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Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

theguardian.com

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Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#331

Post by riversflow »

charcircuit wrote: post #328
spamizbad wrote: post #9

This phenomena is pretty widespread in the service industry and I would venture to say that a significant minority of businesses participate in some version of wage theft. 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 befo…

>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. 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.

It's not really consent if you are being coerced by your employer.

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#332

Post by FireBeyond »

andsoitis wrote: post #145

> Eventually Martinez and several of his co-workers left after not getting paid for four weeks of work. 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.

Even above and beyond that. Worked for a company where the owner had admirably bootstrapped himself from working in a copier room at a law firm to owning a large copy/print/scan business that handled law firms in two cities and was a millionaire mid-late 20s.

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).

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#333

Post by fnordpiglet »

tootie wrote: post #226
darth_avocado wrote: post #43

People thinking wage theft only affects lower wage workers, let me tell you how tech companies commit wage theft: 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…

That's not theft. It's not even really unethical. It's well-understood that the value of RSUs is not guaranteed. Nor is bonus pay. For one, this kind of comp only typically applies to people earning a base salary way above the median and that anyone accepting comp in terms of company or personal performance is willingly signing on to accept the risk.

Usually equity compensation is in lieu of base salary, so the base salary is often below median for comparable work at a comparable company that doesn’t offer equity. For instance Amazon is famous for offering absurdly low base salaries relative to their talent competitors. Wall Street is famous for this too. However bonus based compensation is outsized, often to account for the risk.

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.

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#334

Post by thebradbain »

Jensson wrote: post #307
MeImCounting wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have actually worked in property management. It was incredibly educational. I learned a lot about how "landlords" are really the single greediest, laziest class of individuals one is ever likely to encounter. Eternally lamenting over how they're so under-appreciated and taken advantage of. There are always exceptions to any rule, sure but for the most part "professional landlords" are parasites. Anyway you clearly…

> If you rent an apartment and agreed to pay 3000 a month for it and instead only pay 2500 a month you would be taken to court and lose the case. If an employer did the same it would be "a civil matter" having seen this firsthand I can attest to the truth of this. Both of those are decided in civil court, I don't see the difference.

Police will forcefully evict you from a home. They will not guard the entrance to a restaurant and refuse entry to the owners until they pay their servers stolen wages/tips.

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#335

Post by awo34oaw4u »

spamizbad wrote: post #9

This phenomena is pretty widespread in the service industry and I would venture to say that a significant minority of businesses participate in some version of wage theft. 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 befo…

And in academia. The University of Texas at Austin still owes me $14K in unpaid wages from 2017 where I was never paid for the classes I taught as a grad student. Unfortunately Texas has pathetically weak worker protections and the length of time you have to complain about wage theft is shorter than the length of time it takes the university to set up some payments, so by the time you realize you're not getting paid it's already too late to do anything about it.

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#336

Post by danaris »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #308
danaris wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, gotcha. If I ever learned that level of detail about Hitler's rise to power, I'm afraid I've since forgotten it. Well, in the case where the choices are Hindenburg (who, at that point in time, may or may not choose to give power to Hitler), or Hitler...Hindenburg is objectively the correct choice. It's also a great demonstration that the time to be trying to get yourself better options is before it gets to that p…

A point of a demonstration of an extreme like that is a reflection on how fragile and disenfranchising a tactic voting can be. It's argued voting tames people from increasingly illegal alternative action which has historically been found necessary toward labor conditions improvements that we enjoy today (such as through wildcat strikes) or tames them into highly hierarchical and process bound forms of group coordinat…

I find those arguments unpersuasive.

Voting and other forms of activism are not mutually exclusive, and removing voting from the equation does not particularly make those other forms more attractive, particularly given the likely reasons for people not to engage in other forms of activism today.

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#337

Post by nickff »

teeray wrote: post #54
dbingham wrote: post #26

One of the clearest illustrations of the deeply injust structural power imbalance at the heart of our economic system is wage theft. 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…

Justice delayed is justice denied. There should be an express lane where you collect those wages from social security and employers just get an unavoidable tax bill.

The 'express lane' would be rife with fraud, unless you re-implement a court system, in which case it'll be slow again.

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#338

Post by mjburgess »

samatman wrote: post #317
mjburgess wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

err.. no, free markets are state constructions. By default, an unregulated market becomes non-free essentially immediately, as cartels form (indeed, as cartels of cartels form, hence states ). As Hobbes observed, in the state of nature there is no motivation to remain as an individual, so you form groups in order for self-protection. In an "anarchical market" you end up with incredible levels of monopolisation (etc.)…

Cartels are a feature of free markets. I would argue that it's good for the state to take some sort of interest in regulating them, one of several ways that I'm not a free-market fundamentalist. But arguing that the formation of cartels makes a market non-free is backward. Cartels emerge through free association in trade. Regulating them might make for a more functional market, a more efficient market (or it might no…

A market isn't free if prices aren't set by supply and demand operating under the guarantees of free exchange given by states (ie., property rights, and the rest).

A cartel sets prices, and is one of the many ways markets are unfree.

There's a ton of confusion created by libertarian sorts who fail to distinguish between government regulation which sets prices, and regulation necessary for the operation of the market itself. Basically delusional ideologues have denied the latter exists, by just ignoring it.

If a government acts to set prices it makes a market non-free, just as much as if a cartel does so. "Free" cannot plausibly mean that a mafia is fine but a police force isnt.. and the claim that it does is just libertarian propaganda.

Governments which regulate markets so as to prevent cartels are acting to prevent the very sort of price-setting which "free" denotes does not occur

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#339

Post by FireBeyond »

Jensson wrote: post #203
FpUser wrote: post #135

When it is actual theft why the owners/authors of said theft are not charged criminally? Why laws are asymmetric? When Hertz complains about car theft while there is none the renters are getting charged.

Refusing to pay your bills is treated the same for private persons, you just don't call that rent theft. Calling being late with a payment theft doesn't make it theft. 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.

You're all over this thread trying to miscategorize wage theft as "paying a bill late".

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.

Re: Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

#340

Post by autoexec »

dheera wrote: post #295
madsbuch wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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. An interjection: Under GDPR this is illegal. (Just a reminder that "tech" legislation sometimes also improve on broader levels)

The US isn't subject to GDPR. I see a lot of US websites with annoying GDPR popups and they really don't need to do that over here.

They don't need to do that over there either, unless they're doing something with cookies they don't need to be doing in the first place.
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