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Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

Amazing pettiness from the owners for what is essentially $10 worth of labor (or less)

This sums up much of american rural small business... I started working at 12 and had many random jobs between 12-18 that were run by awful people.

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.

I think some managers use petty potential conflicts to filter out people that are not naive, have a backbone or are not desperate enough to succumb.

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).

It adds up. Multiply by the number of employees by the number of weeks in a year by the number of restaurants owned by the total number of ways in which the employees are deprived of small amounts at a time.

$10/week/employee adds up over decades.

But is it worth the resentment from said employees? Having to deal with the revolving door of naive new staff that needs to be trained, get up to speed, then leaves again when they realize they're being stiffed or they can do better? It just doesn't feel sustainable.

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.

It's worth it to the tune of $50 billion per year with only $3 billion recovered

It sounds like a lot, until you realize it's only roughly $30 per year per employee in the US (roughly).

There's no justification in being shitty to your fellow citizen over this paltry sum of money. None.

It really doesn't.

Can't buy your way out moral bankruptcy with $10,400 over 2 decades.

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