More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
nytimes.com
More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#2Disgusting, but not surprising. A corporation is a soulless entity with one goal: maximize profits. That doesn't produce ethical, human-friendly actions.
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#3Disgusting, but not surprising. A corporation is a soulless entity with one goal: maximize profits. That doesn't produce ethical, human-friendly actions.
Not really - a corporation is a group of people. Sometimes those in control of it have no goal other than profit maximization, but by no means always.
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#4IMO, any company that asks employees to work more than 40 hours a week and doesn't pay for those hours is doing 'wage theft'. Classifying employees as exempt seem to be a common method used by employers.
It surprises me how often on HN startup employees claim to work 70-80 hours without any complaints. And, startup employers expect more hours without paying.
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#5When I worked in construction and restaurants, I saw people agree to work off the books (at the restaurants) and the construction companies would "bank" the overtime hours so they didn't have to pay time and a half, even though they were union companies. Scumbags both, plain and simple...
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#6My wife works in a hotel (housekeeping) and she tells me the same thing. Every week she has to go with great care through her payslip to check if she's been paid correctly. When they've made a mistake and we contact the hotels finance department it's like; "Oops, sorry." but my gut feeling is that they do this on purpose. Imagine, scamming thousands of employees per week on few hours here and there, must be quite a saving.
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#7Disgusting, but not surprising. A corporation is a soulless entity with one goal: maximize profits. That doesn't produce ethical, human-friendly actions.
Not really - a corporation is a group of people. Sometimes those in control of it have no goal other than profit maximization, but by no means always.
Well, often if those running a corporation do not have profit maximization as their primary goal, they are voted out by investors. Essentially, maximizing profit becomes the job of the leaders as requested by those invested. There are some exceptions where corporations are profitable by targeting towards environmental things, or other causes, but the bottom line of profit is still there... Especially so with larger corporations.
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#8Certainly was with the Apple-Google deal, if we need a more relevant tech-related case.
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#9IMO, any company that asks employees to work more than 40 hours a week and doesn't pay for those hours is doing 'wage theft'. Classifying employees as exempt seem to be a common method used by employers. It surprises me how often on HN startup employees claim to work 70-80 hours without any complaints. And, startup employers expect more hours without paying.
I recently quit a startup since 60 hour weeks were expected. It made me do a hard self-evaluation and come to the conclusion that no job was worth that for me.
40 hours is an arbitrary number. I think whatever hours is fine, as long as both parties agree on it and are up front about it.
Re: More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
#10Other NYTimes coverage puts the obscenity of wage theft in much clearer terms:
> One of the causes of this epidemic of wage theft — which, according to Mr. Lafer’s E.P.I. report, involves sums “far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience store robberies in the country” — is lax enforcement of the country’s wage and hour laws. In 1941, there was one federal inspector for every 11,000 workers. As of 2008, there was one for every 141,000 workers. “The average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year,” Mr. Lafer estimates. Because there is so little risk of getting caught, one-third of all employers who have been found guilty of violating wage and hour laws continue to do it.[0]
Hourly labor laws are ridiculous. And saying that 60 million workers hourly are harmed significantly understates how awful these laws are.
> According to one multicity study, in a single week, nearly two-thirds of low-wage workers had, on average, 15 percent of their pay stolen by their employers.
60 million of today's workers will lose wealth that could compound into more wealth. Then there are the million or so new workers who will join the workforce at the end of the year. In four decades of poor enforcement, a hundred million people have been harmed, two-third of them losing 15% of their paychecks every week that could have compounded over those 40 years into meaningful life savings.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/the-republic...