Billions stolen in wage theft from US workers

Amusing as that desperation is, in a way it's more terrifying how the machinery of blind capitalism works. The system isn't capable of sentiment like that. They don't care what I say. It's just business. They're not there keeping a score of 'friends' and 'enemies'.

Universities run on people like me who are of the "academic mindset", who can and will do things like teaching because we love it as a vocation even though the salary is a quarter or fifth of what is on offer privately.

In the end, the only solution is to say no, even when you'd really like to do it. It's a weird modern tragedy.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/cyber-education/

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.

The context is that the OP complained about one business colluding with others by way of informal no-hire lists for employees that don’t tolerate this wage theft. The response to that is to focus on how other businesses that don’t collude will get out-competed…

And yeah I’m pretty sick of this framing. It’s an anecdote where employees are direct victims, and then the focus gets shifted to hypothetical and indirect victims (businesses). Even in my own social democratic place of residence there seems to be dominant narrative of “job creators” and how we need to “create jobs”, the outcome of which is to sacrifice things in order to directly benefit businesses in order to (ostensibly, in rhetoric) benefit workers. This was concretely demonstrated when, during the pandemic, the right-wing government was very insistent on giving handouts to failing businesses that obviously were going to have a hard time (like the travel industry) under the guise of “protecting jobs”. Meanwhile, the government proposed that we should temporarily make it easier for employers to put employees on temporary leave (whatever the English/American term is) in order for them to not just die. Which is fine in itself… except they wanted tax payers and workers to dis-proportionally pay for this temporary measure. What’s the only thing that made them “change their minds”? Labor groups and other such organizations.

And then there was inflation, a predictable outcome of the spending-spree during the pandemic. So the central bank raised the rent. And again. And again. And the acknowledged consequence of that was that the poorest among us would struggle to make ends meet. But that’s not a problem at all—that a predictable outcome of a previous spending spree on businesses would impact regular people and make some people have to choose between mortgage/rent or food; not a problem. That’s just Economics.

What’s the problem with corrupt politicians? On one hand you can simply say that the problem is that corrupt politicians corrupt the political system. On the other hand you can frame it as the outing of corrupt politicians causes “political distrust” and a “crisis of legitimacy” among the (stupid) voters. So you re-frame the issue as a few bad apples (politicians) which causes the real problem of voters/regular people becoming (justifiably) cynical and distrustful of the whole system. That’s the power of framing.

And that’s why I don’t buy into the framing of helping businesses in order to (pinky swear) really helping workers. Yeah, those hand-out to businesses? Oh would you look at that—a “profit party” half a year later for the shareholders. Who woulda thunk it. But too bad about that inflation, though. Guess you should rethink owning a car or having hobbies other than taking walks in the park.

Everything runs like this. Jobs people want will pay less than jobs people don't want.