Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For example, one of my jobs right out of high school was waiting tables at a local restaurant. If you were opening, the expectation from owners and management was you'd get in early to help open but would wait 15 minutes before service started before clocking in. So on those days you'd do 30-45 minutes of fully unpaid labor. There was well understood that if you complained about this not only would they fire you but they'd call up all their industry buddies and you'd basically be on every other restaurants no-hire list. At the time I was pretty naive and didn't think much of it, just figured that's the way the world worked. Doing the math, because I always made more than the tipped minimum wage, I think it only ended up costing me $7/week in wages - but if I stole $7 out of the till each week for a year in a half I'd be charged with a felony.
I did it a couple times and found it so demoralizing I quit. Later I found out that practice is very illegal.
This is the life today for zero-hours, at-will employment in the university sector. As a visiting professor I've had universities ask me to deliver a semester course a year in advance, and call the week before to say they're not running it. At the very minimum a 12 week course takes 40 hours of preparation even if you're just refreshing the notes and practicals from last time.
I've had Russell group universities not pay me for two years. They've flat out "lost" my invoices, three times! Two major league universities tried to stiff me out of over £2000 and had to be threatened with legal action. One London uni asked me to prepare a DSP course, then instead of hiring me to deliver it plagiarised my slides, took my name off them and got a junior lecturer to deliver the course instead. The last university I worked at were so careless with my payments that my accountant advised me to "extricate immediately" because there so many "anomalies" she couldn't keep track of them all.
Universities are absolute f*king gangsters.
Which, based on all of the bad experiences, might be a blessing in disguise for adjuncts (UK or otherwise!)
Rain days.... Too cold days(-5°c)...
So like a much-dreaded union for employers except it’s underhanded and illegal.
And it’s underhanded and illegal when employers do it, because there’s an imbalance of power between employee and employee.
Unions exist to even out that balance of power. When employers engage in that kind of activity it further increases the imbalance of power.
For example, in this case, they were using that tactic to support their ability to steal from employees.
The employer is already a collective, "A business", and the hiring manager is operating with the full power of that collective in hiring/firing negotations.
A union is a collective to balance power against the business (collective).
A cartel is a collective of collectives (ie., a group of businesses) operating to defeat free market competition regulation, in this sense the cartel is balancing power against the state -- which is the only permitted "collective of collectives".
Cartels challenge states (power to create free markets), whereas unions challenge businesses (power to hire/fire).
This is why unions are permissible and cartels are not.
First and foremost, states do not, and cannot "create free markets" the existence of a state to regulation a market makes is de-facto non-free
This is also a very rose colored look at unions, while simultaneously demonizing businesses. In reality it is completely possible to have an exploitive union. At the end of the day, power corrupts, and the more power a person or group has over another person or group the more corrupting that power is.
Thus in a very large union you will likely see just as much employee abuse, as in a very large company.
The sweet spot has always as well always been in Medium sized organizations, or unions, above 300 employees, under 3000 employees. Anything larger or smaller and the risk of abuse and poor conditions go up considerably even if you are represented by a large union
Which is kind of the problem with unions. If they stuck to negotiating pay levels while leaving businesses free to hire and fire who they see fit I think employers would be much more willing to work with them. Higher salary expenses are much less damaging to a business than not being able to fire incompetent workers.
Depending on the country, that varies from "totally illegal" to "well of course you're gonna solidarity strike, that's how it's done".
If they're good or bad is another matter.
The societal impact of this crime cannot be overstated. Billions of dollars stolen from workers, practically free of consequence.
Most companies use countless loopholes.
If you define being late with payments as theft, then I'd bet that rent theft is way larger than wage theft. I don't see why you would say that it is theft when you are late with payments to a worker but not theft when you are late with payments to a company.
If being late with payments isn't theft, then "wage theft" isn't theft, just like you missing to pay your rent one month isn't theft.
Source: wife worked as a credit controller.
This isnt "being late with payments" that is as you have correctly pointed out, not theft. "late" implies that eventually the wages are in fact paid. This is not what people are talking about when they are talking about wage theft.
People refuse to pay rent all the time unless you start to threaten legal action over it. We call that late payment, but they would never pay unless you went after them, just like these companies.
> This isnt "being late with payments"
"Being late with payments" doesn't mean they are late, it means they haven't paid you yet. That is equivalent to wage theft, we just call it "late" to make it seem like a lesser evil, and "theft" when corporations do it to make it seem worse than it is.
Of course some companies will never pay and will take you to court over it, but I don't see why you should lump all of that into a giant number alongside the very benign cases.
At worst, you won't get a positive recommendation from an employer like this if somebody calls and asks. The idea that employers are busy maintaining "no-hire lists" and collecting names from all of their industry peers doesn't hold up, at least not outside of maybe weird small-town social bubbles.
But it’s not like the small-town social bubble of West Coast software development is a stranger to collusion. What was that thing again? Apple and some other giant tech companies colluding on wages? Well, it was on HN a few times at least. I don’t remember the details.
There were two other companies we regularly swapped low-skill call center workers with and the management teams of all three, I was on one, shared a list of disruptive and dangerous workers we'd had to fire and discouraged any of the three firms to hire. On our end, the list was in Lotus Notes and it was someone's job to make sure it integrated updates from the other call centers.
That was the late 90s and the list sharing started in the late 80s before I got there but it was one of the thing you learned about when you got promoted to management, check the list before the interview!
I started out on the phones and had many friends still on the floor when I got promoted, so learning about the list was a little bit disturbing, but the names I recognized on it from my time in our call center, had been escorted out by the police or carried out by EMTs.
That firm was wild. We literally took on 20 guys from the child sexual abuse convict halfway house to work the phones. Only half made the cut after the trial period and only three of them stayed on more than a few months, and those three were quite good, one making the "CEO" team which was the highly capable group that could hold a CEO on the phone for a 45 minute interview about, for example, printers and multi-function devices conducted on behalf of Dell Computers to see if they were making any headway eating into HP printer sales or whatever.
My point is that back in the '90s lists you say don't exist absolutely did. I not only knew of one, I used it, added to it, and I have every confidence that two other companies employing the same kind of people were using it as well.
However, in a small town, business owners may warn each other, and in a small bubble of companies, they may talk to each other.
And if you need a reference, better pick a fellow employee. Other than that, ignore the boogeyman!
For my part, the fired workers that were added to the list had been escorted out by police or wheeled out by EMTs after causing property damage and physical harm to other employees. I didn't think much about it at the time. I was young and foolish and happy to have been promoted off the call center floor into management.
I think the list had started a decade earlier for sharing across sister companies. My local company had been acquired by a larger foreign company which had several US subsidiaries in similar businesses, one of which was just the other side of the river from us. I think they first shared the list amongst themselves which despite them being different companies, is almost "internal", but eventually they started sharing it with another Austin business with a large call center over on Mopac that shared a bunch of workers across different shifts. They'd work for us during the day calling businesses and work theirs at night calling residential. Then a third company joined and I wouldn't be surprised if they shared it even more broadly after I left, but by then I suspect most of the phone workers in Austin were covered at that point.
(This to point out that most lobbies are to employers what unions are to employees)
An interjection: Under GDPR this is illegal. (Just a reminder that "tech" legislation sometimes also improve on broader levels)
I see a lot of US websites with annoying GDPR popups and they really don't need to do that over here.
I only called sick a handful of times, never was late, and did my job to the best of my ability. it is called work ethic. I started at $0.25 above minimum wage, as we given several raises, and position changes by the time I left at age 18, why because I was one of the most reliable teens they had, and they did not want me to go to another employer.
Some parents instill work ethic in their children even teens, sadly we do not have many good parents these days it seems like
and for the record, walmart never asked me and I never did work a single second off the clock...
It turns out that there is a lot more to what makes a person than just the behaviour of their parents.
Most college graduates likely could not pass a 8th grade exam from 100 years ago, the social cost of that is immense.
Also I have to ask, and I mean this seriously. What did you do with the money from that job? Did it go into savings? Did you help with household bills?
My parents provided shelter, basic food at home, and transport to school and official functions...
If I wanted anything beyond that like access to a car to go out with friends. Or to buy a new game.. or go to a party etc. I hade to fund that with my own money
My parents were terrible at personal finance. They were not savers nor did the schools teach me anything about saving.. investment or compound interest so I did not start any of those things until my late 20's.. I failure instill regret....
That said my parents never asked me to contribute to the household finances.. and now today as one of my parents has no retirement they now live with me and I do not ask them to contribute to the household finances...
He kept jerking me around, paying fractions of what he owed me, then "forgetting" how much was left, etc. I probably ended up getting about a quarter or what I was owed.
This was a "friend" (note the quotes). I can only imagine what happens with the contractors that hire laborers from the side of the street, in the local hispanic district. Those chaps don't have any recourse (Unless you count the local MS-13 chapter).
I hear a lot of people tell me about the "wait to clock in" gig. Many of them "help themselves" to their employers' assets. I don't condone that, but I also don't condone their getting ripped off.
Large-scale, white-collar employers probably reap billions from stolen wages. My first job was hourly, and I made a lot of money over my standard wages (it was actually an honest employer -defense contractor, so they were audited with a proctoscope).
During my exempt career, I encountered all kinds of nickel-and-dime behavior. Those nickels and dimes add up to new Porsches in the driveways of senior managers.
The most they'll be screwed is one day's labor. They're in demand because they work very hard, and they'll quickly find work.
This is exactly one of the key responsibilities for labour unions to manage this interest on behalf of their members.
As a server, aside from taking orders and carrying food, we had 'sidework' before and after our shift- stuff like cutting lemons into wedges for water, rolling silverware in napkins, refilling condiments, etc. That all needed to be done before/after clocking in. Additionally, if diners stayed late, our timecards were edited to reflect the hours we 'should have' been working.
And the last thing that bugs me the most, is that we were required to give 10% of our tips to share with the back-of-house employees like bus boys. The manager collected this money directly and there was no accounting or way to see how much of it actually made its way to the other employees. That pisses me off the most because it was so arbitrary and so completely in the control of someone who was already stealing from us.
The places I worked
- busboys were not back-of-house employees; they were out on the floor helping take care of tables (bussing them, refilling coffee, making deserts, etc).
- the wait staff gave the 10% (or whatever it was) directly to the busboys. And some to the hostess, and some to the bartender; basically all the client facing staff.
I have no memory of the owners doing anything dishonest to the staff (at any of the places I worked), so either I was blind to things, or there _are_ (were) some good ones out there.
The idea that there's a cabal of restaurant owners who get together to discuss in detail how they're breaking the law and maintain a blacklist is absurd when you stop to think about it.
But they're more than happy to let those kind of rumours keep doing the rounds to scare the naive young people into not sticking up for themselves.
There are Whatsapp groups of HRs working in a particular group (tech, construction, etc.) where they communicate. Obviously they don't discuss the names openly but they do ask if someone is willing to give feedback on a candidate that worked at XY.
In many cases it's just teenagers being dramatic and coming up with external reasons why they are dealing with suboptimal conditions and not asking the owner about it.
It's unfair competition though, so it's really important that this doesn't happen. A restaurant that wants do to the right thing shouldn't have to worry about a few % worse competitiveness on wages because the asshat across the street has his staff work for free.
If something like this earned you a $10k fee the first time and a 5 year ban from running any kind of business in the state if you repeat it, I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem.
It's not just that. There are people that will outright deny that it's happening. The reasoning trotted out is that if it were true that this were happening then it would be squashed. In other words, if it were happening, then it would not be happening. From the article:
> According to a 2018 report by Good Jobs, between January 2000 to 2018, Walmart paid over $1.4bn in fines and settlements over wage theft violations, FedEx paid over $500m during the same period, and Bank of America paid over $380m.
Sans data about Walmart's $1.4bn in fines, they'll reason to themselves that Walmart, even if it's not somewhere they personally would ever shop, is a reputable company, therefore this isn't something that happens at Walmart.
I have experience firsthand (from a low spot in my life) that FedEx continues to do the same thing, especially to people who are powerless to do anything about it. To wit:
Their warehouse workers get paid low wages and the arrangement is that you need to be available between 4:00 AM and ~10:30. It's not that you'll be working during those hours. No, instead what happens is the night before they determine how high of a load they have and then set the hours for that time. So you as a worker call in at around 9:00 PM the night before, listen to a recorded message that states e.g. "On Tuesday, February 13, package sorters will begin work at 5:30". So far not so good, but there's nothing especially illegal about this is as far as I know. (It stretches morality and ethics, however.) What is illegal as I understand it is incidents where they tell you to report to work at that time, people show up, and then find that the timeclocks are papered over with a sign saying not to clock in because there was an issue at the warehouse overnight and the systems aren't running, so they've moved the clock-in time ahead 45 minutes to when they expect the systems to be up and running. You are expected to wait there off the clock despite not being paid and being expected not to leave.
Note that this is US law enforcement in general. The "if middle america were using drugs at the same rate of inner cities then we'd see arrest rates at the same levels" argument we here. While studies show that drug use is similar between these groups, enforcement in cities, specifically against minority groups is much higher.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
One of my buddies said they did this to them. I don’t know how common it is but it does happen. They were satisfied with their pay, though, compared to what many jobs in the area offered.
And culturally treating it like any other theft: a crime that should subject the thief, in a practical sense, to the risk of imprisonment.
The system is working as intended.
Government is quite literally a criminal organization except it was decided by someone (people, representatives, a monarch, whatever) that this particular one is not criminal and any others like it are, within self-described boundaries.
It might or might not be doing criminal things (as in, things we associate with criminal), but it wants and needs a monopoly on those things, otherwise it risks dissolution by internal and/or external forces. It’s thus obvious it’ll prioritize protecting the mafia bosses/sovereigns/elites and thugs/enforcers.
If you steal $100 worth of food from a store, they'll call the cops and arrest you.
If the store steals wages from you in the tune of $1000+, <POOF> its a.... CIVIL MATTER (waves hands).
And if you're a person of color, if you try to pass a counterfeit $20 bill (unclear if you even know it's counterfeit) then the police just murder you and the person in charge of it gets a cheesecake sentence
No one will get arrested for even stealing $1000s of dollars of luxury items on camera (at least in CA, a trend setter for other states).
https://amhsnews.org/10386/justice-awareness/shoplifting-the...
> On September 30th, 2023, Governor Newsom signed into law Senate Bill No. 553, essentially making it illegal for retail workers to confront looters, burglars, and shoplifters.
> A Walgreens employee working in San Francisco told a reporter that thieves come around 15-20 times per day
> any theft under $950 is only considered a misdemeanor, which means it doesn’t lead to anything punitive by law
Edit: Present data countering the virtue signaling and get downvoted. Keep it up folks.
The true crime is as always the impact on businesses.
It’s a way in which this is bad that folks may not immediately connect to it.
It's hard to tell if you meant this as sarcasm or not, but... it really is a big deal. If all your competitors are screwing their employees in order to increase their margins, that means they can out-compete your on price. Which means you can either screw _your_ employees.. or risk going out of business. And eventually, the only players left are the ones that are screwing their employees.
So yes, if you want to look out for employees, then you need to look out for businesses by making sure everyone is following the same rules. That doesn't mean the businesses themselves are more important, just that their health is vital to the well-being of the employees.
Our family has a small farm, my parents didn't think we did enough of that and put me in a white van full of migrant workers at 12 years old (hey the 80s!) to go pick produce in a field all day... It was grueling work but I got a first hand account of migrant farm workers and the way they are treated.
A worker that does not put up with petty BS is surely less likely to put up with major BS (like wrongful termination when getting pregnant or whatever).
Not to mention the chance that you'll be found out by the authorities; I want to believe the punishment for wage theft is much more than the savings. Of course, that depends on how many people report it and how much evidence can be retrieved I suppose.
Can't buy your way out moral bankruptcy with $10,400 over 2 decades.
I turned down a job at a nice Italian place to work there because of that lie and a $1 difference per hour in the base wage.
But somehow companies seem to have more rights than people.
These are not comparable as working an extra 15 minutes is a consensual tranaction where getting $7 stolen from the business was an unconsensual transaction. A better comparison would be along for a $7 per week raise.
If they did so could you not bring up the suspicious timing with the labour board?
You have to be operating in a very narrow niche or a very small community for illegal behavior to be the norm.
what most employees don't know is that this type of theft is often a smokescreen for theft by a manager or someone below ownership.
mention to owner anonymously, if no action, report the business that does this to you, put it on yelp, and move on.
What you are describing is typically called "side work". Basically work that is not directly related to waiting a table. Folding napkins, putting up chairs, moving tables, etc. Even in cases where the restaurant clocks in their workers for every minute they are doing work, servers complain about doing side work because "it costs them money". And they want the federal minimum wage during that time.
Which naively makes sense. But that's not at all how tipped wages work under the law. The formula is basically: (([hours worked] * [tipped minimum wage]) + [tips earned in pay period]) / [hours worked] = [hourly wage over pay period]
So if you work 10 hours in a pay period, that's $21.30. If you collected $51.20 in tips during that time, you made $72.50 or $7.25/hr (based on current federal minimum wage, obviously numbers are different for different areas where the minimum wage is different from the federal). The restaurant is in the clear. Even if you worked 5 hours doing "side work" and 5 hours waiting tables where you got $51.20 in tips.
Servers want to essentially prorate every minute they are not physically collecting a tip it seems. Worked an hour and every table stiffed you? They want $7.25 for that hour. Regardless of the fact that the previous hour they took in $20 in tips.
Serving is more akin to being an independent contractor. You need to make hay while the sun is shining. The fat sustains you through the lean. You look at your per hour over the aggregate, not counting every hour. It's why contractors charge the rates they charge. If you are only billing half the year, those billings need to support you through the other half.
Now, in your case, the reason they don't want you to clock in isn't to save $7 over a week. It's to up your average. Which is still wrong. Let's say at your current rate of collecting tips, you totaled $225 over 30 hours. That's $7.50. Restaurant doesn't owe you anything. Now, $225 over 32.5 hours (your low end over 5 days), that's only $6.92 / hour. The restaurant is short, not $7, but $41.28
And true, If you instead made $300 over those 30 hours, the extra 2.5 hours don't even matter to you. Your check wouldn't have been that different. But, it's money that's not coming from their pockets and it's really to push people near the bubble over their limit.
So you earn $16/hr for all time you’re at work, plus tips.
Which is how it should be. You’re being employed. Those tips are for the employee, not a gratuity for the owner to offset their costs.
“Tipped wages” are just another form of theft, bought by the restaurant lobby.
> So you earn $16/hr for all time you’re at work, plus tips.
This is not true. According to California Waitress & Bartender Minimum Wage Laws California Tipped Minimum Wage Laws for 2023, 2024 [1],
> California labor law allows tipped employees to be paid a lower cash wage than the standard California minimum wage by their employers, with different allowed tip credits applying to different classes of employer.
That lower amount is $11 or $12 per hour, depending on the size of the company (vs the normal $16/hour rate for non-tipped employees).
The numbers are lower for most (all?) of the rest of the country.
[1] https://www.minimum-wage.org/california/tipped-employee-mini...
>They want $7.25 for that hour. Regardless of the fact that the previous hour they took in $20 in tips.
Good. It is the companies job to pay the minimum wage rate per hour regardless of weather customer come in or not. If the restaurant industry cannot survive this they have no legal right to slave wages to survive.
The restaurant owner is encouraged to keep the restaurant open much later than "profitable" hours because the cost of the additional late-night hours is only $2.13/hour per employee. So if even one table comes in during the 11PM to 1AM hours, that breaks even for the business. The business owner benefits from externalizing the true cost of staying open for those hours onto the employees. The workers end up working a lot of no-profit hours.
If they were making $7.25/hr then the incentives would be (more) aligned for them to keep working those hours.
But currently this is NOT a legal requirement. So your statement "they have no legal right to slave wages to survive" drips with hyperbole.
If your employer withholds $20 from your paycheck it's a civil violation of contract law. You have to go through an extremely onerous and convoluted process that very likely won't go anywhere.
If, in response, you decide to pay yourself by taking $20 from the till, that's criminal theft. You will be arrested by the police, sent to jail, and charged in the criminal justice system.
If you withhold $20 from a bill payment, the worst that happens is collections. The company has to go through an extremely onerous and convoluted process that very likely won't go anywhere.
If, in response, a company employee decides to settle the bill themselves by visiting your home and stealing $20 from your wallet, that's criminal theft. They will be arrested by the police, sent to jail, and charged in the criminal justice system.
In the end, the imbalance isn't fundamentally one between employers and employees -- it's the fact that stealing is a very different situation than not paying money owed.
Of course it does benefit employers in the end, since they get to receive work now and pay later. Which makes you wonder why it's never become a thing for workers to receive their daily/weekly/biweekly wages or salary at the start of the period? In which case any wage theft would come from quitting the job before the end of the period.
> (...) by visiting your home and stealing $20 from your wallet
You are being dishonest here.
Here's my version:
If you withhold $20 from a bill payment, the worst that can happen is having to pay an extra fee, getting a utility shut off, and a permanent hit to your credit score.
If you charge a customer an extra "service improvement fee" or "credit card surcharge" or a $400 "Mod Seq Other Qhp" (an actual line from a bill I have in front of me), they'll have to pay it.
That's entirely uncalled for.
My point was clear and, yes, honest.
Obviously there are additional complications in both directions. Yes, if you don't pay your electric bill of course it will eventually get shut off. But if an employer stops paying their employees they eventually quit. If you're late in paying there may be a fine. Courts also fine employers punitive amounts for non-payment of wages.
The situations aren't identical but my point stands that debt and stealing are different concepts and can go in both directions.
And random line items added to a bill have nothing to do with this conversation.
> And random line items added to a bill have nothing to do with this conversation
Doesn't it? I'm sure employers withholding wages have some sort of itemized justification too.
You're focusing on the wrong detail. My overall point is clear. You're wrong to say I'm being dishonest -- I was obviously trying to draw an equivalence. Pickpocketing is a better example, but I think my intention was clear.
It actually wouldn't be too hard to implement without wage theft in either direction -- mandate some kind of escrow functionality by law, built into direct deposit.
In other words, if you work daily, the money is deposited in "escrow mode" at the start of your shift, and you can verify it in your banking app. But it's not released until you clock out. Or if your salary is every two weeks, it's deposited in escrow mode at the start of the period. At the end of the business day each day, a day's proportion is automatically released unless the bank is informed that your employment has been terminated.
But the point is that businesses could never try to save money by not paying their employees, because they couldn't get the money back anyways. If your boss doesn't approve that you completed the day's work when you actually did, the money stays in escrow until it gets settled by a court.
So I don't buy that it's just because business owners and politicians "decide" things. If voters wanted what I just described, it could easily happen. But I just came up with this proposal on my own -- I've never heard it described by anyone. It's not something voters seem to care about. Why not?
Boss: "Your court hearing will be in 2-6 months, you'll need to take time off work to go to court and I'll get the company lawyer to argue our side so you'll need to pay for a lawyer to argue your side. You'll need to risk losing and being lumbered with court costs on top, and extra time and costs for a retrial. Or ... you could stay an extra hour tomorrow and I'll approve today's salary release. What do you say, low-wage labourer?"
My point is regarding companies that simply don't pay for whole weeks' or months' worth of payroll, for whole teams of people, to try to get out of paying wages entirely. Which happens for businesses that hire people for single projects and then let them go (like construction), or businesses that wind up going out of business but where the owner can at least lose less money (common in restaurants, cafes).
it's a snarky comment trying to conflate democratic control of government with communism, i know, but it's ignorant, not funny, nor is it an original joke.
i enjoy edgy humor, but let's stop making jokes about the tragic fate of people in the USSR in an attempt to make an ideological point.
And thank goodness. In the same way, if you go to a restaurant and walk out without paying, but you've been there before and paid with a credit card, they're not allowed to go back and charge that credit card by the amount you stiffed them.
If you want your money, you need to go through the courts. You can't just take money you're owed, no matter if there's a debt or not. Not until a court says you can.
As the article points out, this is not the case, so the rational course of action is to do something else, as seen in less developed countries with lower societal trust.
Really there ought to be a pretty straightforwards system. You go to the local court showing your employment contract and proof of hours worked. Court contacts employer same day (could be automated phone system or e-mail) with X days to respond (ideally like 1 or 2). If no response, or no satisfactory response, you are given a certificate you can take to the business's bank to withdraw from their accounts directly, just like a wage garnishment. Why won't legislators think of solutions to such basic issues, instead of spending time on endless culture war nonsense? This seems like one of these things that ought to be 'easy.' Also allow for substantial interest penalties, like seven percent per day or something.
If it were "self-service" as you suggest, it would be open to abuse of tons of people falsely claiming wage theft, to make an easy buck.
Companies can't be required to respond in 1 or 2 days. They need time to gather facts, especially when people can be out sick, busy with other work, etc. And they need to be able to present them to a judge and allow for cross-examination. Courts are designed to be fair and protect the rights of both sides, not to be fast.
Also I don't know what you mean about "normal debt recovery" being "self-service"? It isn't.
That said, it's not a crime if you don't get caught. This too goes both ways.
Of course it doesn't. But you'd still think that the one theft couldn't be reprimanded by a court while the other was handwaved at the same time. What would be interesting wouldn't be if someone could get away with that (they couldn't, and shouldn't) but whether the fact that the matter was taken to court - presumably by the employer who was also guilty of a provable crime - led to any consequences for the employer.
It's always treated like bullshit because it is. You don't get to decide how I settle my debts. If I owe you $20, you don't get to confiscate whatever you want of mine of what you deem is of equal value.
The lawyers will though.
It looks like corporations make far more money stealing from workers than they'd ever lose in their dealings with the DOL. If enforcement were inevitable and fines high enough to actually hurt no company would ever dare steal from their employees, but because they do (and at such large scales) we know that they make more money from theft than they risk losing by stealing.
Theft is "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive the other of it". Not being paid isn't the same, no matter if you try to equate the two on a numerical basis.
It would be more accurate to call "wage theft" as "labour theft". But then, labour isn't as easily stolen outside a contract. The fact is, if you aren't compensated, you can stop providing labour, and any right to a wage usually has a contract associated that can be taken to court.
Someone stealing from a till can steal potentially unlimited amounts before an employer discovers it, and there may be no record proving what is missing.
It's not great how hard it is to recover unpaid wages, but there's no injustice in theft being criminal in comparison. Also, there are circumstances that contract violations can lead to criminal charges (e.g. fraud), but in general if a valid contract is in places, penalties are not criminal (e.g. monetary).
There is a power imbalance, there should be more done to take employers to court. I'd be more interested in the effect on long-term low waged employees, than temporary high-schoolers.
To be clear I am not defending it. If anything I was on receiving end of this behavior from a douchebag employer.
1. Having annual components to wages (RSUs, bonuses), making you work all year and firing you just before they have to pay you.
2. Having no overtime for salaried employees
3. Having employees work extra responsibilities that are not part of the job description by promising promotions and then not giving it to them
I've never encountered such a system in my 20+ years being paid a salary. What companies do this? Worked for two European firms (including one very large one) and two large American firms during that time. Is it something small companies try to do?
What companies have you been at in 20+ years that you have not experienced it at?
Overtime and various other hourly worker protections led to more and more work being classified as salaried, and with it, a removal of the “perks” for most salaried people.
Generally the primary perk that still follows salaried work though is the concept of vacation, sick time, and benefits albeit rationed and beancounted now.
I'm on salary, and I'm only expected to get the work done that's on my plate, and respond to emails etc within a reasonable time frame (eg, if I get an email at 4pm on a Friday, and I don't respond to it till 11:30am Monday, that's fine so long as it's not an emergency).
If I get my work done and there's still time in the day, I'm not expected to invent busywork for myself.
But I do recognize that I'm extremely lucky to have the kind of conditions I do here.
Or even worse, instating mandatory unpaid overtime.
I would love to see Pagerduty stats by job and position. I'm pretty sure the number of devs on 24/7 rotations is way higher than it should.
This is just the definition of "salaried employee".
This is particularly true for workers whose jobs are computer based. Companies think they can pay one shift of workers to keep the computers running 24/7. It should not be that way.
If a company wants its computing infrastructure running 24/7 it should pay for 3 shifts of workers. If not then shut down the systems at 5pm like any normal business.
Email/IM should also be disabled for workers who aren't actively on shift. Any expectation of monitoring email/IM/phone should be counted as work that requires payment and for which there is a maximum number of allowed hours a week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003
NB a lot of employers will ask you to sign a contract self-excluding you from its protections on your first day. ("it's not mandatory, we'd just like everyone to sign it :)" )
Over a year later, they were still "ramping up". Not a single interview had taken place, to the best of my knowledge.
Surely if I'm doing my work in much less and stop working, I'm stealing. When I'm waking up at 2am to handle an incident and still have to clock in the day after, "that's part of the job".
Favors only go one way
Plenty of good examples: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22time+theft%22+us
So while the legal definition is true that I get paid a fixed amount "regardless of work hours" the societal expectation is that I'll meet the 40 hours, 40+ makes me a "work hard, play hard", and everything under is me being lazy regardless of whether I hit my productivity goals or not.
I once closed my Microsoft Teams off 15 minutes earlier than the expected and my manager was telling me to inform her next time that I'm leaving, and I work from home. Micromanaging at its finest.
Everyone is eligible for overtime if they're paid hourly. Certain classes of jobs are exempt from overtime if they're salaried. For example, an Amazon warehouse can't make a picker salaried and then demand free overtime hours.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime/fact-sheets has the breakdown of can be overtime exempt. As a couple of examples, blue-collar workers and first responders can not, in general, be overtime exempt.
The company released the contract and he was put on the bench working for the contracting firm on their projects. They would pay him once per month. They fired him after a few months, not pay him is back pay.
He filed a claim with Texas, nothing was done. When he told me (a year or 2 later) I said he should file with the Federal Gov, but he did not want to.
So it can happen in office work too.
I'm self-employed and have made it a standard practice to look up court records on any new client I'm considering to take on. It has been eye opening.
The problem comes with laying people off in December prior to bonuses. You’ve taken a year of work under the presence of a bonus compensation and then yanked the rug out after squeezing every last ounce of work from a year. They could of course just not pay a bonus, but often internal compensation guidance requires proving a fireable performance problem while layoffs just require basic reporting to labor departments.
Calling this theft is extreme, but it’s definitely ripping employees off and treating them badly. The imprudence mismatch is that the employee is much less able to afford the shenanigans than the employer benefits, and a year of an employees career is a much larger share of total lifetime earnings than the corporations benefit as a percentage of its total lifetime revenues (or compensation expenses as the case may be). This makes it wrong, but not illegal.
Get it in writing so you can sue later, or don’t ever count on it. It’s basic business skills.
Job offers are often take it or leave it, because of the inherent power dynamics in the industry. These “basic business skills” will essentially leave you out of a job.
Your claim is that any crime where the evidence is destroyed isn't a crime.
I once heard a judge say "An oral contract is worth the paper it is printed on".
It may be enforceable if there is a bunch of corroborating evidence that multiple people were told this and are willing to testify in court to that case. But you'll find, especially in right to work states, getting people to speak against the company is difficult.
> “I reminded my manager that paying less than minimum wage was illegal, and added a link to a law firm’s page about it. He fired me,” the worker said. “Getting fired for not wanting to be paid below the already insanely low minimum wage after working in the industry for over 20 years was pretty rough.”
> The worker attempted to file a complaint with the US Department of Labor and the Florida attorney general’s office but was told they only prioritize higher wage violations and never heard back after being told someone would follow up.
All courts are backlogged, many for years. Even "simple" issues can easily take 6+ months.
Child support law isn't that straightforward. It generally isn't even tied to the actual costs to raise the child. It's also rife with abuse for things like unreported income, misusing the money, etc.
If you are owned money, go to small claims court. If a thousand employees are owed money, the time spent for the company becomes painful indeed, and these court cases will raise the notoriety of the company in the department of labor's view.
Even so, the department of labor has it's own procedures it has to follow to make a fair investigation.
But if this year you vote for candidates who are more favorable to labor than the other candidates, and then you continue making that (part of) your strategy over the course of several elections, you can start to shift things. Especially if you can get other people on board with the movement.
It's not like the current situation came about by chance or some cosmic inevitability: the right wing in America has been consistently showing up and voting in larger numbers for decades to get where we are.
Labor wins that we have today have come from coordinated labor movements across partisan lines, not from voting and waiting on service from politicians
In the US, due to the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post voting system, if Hindenburg was running against a candidate in the general election who was even one step worse than he was, then yes, I would have voted for him. Even if his platform included kicking puppies and stealing candy from babies. (Because, remember, in this hypothetical, his opponent's platform includes, say, setting fire to puppies and kicking babies.) Any other choice, under the system we have here, is mathematically certain to increase the chance of the candidate I like least winning.
Voting is not saying "I like this person and agree with everything they say." It is saying "I think that, of the two choices on offer, this person is the most likely to move the county/state/country toward the situation I prefer."
It's not about whether the vote makes me happy. It's about whether it makes the world a marginally better place than the realistic alternatives.
They’ve been quiet quitting across the country since the George Floyd protests and they are working less than ever. Police interventions have been going down, crime has been going up, but staffing and funding has been mostly flat. They’re just not doing their jobs because they know if they hold out, funding will increase.
Also sometimes they just kill you.
Even if I were a victim of a major crime I wouldn’t contact the police in the USA unless I needed a police report number for my insurance claim. They’re probably not going to do anything and they might make things a million times worse.
I’m aware of maybe ten or so property crimes committed against friends, family, and employers, with damage and theft ranging from low-thousands (2024 dollars—some of these were decades ago) to $20k or so. I’ve never once known the police to do anything but scoff at the notion and treat you like an idiot if you go in thinking they’re going to investigate anything at all, no matter how much evidence is available.
And all the people concerned were/are white and middle class, for the record. Even then, nothing.
It’s one of the reasons I tepidly support the more extreme end of “defund”. Let fucking wal-mart or whoever’s getting actual value from the cops pay for them. Me and mine surely aren’t getting our money’s worth.
Hell, the clearance rate on murders is %50, and that includes a substantial chunk of people incorrectly found guilty despite the cops having DNA evidence that would exonerate them.
Makes lobbying over 50x more complicated.
The fact that a UK publication is on about it should be a clear signal that the authors are being influenced by an international interest would like to simplify the process.
Probably chipotle
Here's a page that lists like, a third of the state agencies, I guess, hope this helps! : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Labour
The Guardian has had an office in the US to produce local content for over a decade, now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US
Getting the cops involved is like showing up with an assault rifle. Even if you intend that no one gets hurt, it's a a dangerous escalation.
I distinctly remember that the handbook used the term “wage theft” and not “time card theft” or “fraud”.
If my employer fails to make even a single paycheck I would immediately be looking for another job because the chances are that it isn't that they're looking for free labor, but rather that they have cashflow problems. I am not interested to depend on a sinking ship for my income.
Would give me my check (after repeatedly asking, though never "late"), and usually say something like "this will cash today, but if you can wait til Monday or Tuesday, I'd prefer that".
Hell no. I went downstairs within minutes every time and put that straight in the bank, and I did it over the teller (we banked with the same bank, so it was processed immediately).
Parking lot fines where you are accused of misusing a lot and fined: https://globalnews.ca/news/10217661/bc-man-private-parking-c...
Or being charged a fine when you were never there (due to someone reporting your number): https://globalnews.ca/news/9668618/bc-woman-fights-parking-v...
Or when trying to find another working machine your vehicle was ticketed even after being explained it would be waived (sorry, video): https://globalnews.ca/video/10283604/fort-langley-parking-ti...
It is too easy to be smartass about someone else's life and situation but since individual employees are always more fragile than organizations the best to avoid extreme competition advantages like above and have reserves for situations when an organization stops paying - e.g. being on the brink of collapse - so one can have better position of pressuring by not working until payment arrives in parallel of looking for other possibilities in case the likely eventuality of loosing job comes.
Of course this is what is almost impossible to achive for most, especially for the most vulnerable: there will always someone to take the place of 'troublesome' employees, sometimes for less or offering more. As a product of desperation (in lack of reserves and possibilities but the need of buying food for the family). Shady figures exploit this. Unity against exploitation would help but we rather compete to raise above others.
Not paying for work.
Internships: some may be legit, most are slave labor schemes with many being deeply institutionalized in systems such as healthcare and education.
Lower than minimum wage with an expectation that tips will make up the difference (just be done with tipping, pay at least minimum wage, and raise food prices).
Mistreatment
Virtually everyone is forced to work, or face death. Being forced to work is the de facto human experience. Effectively, there isn't a choice to work or not.
Presenting work as a choice is closely analagous to presenting eating as a choice
Pay, or relative lack thereof, is what defines degree of slavery (complete or partial).
The only real arguments being a.) if one is paid what the work is worth and b.) how much of that pay is retaken in the form of taxes (direct or indirect like when company towns, or estates, recoup most of the pay in the form of costs to the laborer).
Therefore, we will add an additional form of enslavement process: purposefully (often illegally) diulting the value of labor so that it is cheaper.
If a serf is "paid" but the boss and landlord recoups nearly all of that pay in rent and taxes, is the serf a slave?
Few moral and logical people would say no.
Slaver hand-waving deserves to be called out.
Except it's a 3% fee! I'm paying $50 for steak, surely you can just freaking charge me $52 and pay the staff what they deserve?! Why all this nonsense around adding fees like you're the local cable company? You've spent more editing your printed menus to include this new disclaimer than it would cost to just pay your damn staff!
Just a hunch, but I'm guessing you live in Seattle. I've been noticing the same thing all over, and honestly it should be highly illegal.
Seek a rent, sweat the asset: more and more business-as-usual today.
While the Guardian likes to imply that the first company upstream of the workers is a thief, the reality is far more complex. There might be some dealings that could be called theft but, before you get to those, you'd have to remove all the dealings that involve a risky chain of transactions that failed somewhere along the line.
I am very happy that I don't get treated like a criminal just because I forgot to pay a bill, I don't see why companies should be treated differently.
>"I don't see why companies should be treated differently."
In this case I'd love people to get away with fraud / theft / etc. After all big companies commit it left and right and gets away with it.
It's not. It's systematically _not ever_ paying monies owed, on an ongoing basis. And given the number of interactions you've had on this where this has been explained, it seems to be deliberately obtuse on your part by now.
This in between you trying to describe it as a small, almost non-existent problem, and when it does happen, it's non-profitable small businesses just struggling to keep the lights on.
Very hard to assume good faith here.
Capital -ism.
We basically put a big flashing sign right out front saying whose interests are the top priority.
Also I didn’t voice distaste.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/wage-theft-law-new-york-v...
My mother always meticulously logged when my father clocked in and when he clocked out. All my life she did this.
At one employer they immediately noticed my father wasn't getting paid what he should be. So they let it rack up to a decent amount and took them to court. The judge took the years of time logs as proper documentation.
Is this something which could be addressed through the use of a specialized AI assistant?
The biggest barrier to uncompensated workers is the cost of litigation. If the worker could represent themselves effectively, then this would stop.
JFC tech workers sometimes. Just unionize man, that's like the whole point of unions. An "AI assistant" that was effective would be telling you the same thing. You can't convince your boss that paying you what you are owed is the correct choice, you don't have any power in the relationship. Whether they are right or not, they BELIEVE you are eminently replaceable.
Basically, people don't want to do the lawsuit, because they don't know how and to pay for the expertise, it would cost more than the paycheck.
The most straightforward way to fix it, is to make the expertise low or zero cost.
An "AI assistant" that was effective would be telling you the same thing.
No, it would tell me how to conduct the lawsuit.
Below is what ChatGPT-4 just told me. Had I known back then, I would have just done this. (And I note that the lawyer who told me it would cost me more than I would get back didn't tell me a lot of this!)
User
I have been shorted $4000 on my last paycheck when I was let go by a software company in Columbia, South Carolina. What is the jurisprudence on being shorted pay, what do I have to prove, and how do I go about bringing the lawsuit.
ChatGPT
In a situation where you've been shorted on your final paycheck, the specific steps you can take and the jurisprudence around it largely depend on both federal and state laws. Here's a general overview of what you need to know and potential steps you could take, specifically tailored to Columbia, South Carolina:
Jurisprudence on Being Shorted Pay
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA): At the federal level, the FLSA requires that employees are paid for all hours worked. If an employer fails to pay you what you're owed, you may have a claim under the FLSA.
State Laws: South Carolina has its own labor laws that complement federal laws. While South Carolina does not have specific laws governing the timing of final paychecks for terminated employees, employers are generally expected to adhere to the agreed-upon terms of pay. If no specific terms are set, then they must follow the usual pay schedule.
What You Have to Prove
To bring a successful claim for unpaid wages, you typically need to prove:
The Amount Owed: Documentation or evidence of the agreed-upon wages and the shortfall in your final paycheck. Hours Worked: Evidence of the hours you worked for which you have not been paid. This could include time sheets, emails, or other records. Attempts to Resolve: It's often beneficial to show that you've made reasonable attempts to resolve the issue with your employer before resorting to legal action. Steps to Take Review Employment Agreement: Check your employment contract or any official documentation regarding pay rates, schedules, and termination policies.
Gather Documentation: Compile all relevant documents, including pay stubs, employment contracts, correspondence with the employer about your pay, and any records of hours worked.
Attempt to Resolve Directly: It's often recommended to attempt to resolve the issue with your employer directly. Sometimes, pay discrepancies are due to clerical errors and can be corrected without legal action.
File a Wage Claim: If direct resolution isn't possible, you can file a wage claim with the South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (SCLLR). While SCLLR does not handle wage disputes directly, they can guide you on the process and what state resources might be available.
Consult with an Attorney: Consider consulting with an employment law attorney who is familiar with South Carolina's laws. An attorney can advise you on the best course of action, whether it's negotiating a settlement or filing a lawsuit. They can also help you understand your rights and the strengths of your case.
Small Claims Court: For amounts under a certain threshold (which varies by state), you might be able to bring a claim in small claims court without the need for an attorney. In South Carolina, the limit for small claims court is $7,500.
Federal Claim: If your case involves violations of federal law (such as FLSA violations), you might also have the option to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division.
Each case is unique, so it's important to get personalized legal advice. An attorney can help you navigate the specific procedures and ensure your rights are protected throughout the process.
In my state...Idaho...employees can be paid as low as $3.35 (if I am reading that correctly). I know many people local who worked under this law for many years. The town I am in it costs approx 2x the average "renters salary" to afford to live. We currently have constant "now hiring" signs on almost every building. One of the largest employers in the area uses this law to pay their people peanuts. The only ones who can afford to stay in this town are the ones who already had houses before the "doubling" that happened over the last 5 years...and often they are on edge too.
But you know..."Go ruthless capitalism".
many media outlets are complicit with this, and are either getting completely fooled by these PR tactics or simply don't care
The facility was foul, we had rats running around, frequent minor electrocutions from improperly maintained power and of course, all sorts of backhanded tactics to avoid paying employees what they were owed.
At some point, someone had enough and reported something to OSHA - I’m not sure what, but the day the inspector showed up, our supervisors came around the office telling us all that we had better lie to the inspector because if we tell the truth, they’ll shut us down for weeks and no one will be able to pay their rent.
I wonder how many other people struggle with that issue daily. The inability to try to make their employer do the bare minimum out of fear of losing what they do have.
That's so medieval and backward for a country like that
Brazil's independence from Brazil was declared in 1822 and recognized in 1825. "Slavery was legitimated as a historical institution in the Brazilian Constitution of 1824 in the right to own property." says https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/display/10.1093/ac...
More specifically, just like the US Constitution does not mention slavery, https://constitutionalstudies.wisc.edu/index.php/cs/article/... writes:
"Given its Enlightenment inspiration and proclaimed liberal spirit the Brazilian Constitution of 1824 never explicitly employed the words slave or slavery. But it did implicitly recognize the slaveholding character of Brazilian society when it subtly confessed the inequality among men. To some extent it had to, for the far-reaching consequences of the slave-master relationship were too important to be fully ignored. The solution the constituent found was to borrow categories from Roman law.5 Article 6 of the Charta established that Brazilians were those born in Brazil, either ingenuous or freed. Ingenuous were those born free, while freed were those born slaves but manumitted (Ribas 1880, 49)." ..
It seems that "masters could revoke a granted manumission in case of ingratitude."
Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888.
Who could have thought?
Libertarians and ultra capitalists see the building on fire and complain that we have too many firefighters. Let this building auto-regulate! To some degree it's probably the same mechanisms of self-deception that conspiracy theorists use to make themselves feel good and superior for having seen the light.
There is no magic effect of the capitalism system. It eats workers and shits billionaires. It won't self correct. And arguably yes, all the regulations are just patches to the system, but short of a revolution and changing the system itself, that's the best there is for now.
>> There are numerous forms of wage theft, from employers not compensating workers for time worked, violating minimum wage and overtime laws, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, not providing legally required meal breaks, confiscating worker tips, or illegally taking deductions from worker wages.
Yeah, one of those isn't like the others. I know unions and the tax people hate it, but some people are perfectly happy to be independent contractors.
Having said all that, for all the others make the company directors personally liable.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/01/10/2024-00...
The issue with misclassification is that a number of jobs don't actually have the level of autonomy needed to be legally classified as an independent contractor, and yet the company classifies them as one anyway to skimp out on benefits.
Literally nobody is denying that. The issue is that many companies are also happy to use the classification to their advantage when the roles don't meet the legal standard their society has put forth as the requirement for someone to be an independent contractor (largely e.g. genuine independence in their work).
This however is empathically and clearly not about people who enjoy perks of independent contracting. I'm aware of no union or "tax people" in my circle who deny that reality.
This is about people who have NO perks of independent contracting and NO perks of being an employee.
I've had several friends in such situations - from sleezy sketchy places, to standard practice at bug research institutions.
(The down votes, fwiw, are probably not because people disagree with your political stance, lest you feel like a martyr, but from possibly intentional obtuse misrepresentation of article and issue).
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/understanding-off-payroll-workin...
>> (The down votes, fwiw, are probably not because people disagree with your political stance, lest you feel like a martyr, but from possibly intentional obtuse misrepresentation of article and issue).
I think I'll cope with the loss of imaginary internet points, and there is no obtuse misrepresentation. Clearly your reading comprehension is struggling. I said that:
>>>> There are numerous forms of wage theft, from employers not compensating workers for time worked, violating minimum wage and overtime laws, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, not providing legally required meal breaks, confiscating worker tips, or illegally taking deductions from worker wages.
>> Yeah, one of those isn't like the others. I know unions and the tax people hate it, but some people are perfectly happy to be independent contractors.
I can't think of anyone that would like to be paid less than minimum wage, or not get paid overtime for instance, but I can think of plenty of people (especially in the UK) that would have liked to have continued as independent contractors (in IT, broadcasting, lorry driving or wherever).
Often under the guise of protecting the vulnerable, over broad legislation is passed that affects more than just (EG) the Uber Eats driver.