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Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

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Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#61

Post by dsfyu404ed »

aaomidi wrote: post #53
tarotuser wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think attributing any sort of emotion to them is out of place. I'd argue that there's complete antipathy at the politician and elite level. And that turns "illegal child labor" into a cost of doing business. And from the looks of it, a quite lucrative form of doing business. I think you're misjudging the emotions (I'd argue they have none). I don't think you're insane.

You're not wrong. I think I use the word `hate` because the status quo is to squeeze the average person out more and more. So since they "don't care", that lack of care ends up being the same as if they hated us.

Exactly.

They don't care if they screw the average joe.

They care about winning political brownie points from various voting blocks.

The policies and actions that win those points just so happens to screw the average joe.

The only logical course of action given those constraints and absent of any morals is...

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#62

Post by legitster »

oramit wrote: post #19

"Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee who was employed in violation of the law. The amount is the maximum civil money penalty allowed by federal law." Wow, I knew that labor laws in the US were toothless but to have it spelled out like this is so depressing. A max penalty of ~15k per violation, just bravo team, bravo.

??? - $15k per violation is still quite a bit of money. This is an order of magnitude more expensive than the pennies they saved by looking the other way.

The point of the fines is not to force the company into insolvency - if anything, the DOL would rather incentivize companies into compliance with labor laws than squash them and spread bad practices into harder-to-monitor industries.

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#64

Post by etchalon »

nightpool wrote: post #38
nostromo wrote: post #21

There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs. Both major parties support this system. Some Republican interests enjoy the access to dirt-cheap labor. Some Democratic interests want immigrants to be able to find jobs despite it being illegal to employ them. So we end up with a system where employers have no easy way to verify that an employee is who they say they are and has a…

"This is such an easy problem to solve" How? If someone uses a fully faked/stolen identity, with a valid SSN / passport # / etc (which every single company is required to check), how do you propose we catch them?

It's not an easy problem to solve. Anti-immigration advocates have to pretend it is. "Just verify people" is up there with "build a wall".

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#65

Post by [deleted] »

nostromo wrote: post #21

There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs. Both major parties support this system. Some Republican interests enjoy the access to dirt-cheap labor. Some Democratic interests want immigrants to be able to find jobs despite it being illegal to employ them. So we end up with a system where employers have no easy way to verify that an employee is who they say they are and has a…

[deleted]

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#66

Post by jaywalk »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #49
stonemetal12 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In non farm jobs, No.

Sure it is. The Federal labor laws only apply to businesses engaged in interstate commerce (individual state laws apply locally). But even then exemptions are listed on page 5 of this non-copypastable PDF: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/chil... https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/youthrules/young-workers If you are under the age of 14, you are only allowed to do the following jobs: - Deliver new…

> Work as a homeworker gathering evergreens and making evergreen wreaths

I would love to know the history of that incredibly specific exemption.

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#67

Post by throw93 »

roenxi wrote: post #55
throw93 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs. How is this related to the story? The story is about companies using children as workers in hazardous job. It’s illegal regardless of their documentation status. Iowa has proposed bill to to legalize exactly this. This is happening because companies don’t want to pay fair wage.

Presumably the children in question lied about their age when they signed up. The most likely scenario is the meat plant offered them the best wage-earning opportunity in the area. If there aren't systems to verify who workers really are then the meat plant might not have had an easy way to find out. Seems plausible as theories go although obviously I only read this press release and moved on. I mean; if the likely o…

> Presumably the children in question lied about their age when they signed up.

That’s not true though. The company knew exactly what they were doing and still they went ahead and doubled down on it.

Excerpt from article: “Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags. When the Wage and Hour Division arrived with warrants, the adults – who had recruited, hired and supervised these children – tried to derail our efforts to investigate their employment practices,” said Wage and Hour Regional Administrator Michael Lazzeri in Chicago.

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#68

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #61
aaomidi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong. I think I use the word `hate` because the status quo is to squeeze the average person out more and more. So since they "don't care", that lack of care ends up being the same as if they hated us.

Exactly. They don't care if they screw the average joe. They care about winning political brownie points from various voting blocks. The policies and actions that win those points just so happens to screw the average joe. The only logical course of action given those constraints and absent of any morals is...

> don't care if they screw the average Joe

Who don't vote. Democracy incentives transferring resources from non voters to voters.

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#69

Post by PuppyTailWags »

bruceb wrote: post #56
nostromo wrote: post #21

There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs. Both major parties support this system. Some Republican interests enjoy the access to dirt-cheap labor. Some Democratic interests want immigrants to be able to find jobs despite it being illegal to employ them. So we end up with a system where employers have no easy way to verify that an employee is who they say they are and has a…

Immigration is one of the areas that such blatant lying happens by partisans. We do have defacto open borders. A good segment of Dems politicians and activists try to cover this up. They also misrepresent temporary "humanitarian" visas as being temporary. They are never temporary and always get extended. On the other side is the lack of enforcement on the employer side which a good segment of Rs ignore. Cut off incen…

We do not have de-facto open borders, and this is a huge exaggeration. Immigrants are turned away all the time for all manner of arbitrary reasons. Just because there are large numbers of undocumented people in the country doesn't mean that there isn't border enforcement. Border enforcement is just a hard, expensive problem to solve with no clear vision or leadership.

Re: Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

#70

Post by j16sdiz »

nightpool wrote: post #38
nostromo wrote: post #21

There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs. Both major parties support this system. Some Republican interests enjoy the access to dirt-cheap labor. Some Democratic interests want immigrants to be able to find jobs despite it being illegal to employ them. So we end up with a system where employers have no easy way to verify that an employee is who they say they are and has a…

"This is such an easy problem to solve" How? If someone uses a fully faked/stolen identity, with a valid SSN / passport # / etc (which every single company is required to check), how do you propose we catch them?

one way of doing that is government maintains a central registry of employment.

This, of course, have many other problems.

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