property, the source of wealth.

edit: i've edited to clarify that I am responding to the definition of the word stealing used by Better.com. as Kye/OP pointed out below, this is not Kye's personal definition for the word stealing and it was terminology they copied verbatim from this current context (used by one of the parties involved).

related fun fact: wage theft by employers is the largest category of theft in the US by a large measure [1].

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

Time theft by employees well over an order of magnitude greater than this.

https://www.epaysystems.com/time-theft-facts-and-stats/

Much of "time theft" is covered by people struggling to focus continuously for 8 hours at a time 5 days a week. That's not theft, that's unrealistic expectations.

This article talks about things like timesheet fudging and practices like 'buddy punching', not getting distracted by a news article here or there, or getting a non-work phone call between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm

Given that companies typically want to maximally exploit their employees while paying the minimum wage they can, I don't really care about employees doing a little exploiting in the other direction.

Of course it depends on the company - I think people tend to do this kind of thing when their employer is hostile or exploitative. People typically respond well and work hard when they're treated fairly.

If an employee is selling their time to answer customer inquiries and is not, in fact, answering available customer inquiries, what else would you call it?

Incompetence? Slacking off? Lazy?

Fraud would be another term.

But as others have stated this should have been taken care of earlier. To fire them and then give the excuse afterwards meant they allowed the actions to happen.

If it happens as frequently as claimed? I'd call it total managerial incompetence. Call metrics are well defined and it is easy to see if someone is doing no work. If the line managers are slacking off like that, what does that say for their management (and so on and so on)?

Breach of contract, or at a stretch maybe fraud if they were actively misleading someone. But definitely not theft.

Thanks for calling this out, moreover that’s not what wage theft means:

> Wage theft is the denial of wages or employee benefits rightfully owed to an employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

I'm sorry, if you feel like you're not being paid enough, the solution is not to commit wage fraud against your employer.

There are plenty of employee-owned companies out there that would fit your ideals, people can work for them if they want that ownership. Or start their own. Otherwise, no, they don't get to own the output of their work. That's the way it is.

> I'm sorry, if you feel like you're not being paid enough, the solution is not to commit wage fraud against your employer.

i'm pretty sure you did not read the second part of my comment as you did not engage with it's argument (that the definition of the word 'steal' is political). i don't think saying "I'm sorry" and then stating your opinion is an argument.

> There are plenty of employee-owned companies out there that would fit your ideals, people can work for them if they want that ownership. Or start their own. Otherwise, no, they don't get to own the output of their work. That's the way it is.

It's not about ideals, it's about the core logic of our current economic system: the accumulation of capital by one class.

Idealism or whatever can't do anything to fight back against coercive and alienating capitalist property relations where one class (property-owning) benefits at the expense of another class (the working class).

Since you mentioned it, the reason I didn't engage with your argument about the word "steal" because I think it's frankly ridiculous and clearly not worth arguing about. We share no common ground, so we will never agree.

Read the rest of the comment. I am clearly not in favor of that framing. I was going along with it for a moment to demonstrate why it was a bogus framing.

ah thanks Kye. i've edited my comment.

"Wage theft" in these terms is a thing only in the US. In legal terms, and in most of the developed world, "wage theft" is the unlawful denial of wages from employers to employees.

It's usually called time theft when employees are on the clock but doing things they shouldn't be doing.

Messing around isn't illegal.

Calling it "theft" is a way to try to tie it to something widely considered illegal, which is unfortunate.

I'm not talking about messing around. Humans aren't machines.

Fudging timesheets and practices called "buddy punching" are what I'm talking about.

> Fudging timesheets and practices called "buddy punching" are what I'm talking about.

as someone else already responded to you: "I think people tend to do this kind of thing when their employer is hostile or exploitative. People typically respond well and work hard when they're treated fairly."

> It's usually called time theft when employees are on the clock but doing things they shouldn't be doing.

This is what you originally said.

Clocking for another employee, that is time card fraud, not "time theft". "Time theft" is not even a legal term.

There is a recent push to coin the term "time theft", in order to group anything that may not be considered working during work hours as a "crime".

An employee may commit fraud by not working and still collecting wages, which is a crime, but this tends to be used as an excuse for employers to make it look that any work time used for non working matters, is illegal. Break a bit longer than usual? Time theft. Taking a personal call? Time theft. Pooping at work? Believe it or not, time theft.

There are plenty of examples out there where managers try to curb and reduce employee breaks, even with ludicrous signs advertising "how to avoid committing time clock fraud" [1], and also plenty where those employees get canned accused of "time theft", but if you live in the US, in an "at will employment" state, it is enough that the reason is not illegal for an employer to do so.

But again, there is not such a thing as "time theft". "Time theft" is a made up term to scare people into total submission while at work.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/mf41ia/i_work_for...

There is no such thing as time theft, please don’t make legal terms up

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