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 before clocking in. So on those days you'd do 30-45 minutes of fully unpaid labor. There was well understood that if you complained about this 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. At the time I was pretty naive and didn't think much of it, just figured that's the way the world worked. Doing the math, because I always made more than the tipped minimum wage, 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.
So like a much-dreaded union for employers except it’s underhanded and illegal.
If you want to demonstrate to someone why the legal system is designed for the wealthy and not the common people, I don't think you can do better than the entire subject of wage theft. Wage theft utterly eclipses every other form of larceny in the United States at least, and it is practically legal in every way apart from the letter of the law. Few companies ever see any consequences at all, and the few that do, it's fines here and there. No criminal liability. Certainly no SWAT teams raiding gated communities daily to haul off white collar criminals the way they'll roll out and obliterate an entire home (sometimes even the correct one) to catch someone selling weed.
The societal impact of this crime cannot be overstated. Billions of dollars stolen from workers, practically free of consequence.
If you define being late with payments as theft, then I'd bet that rent theft is way larger than wage theft. I don't see why you would say that it is theft when you are late with payments to a worker but not theft when you are late with payments to a company.
If being late with payments isn't theft, then "wage theft" isn't theft, just like you missing to pay your rent one month isn't theft.
"If this thing was an entirely different situation then the stakes would be different." Well, glad we got that part worked out.
It is the same situation, entity A didn't pay entity B the money they agreed to pay.
Even looking past the time aspect which you slipped in (rent late, wages unpaid are definitionally different: unpaid is not, by necessity, late, and late is not necessarily "never going to arrive") wages are the payment of labor performed and rent is the payment of use of private property. Rent-seeking is derided behavior (by economists!) for this exact reason: A landlord does not (in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases) add value to a property: they merely own a thing, and charge people who need access to it, to access it. It's the free-market version of wind-drag: you aren't contributing anything, you're just taking a slice of production you haven't earned because you own a thing that's necessary for the larger system to operate.
Those two are the same, a person who is late would typically never pay if they didn't get threatening mail to "remind" them.
Citation: Dude trust me
Hot, hot, hot fucking garbage. When I was in college and broke, and struggled to make rent, I was KEENLY FUCKING AWARE I owed it. It was a fact that was on my mind 24 hours a day, including inducing stress nightmares about losing my place to live.
Just absolute, 100%, shit from a bull's ass. Bullshit, you might say. I dunno where in the world you got this notion, but as someone who spent a youth in the poverty grinder, allow me to dispel you of it. Fuck no. Rent NEVER left my mind, even when it WAS paid. Making my rent payment every month was what kept me going to work when sick, what kept me at work when my boss treated me like shit, etc. etc. etc. This notion that people "forget" rent is some of the most ludicrous bullshit I've ever heard in my fucking life.
I don't mean to personally attack, I don't know you, but I cannot fathom how you got this idea in your head if you've ever rented a place before that you had to personally pay for.
You don't think that the people who run companies that makes negative profits and thus can't pay workers since they lack the money doesn't feel the same? Just because some do that doesn't mean it is the norm.
Edit: You see plenty of stories from company owners who worry if they can pay salaries next month and it is all they can think about, that is the kind of person you are calling a "wage thief" here, even though they just like you are just struggling and trying to make ends meet.
It's laughable that you think the only companies committing wage theft are those that are not profitable and are struggling to keep the lights on.
And even if they are, remind me where your constitutional right to a profitable business is? If paying your workers means you can't keep the lights on, then you can't keep the lights on. Too many even in this situation think the answer is "keep the lights on, before paying workers".
But highly profitable businesses (up to and including Apple) also commit wage theft. So please don't try to turn this into yet another "poor small business owners" trope.
Tell me youve never worked in service industry without telling me youve never worked in the service industries.
This isnt "being late with payments" that is as you have correctly pointed out, not theft. "late" implies that eventually the wages are in fact paid. This is not what people are talking about when they are talking about wage theft.
Tell me you have never rented out without telling me you have never rented out something.
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.
"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.
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 arent understanding the point here.
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.
If being late with payments was theft then by far, far the largest form of larceny would be B2B. Late payments from businesses to vendors eclipses late rent. That's why there's an entire industry built around collecting payments, called factoring companies. That's why there are people hired as credit controllers to chase late payments.
Source: wife worked as a credit controller.
Agreed, and not sure why you're being downvoted for this.
Rent is a contractual obligation and the remedy for late payment is built into the contract. Hardly comparable.
Most companies dont pay many taxes either.
any proof of this? Every company I've worked for pays lots in taxes.
Exactly. How many hand wringing articles have we seen in the past few years about roving bands of shoplifters vs how many about wage theft?
Yes, exactly.
And it’s underhanded and illegal when employers do it, because there’s an imbalance of power between employee and employee.
Unions exist to even out that balance of power. When employers engage in that kind of activity it further increases the imbalance of power.
For example, in this case, they were using that tactic to support their ability to steal from employees.
To clarify this further:
The employer is already a collective, "A business", and the hiring manager is operating with the full power of that collective in hiring/firing negotations.
A union is a collective to balance power against the business (collective).
A cartel is a collective of collectives (ie., a group of businesses) operating to defeat free market competition regulation, in this sense the cartel is balancing power against the state -- which is the only permitted "collective of collectives".
Cartels challenge states (power to create free markets), whereas unions challenge businesses (power to hire/fire).
This is why unions are permissible and cartels are not.
This is very simplistic, and somewhat wrong
First and foremost, states do not, and cannot "create free markets" the existence of a state to regulation a market makes is de-facto non-free
This is also a very rose colored look at unions, while simultaneously demonizing businesses. In reality it is completely possible to have an exploitive union. At the end of the day, power corrupts, and the more power a person or group has over another person or group the more corrupting that power is.
Thus in a very large union you will likely see just as much employee abuse, as in a very large company.
The sweet spot has always as well always been in Medium sized organizations, or unions, above 300 employees, under 3000 employees. Anything larger or smaller and the risk of abuse and poor conditions go up considerably even if you are represented by a large union
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.).
A free market is a state construction whereby cartels, scams, fraud, (murder, theft, etc.) is prohibited so that limited liability collectives (another state construction) called "businesses" can freely compete for labour and profit.
FWIW, to bystanders without context for this area of study, the parent is basically the orthodox take on the role of the state in modern economies and “free markets”: in short, you can’t have one (certainly not a highly-productive one that makes life not-suck) that lasts for any length of time without a state, and the “shape” it takes and whom it serves and to what degree is meaningfully determined by same state.
There is an irony that capitalism is claimed by the anarcho-libertarian lot. As capitalism is the most collectivised system in human history (consider, only, the scale of Microsoft) -- and also the most anti-capitalist system (ie., it forces capitalists to compete and hence dramatically diminishes their power relative to other systems).
Perhaps one day we might see capitalism as an "iterated socialism" (ie., socialism as thought about if you include time in your imagination).
And communism, libertarianism, anarchism, etc. as all products of a time-free form of reasoning where you can just pause the world and imagine that all people will "run the same program".
Yeah, last I checked the “story” of capitalism and strong market economies is generally regarded as essentially having the emergence of the proto-nation-state (as in e.g. Spain under the “Catholic Monarchs”) as a prerequisite, as far as being something that can exist on an all-encompassing scale rather than in the margins, in tiny states navigating the “waters” between larger polities with other economic systems.
Stability and guarantees from a strong central state really grease the wheels of commerce.
That's essentially my understanding too. The legal construction of property, and rule and commodification of law are all necessary functions of market economies.
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 not) but it makes for a less free market, always.
I will add that I consider the very idea of "absence of the state" to be badly-formed, states vary considerably in their constitution but there's always something serving that role, even if it's a few elders in a village.
graeber/wengrow would disagree
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
well now we will get in a Hobbes vs Locke, I am more Lockean
I disagree, and history has shown that free markets absent government control doe not instantly become monopolized, and infact through out most of history monopolize form when the government regulates the most
Look at todays market as an example, the most competition is present in markets where the government has the least influence, where markets like energy, healthcare, etc which are the most regulated are also the most monopolized
I know of no example in all of human history of a free market without a state, at least one of more than a short period -- so my position is very weak here, if you can show only one, i'd have to at least modify it. Yet, I bet you cannot.
Neutrally, using the term "anarchical market", i'd say that these markets are empheral. Everyone them has to act against rules which are not in their self-interest, it's highly unclear why a subgroup of market participants wouldnt immediately collectivise and outcompete everyone else.
Collectivisation is human's superpower, and the obvious an immediate thing basically everyone does (hence: mafia, warlords, cartels, etc.). It would be remarkable to see this anarchical market of yours remain free for very long, so I'd gladly hear of one case.
The main mechanism against collectivisation is that some biggest baddest collective decides to prohibit it (hence the state). There may be others, but I can think of none that would operate under anarchical conditions.
Markets do not instantly become monopolized, but they do tend that way, and will also eagerly form cartels unless stopped by regulation.
Of course it matters what kind of regulation; it's also possible to regulate markets in a way that protects monopolies, and some governments do that. So it's important to have a government that understands the importance of a free market.
To give you some examples, the Dutch markets for health insurance and energy are entirely privatised but heavily regulated, and quite competitive. It's easy to switch from one provider to another, and so they compete hard on price. Although perhaps more so in the early days after privatisation than more recently.
On the other hand, the market for software is not very regulated, it's heavily monopolised. Sometimes the EU makes moves to increase competition, but that's only piecemeal and not always terribly effective; Microsoft still rules the desktop, except in those areas where Apple now rules it.
Have you got any examples of this?
When I look at large unions where I am, it goes one of two ways. They get large and hopeless (teachers union and nurses union) or they get powerful enough that they can dictate such that they can make a meaningful change for their members.
I’ve seen some impressive conditioned earned by doctors unions, police unions and one I belonged to for allied health professionals.
None of them seem to be exoloiting their members, but I’m not sure how I’d find out about that.
Unions are cartels of sellers of labor.
If they're good or bad is another matter.
Yeah, they can be, so its more vauge than i've made it out to be. The underlying problem is that employee-employer is individual-collective; so in some sense, there "has" to be a union option if this becomes too one sided.
But a cartel is never required, since businesses competing with each other is the goal of a free market.
I would agree that if unions become more powerful than businesses, so it ends up single-business vs "union-of-unions" you can get the same effects.
Hopefully the asymmetry is clear though. Cartels are never permissible in a free market, but unions often are because of the need for labour to compete "on the same terms" as business.
ie., the mere existence of a union isnt a sign the market is non-free; whereas the mere existence of a cartel is.
It’s pretty clear what you think though.
"Cartels of unions" or whatever are legal in some jurisdictions. See e.g. solidarity action / sympathy strikes.
Depending on the country, that varies from "totally illegal" to "well of course you're gonna solidarity strike, that's how it's done".
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.
The idea of industry-wide "no-hire lists" is a bogeyman that bad employers use to control young employees who don't yet know any better.
At worst, you won't get a positive recommendation from an employer like this if somebody calls and asks. The idea that employers are busy maintaining "no-hire lists" and collecting names from all of their industry peers doesn't hold up, at least not outside of maybe weird small-town social bubbles.
Can confirm. There's no "no-hire lists" in the heavy construction, restaurant, and IT companies that I've seen.
However, in a small town, business owners may warn each other, and in a small bubble of companies, they may talk to each other.
And if you need a reference, better pick a fellow employee. Other than that, ignore the boogeyman!
Ah shame, shame, stupid low-experience employees just falling for some savvy bad-employer tricks.
But it’s not like the small-town social bubble of West Coast software development is a stranger to collusion. What was that thing again? Apple and some other giant tech companies colluding on wages? Well, it was on HN a few times at least. I don’t remember the details.
But with enough lobbying, it _could_ be legal!
(This to point out that most lobbies are to employers what unions are to employees)
They’re just voting with their (fat) wallets!
I think the word is Cartel.
An anonymous tip and a few inspections of staff logs and payrolls would make it pretty easy to make this disappear. The problem is that these sort of things (what regulations exist, whether authorities prioritize enforcing them) seems to always be answered with "no, because it's a poor people problem".
It's unfair competition though, so it's really important that this doesn't happen. A restaurant that wants do to the right thing shouldn't have to worry about a few % worse competitiveness on wages because the asshat across the street has his staff work for free.
If something like this earned you a $10k fee the first time and a 5 year ban from running any kind of business in the state if you repeat it, I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem.
And culturally treating it like any other theft: a crime that should subject the thief, in a practical sense, to the risk of imprisonment.
In reality....
If you steal $100 worth of food from a store, they'll call the cops and arrest you.
If the store steals wages from you in the tune of $1000+, <POOF> its a.... CIVIL MATTER (waves hands).
Nah.
No one will get arrested for even stealing $1000s of dollars of luxury items on camera (at least in CA, a trend setter for other states).
https://amhsnews.org/10386/justice-awareness/shoplifting-the...
Edit: Present data countering the virtue signaling and get downvoted. Keep it up folks.
Hell, I worked at $retailer for a time, and even their statements were to "DO NOT ENGAGE SHOPLIFTERS". Worse yet, I can scarcely imagine some $12/hr being told to chase after shoplifters... That's gonna end up being shot or shivved.
And frankly, there were times in which I saw people steal food. And in those cases, I never saw a thing! Especially when formula was being "acquired".
One time, during Black Friday, someone stole a whole register full of cash. Again, not my job and not my problem.
You do realize that people who steal formula use it to cut drugs?
https://city-attorney.columbus.gov/pdf/press/babyformulaband...
There are a lot of organizations that give out formula for free but not at scale required for nefarious uses.
Low income mothers can get formula from the government.
https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic
It was probably all theft to exchange for drugs.
During the pandemic there was a formula shortage and allowing theft rather than punishing it probably ensured some children went without unnecessarily.
Any means testing (and I do mean ANY) will always exclude people who have an actual need who'll never be able to get.
And really, if 1 out of a thousand "cuts drugs" with formula, so be it. At least that's non-toxic... and frankly, laughable as DARE propaganda.
Here is a list of places with free baby formula and stuff in the Bay Area most without means testing:
https://www.211bayarea.org/sanfrancisco/food/food-programs/f...
https://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/san_francisco_and_s...
Just recently there was a baby formula shortage. And we were not prosecuting gangs stealing formula. Shameless and laughable.
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/infantandtoddlernutrition/form...
Edit: To person calling me a techbro below, I can't provide data for 1000s of cities in the US, genius. Feel free to do so.
Non tech folks also live in the US (you would know if you live in the US). Also look up why we are discussing the Bay Area.
The Bay Area is not the USA, techbro.
I can't provide data for 1000s of cities in the US, genius. Feel free to do so. You provide data for zero other parts of the US.
Non tech folks also live in the US (you would know if you live in the US).
Also look up why we are discussing the Bay Area.
Look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you honestly believe drug dealers are stealing formula to cut drugs with rather than mom's just need to feed their babies
Maybe you should stop looking at yourself in the mirror and look at the data?
As a parent, I feel people like you are the reason formula ends up being unavailable for real babies as you enable gangs to steal them driving up cost.
Here is a list of places with free baby formula and stuff in the Bay Area:
https://www.211bayarea.org/sanfrancisco/food/food-programs/f...
https://www.findhelp.org/goods/diapers-%26-formula--san-jose...
https://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/san_francisco_and_s...
One advice: Stop with harmful virtue signaling. It is easy to virtue signal like you do here with looking at any data or bearing any of the real cost of virtue signaling. I will repeat. People like you are the reason formula ends up being unavailable for real babies as you enable gangs to steal them driving up cost and causing shortages during real crises. As a parent this is frustrating and rage inducing.
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/infantandtoddlernutrition/form...
How about we both:
1) Support low income people by giving them formula if they need it, AND
2) End the war on drugs and move people into treatment instead of the carceral slave system
Sounds like a win-win.
a lot of stolen inventory is resold for money but it's then in turn sold to moms on street markets (or sometimes back to unscrupulous store owners at a discount off wholesale to resell, sometimes via a proxy reseller). so you may be unhappy with who profits in various ways but it's evidently going to moms one way or the other
I feel like that is the least committal press release that could exist about this topic. The police might be correct but the facts described aren't as clear cut as they're making it.
"Offenses" is carrying the whole team here. All this says is that he was charged with the crime of doing drugs while black. I could have been arrested for all of these at one time in my life or another. Without a trafficking charge they're just speculating he might be a dealer.
So he could be cutting drugs with it, or he could just be stealing it to sell directly. He even could even be selling it to actual drug dealers. Not saying that's better but the police kinda gloss over that as presented that's the more likely option.
I promise I'm not trying to drag you or anything but I'm originally from Columbus and you have to take anything the CPD says with a shaker of salt. Columbus is a fairly boring city and so CPD always tries to punch up the stories.
That’s because it’s a liability issue. Better to let someone steal a $100 item than get sued for $1000000 because an employee chased them into the parking lot and got stabbed.
Which incident receives media coverage as it happens?
Given the breathless reporting of "MAJOR CHAIN STORE SHUTS DOWN SINGLE BUSINESS DUE TO EXTREME THEFT", yeah.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-retailers-close-stores-...
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202264923/major-retailers-bl...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/target-store-closures-theft-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/target-closing-stores-2023-san-...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/26/business/target-retail-theft-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/target-stores-theft-1.69794...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11965589/The-stores...
------------------------
However, on the actual wage theft side, is scattered articles about a single bad company, or policies from stuffy think tanks and "boring" and non-sensationalized sources.
https://www.cohousedems.com/news/wage-theft-prevention-passe...
https://www.dir.ca.gov/DIRNews/2024/2024-10.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/wage-theft-law-new-york-v...
https://blog.dol.gov/2024/02/07/protecting-workers-rights-at...
https://calmatters.org/politics/capitol/2024/01/wage-theft-c...
The Target store closings (in Seattle) were not due to violence/theft but rather a cost cutting measure; Target lied.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/target-store-closures-theft-...
The entire "Theft is driving up prices" narrative was bullshit. The national retail federation, the very group that is the lobbying voice of the retail industry, found that a majority of retail stores complained about theft, but if you look at the reported shrink numbers, they have been the same for 30 years. There has not been widespread increase in theft, by their own numbers.
That article proves nothing of the sort. Shutting down stores that have too much theft is a cost cutting measure, and keeping stores open that have more theft but far more sales doesn’t invalidate it.
It gets even worse than just the media. A bunch of legislation has been proposed or passed specifically to target "organized retail theft." In Virginia, legislation upped the designation for "stealing several thousand dollars of stuff with other people" to the same felony category as stabbing somebody while jack shit is done to crack down on wage theft.
If people don't care about the $ severity of the crime, what is it they care about to keep this going as it does?
I think you're getting the wrong takeaway from OP's comment...
?
And if you're a person of color, if you try to pass a counterfeit $20 bill (unclear if you even know it's counterfeit) then the police just murder you and the person in charge of it gets a cheesecake sentence
Property crimes are rarely enforced against the ownership class. Law enforcement in the US exists to enforce the social order and class structure; they have no legal obligation to investigate or prosecute crimes.
The system is working as intended.
That's why I described it as a cultural, not a legal problem.
Always has been.
Government is quite literally a criminal organization except it was decided by someone (people, representatives, a monarch, whatever) that this particular one is not criminal and any others like it are, within self-described boundaries.
It might or might not be doing criminal things (as in, things we associate with criminal), but it wants and needs a monopoly on those things, otherwise it risks dissolution by internal and/or external forces. It’s thus obvious it’ll prioritize protecting the mafia bosses/sovereigns/elites and thugs/enforcers.
The true crime is as always the impact on businesses.
It's hard to tell if you meant this as sarcasm or not, but... it really is a big deal. If all your competitors are screwing their employees in order to increase their margins, that means they can out-compete your on price. Which means you can either screw _your_ employees.. or risk going out of business. And eventually, the only players left are the ones that are screwing their employees.
So yes, if you want to look out for employees, then you need to look out for businesses by making sure everyone is following the same rules. That doesn't mean the businesses themselves are more important, just that their health is vital to the well-being of the employees.
I’m absolutely being sarcastic.
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.
I think it’s worth calling out that failing to enforce regulations corrodes entire industries to the point that it’s impossible to compete in many sectors of it without breaking the law and screwing over workers (and maybe also customers!)
It’s a way in which this is bad that folks may not immediately connect to it.
The Honest Employers Guild should sponsor investigations and lawsuits against the criminals to drive them out of business, like that company that buys anti-Tesla Super Bowl ads.
It's not just that. There are people that will outright deny that it's happening. The reasoning trotted out is that if it were true that this were happening then it would be squashed. In other words, if it were happening, then it would not be happening. From the article:
Sans data about Walmart's $1.4bn in fines, they'll reason to themselves that Walmart, even if it's not somewhere they personally would ever shop, is a reputable company, therefore this isn't something that happens at Walmart.
I have experience firsthand (from a low spot in my life) that FedEx continues to do the same thing, especially to people who are powerless to do anything about it. To wit:
Their warehouse workers get paid low wages and the arrangement is that you need to be available between 4:00 AM and ~10:30. It's not that you'll be working during those hours. No, instead what happens is the night before they determine how high of a load they have and then set the hours for that time. So you as a worker call in at around 9:00 PM the night before, listen to a recorded message that states e.g. "On Tuesday, February 13, package sorters will begin work at 5:30". So far not so good, but there's nothing especially illegal about this is as far as I know. (It stretches morality and ethics, however.) What is illegal as I understand it is incidents where they tell you to report to work at that time, people show up, and then find that the timeclocks are papered over with a sign saying not to clock in because there was an issue at the warehouse overnight and the systems aren't running, so they've moved the clock-in time ahead 45 minutes to when they expect the systems to be up and running. You are expected to wait there off the clock despite not being paid and being expected not to leave.
Note that this is US law enforcement in general. The "if middle america were using drugs at the same rate of inner cities then we'd see arrest rates at the same levels" argument we here. While studies show that drug use is similar between these groups, enforcement in cities, specifically against minority groups is much higher.
Indeed the overdose data seems to indicate a worse problem in rural areas, with West Virginia topping the per capita OD rate:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
“Their warehouse workers get paid low wages and the arrangement is that you need to be available between 4:00 AM and ~10:30. It's not that you'll be working during those hours. No, instead what happens is the night before they determine how high of a load they have and then set the hours for that time. ”
One of my buddies said they did this to them. I don’t know how common it is but it does happen. They were satisfied with their pay, though, compared to what many jobs in the area offered.
I had a manual labor job when I was 16 that my parents wanted me to get to build some character. A night a week or so and one shift on the weekend. The need for labor was dependent on customer demand on a given day and weather and fluctuated greatly. Practice was so show up and wait around in the break room until it was busy enough that you were needed, and then people would be called in order of arrival. So some people would wait around hours to even find out if they might work that day.
I did it a couple times and found it so demoralizing I quit. Later I found out that practice is very illegal.
You think the construction industry is illegal. Wait till you hear about academia!! :)
This is the life today for zero-hours, at-will employment in the university sector. As a visiting professor I've had universities ask me to deliver a semester course a year in advance, and call the week before to say they're not running it. At the very minimum a 12 week course takes 40 hours of preparation even if you're just refreshing the notes and practicals from last time.
I've had Russell group universities not pay me for two years. They've flat out "lost" my invoices, three times! Two major league universities tried to stiff me out of over £2000 and had to be threatened with legal action. One London uni asked me to prepare a DSP course, then instead of hiring me to deliver it plagiarised my slides, took my name off them and got a junior lecturer to deliver the course instead. The last university I worked at were so careless with my payments that my accountant advised me to "extricate immediately" because there so many "anomalies" she couldn't keep track of them all.
Universities are absolute f*king gangsters.
Universities, unlike building firms, have actual assets and are unlikely to claim bankruptcy. That means you could easily take the above issues to small claims court as long as you had them in writing (and remember, even a agreement to pay you via email usually suffices - no formal documents or signatures required)
...and then your career in academia is over, regardless of the official rules of retribution.
Which, based on all of the bad experiences, might be a blessing in disguise for adjuncts (UK or otherwise!)
No, it's not like that. I write excoriating pieces in the Times Higher, completely damning the UK university system as "unfit for teaching and leaning" [0], and they still call me and ask "can you just cover this class?".
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/
Everything runs like this. Jobs people want will pay less than jobs people don't want.
Does that mean everyone wants to be a waiter and nobody wants to be a CEO?
Unironically, yes. Most people don't have enough exposure to actually understand what the job of a CEO is. I have had that exposure, and I don't ever want to be the CEO of any sizeable company. Once you become CEO, work/life balance utterly ceases to exist, because you are the person imbued as the corporation, meaning you are literally always working, always on call, always stuck with the most difficult or intractable decisions where maybe all the options are wrong, and no matter your choice everyone will hate you. It's a terrible job that people only do because it pays so well.
I am not the CEO but I'm much higher up the food chain today than I was when I started. I often reminisce fondly about my time working phone tech support, because I could work my queue and walk out without having to give any thought to anything that occurred that day. That's not the reality of being in any sort of management role, and the higher up you go the less that matches reality.
I have yet to see a CEO choose to go back down the food chain, even though that is something they have the power to do.
You're not wrong, but my goodness... the effort, and the waiting. It's so sapping to have to work for your money like a regular person, and then work again and again just to get what's rightfully due to you.
US academia has its problems, but UK academia is a whole different nightmare.
The "industry buddies" but seems like a Boogeyman meant to scare people.
That's exactly what it is, but the kids they employ don't know better.
The idea that there's a cabal of restaurant owners who get together to discuss in detail how they're breaking the law and maintain a blacklist is absurd when you stop to think about it.
But they're more than happy to let those kind of rumours keep doing the rounds to scare the naive young people into not sticking up for themselves.
Yeah the closest your going to get to a restaurant cabal are owners gossiping at the local wholesaler while waiting for their purchase to be processed, and even then there's a 50/50 chance a member of them is lying in order to bait a competitor into making a bad hire
It might be funny, but in Mexico it's done differently.
There are Whatsapp groups of HRs working in a particular group (tech, construction, etc.) where they communicate. Obviously they don't discuss the names openly but they do ask if someone is willing to give feedback on a candidate that worked at XY.
I think there’s one way this might work. To get hired at the next place they might want you to have experience. So you put your prior employer on the application, the new restaurant checks your references and mysteriously decides to pass on you.
Are you willing to risk extended unemployment and potentially homelessness in order to call that bluff?
Wait until it's automated:
https://marshallbrain.com/manna
Yes, and in my experience the lore around both the vileness and power of the owner is fully invented by the staff.
In many cases it's just teenagers being dramatic and coming up with external reasons why they are dealing with suboptimal conditions and not asking the owner about it.
right, can you imagine some low level restaurant manager going over a list of potential hires that are still in high school with some managers from a couple of other restaurants? How many even bother to perform reference checks? It is a empty threat from a impotent person
Amazing pettiness from the owners for what is essentially $10 worth of labor (or less)
$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
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.
This is tangential, but part of the reason why I dislike talking to servers about the tipped minimum wage. Because it seems they deliberately don't want to understand the full context of the law. Or fully the type of work they are in.
What you are describing is typically called "side work". Basically work that is not directly related to waiting a table. Folding napkins, putting up chairs, moving tables, etc. Even in cases where the restaurant clocks in their workers for every minute they are doing work, servers complain about doing side work because "it costs them money". And they want the federal minimum wage during that time.
Which naively makes sense. But that's not at all how tipped wages work under the law. The formula is basically: (([hours worked] * [tipped minimum wage]) + [tips earned in pay period]) / [hours worked] = [hourly wage over pay period]
So if you work 10 hours in a pay period, that's $21.30. If you collected $51.20 in tips during that time, you made $72.50 or $7.25/hr (based on current federal minimum wage, obviously numbers are different for different areas where the minimum wage is different from the federal). The restaurant is in the clear. Even if you worked 5 hours doing "side work" and 5 hours waiting tables where you got $51.20 in tips.
Servers want to essentially prorate every minute they are not physically collecting a tip it seems. Worked an hour and every table stiffed you? They want $7.25 for that hour. Regardless of the fact that the previous hour they took in $20 in tips.
Serving is more akin to being an independent contractor. You need to make hay while the sun is shining. The fat sustains you through the lean. You look at your per hour over the aggregate, not counting every hour. It's why contractors charge the rates they charge. If you are only billing half the year, those billings need to support you through the other half.
Now, in your case, the reason they don't want you to clock in isn't to save $7 over a week. It's to up your average. Which is still wrong. Let's say at your current rate of collecting tips, you totaled $225 over 30 hours. That's $7.50. Restaurant doesn't owe you anything. Now, $225 over 32.5 hours (your low end over 5 days), that's only $6.92 / hour. The restaurant is short, not $7, but $41.28
And true, If you instead made $300 over those 30 hours, the extra 2.5 hours don't even matter to you. Your check wouldn't have been that different. But, it's money that's not coming from their pockets and it's really to push people near the bubble over their limit.
No, this entire you're working for $2 an hour and hoping to earn tips shit needs to end.
Good. It is the companies job to pay the minimum wage rate per hour regardless of weather customer come in or not. If the restaurant industry cannot survive this they have no legal right to slave wages to survive.
They do have a "legal" and ethical right federally in the USA (some smaller jurisdictions have stronger rules but that's not typical). But perhaps you mean to argue they shouldn't have a legal right, or don't have a "moral" right. I have worked restaurants and believe that minimum wage should be meted out on a per-hour basis because of the way the current system mis-aligns incentives.
The restaurant owner is encouraged to keep the restaurant open much later than "profitable" hours because the cost of the additional late-night hours is only $2.13/hour per employee. So if even one table comes in during the 11PM to 1AM hours, that breaks even for the business. The business owner benefits from externalizing the true cost of staying open for those hours onto the employees. The workers end up working a lot of no-profit hours.
If they were making $7.25/hr then the incentives would be (more) aligned for them to keep working those hours.
But currently this is NOT a legal requirement. So your statement "they have no legal right to slave wages to survive" drips with hyperbole.
It is in California, Oregon, and Washington. And probably a few other places in the US.
In the state of California, tips are a gratuity paid on top of minimum wage. This is also how it works in many other states, in Canada, and in many countries around the world.
So you earn $16/hr for all time you’re at work, plus tips.
Which is how it should be. You’re being employed. Those tips are for the employee, not a gratuity for the owner to offset their costs.
“Tipped wages” are just another form of theft, bought by the restaurant lobby.
This is not true. According to California Waitress & Bartender Minimum Wage Laws California Tipped Minimum Wage Laws for 2023, 2024 [1],
That lower amount is $11 or $12 per hour, depending on the size of the company (vs the normal $16/hour rate for non-tipped employees).
The numbers are lower for most (all?) of the rest of the country.
[1] https://www.minimum-wage.org/california/tipped-employee-mini...
I working in restaurants for years. They purposely go for high school kids because they know they don't know the law, and know that they will think walking out with $50 is awesome, even if they worked 6 hours.
And then they get mad that the teenagers they made a point of hiring are irresponsible, unreliable, and have limited experience working. You know, teenagers.
I started working at 16, at a walmart.
I only called sick a handful of times, never was late, and did my job to the best of my ability. it is called work ethic. I started at $0.25 above minimum wage, as we given several raises, and position changes by the time I left at age 18, why because I was one of the most reliable teens they had, and they did not want me to go to another employer.
Some parents instill work ethic in their children even teens, sadly we do not have many good parents these days it seems like
and for the record, walmart never asked me and I never did work a single second off the clock...
It turns out that there is a lot more to what makes a person than just the behaviour of their parents.
I also experienced wage theft while waiting tables, and also thought 'thats just how it works'
As a server, aside from taking orders and carrying food, we had 'sidework' before and after our shift- stuff like cutting lemons into wedges for water, rolling silverware in napkins, refilling condiments, etc. That all needed to be done before/after clocking in. Additionally, if diners stayed late, our timecards were edited to reflect the hours we 'should have' been working.
And the last thing that bugs me the most, is that we were required to give 10% of our tips to share with the back-of-house employees like bus boys. The manager collected this money directly and there was no accounting or way to see how much of it actually made its way to the other employees. That pisses me off the most because it was so arbitrary and so completely in the control of someone who was already stealing from us.
The places I worked
- busboys were not back-of-house employees; they were out on the floor helping take care of tables (bussing them, refilling coffee, making deserts, etc).
- the wait staff gave the 10% (or whatever it was) directly to the busboys. And some to the hostess, and some to the bartender; basically all the client facing staff.
I have no memory of the owners doing anything dishonest to the staff (at any of the places I worked), so either I was blind to things, or there _are_ (were) some good ones out there.
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.
Right after I finished tech school, and I was waiting for my first technician job, I worked for a friend's home remodeling contractor company for a few weeks. I was the "helper," so, naturally, I got all the shit work. The wages were minimum wage.
He kept jerking me around, paying fractions of what he owed me, then "forgetting" how much was left, etc. I probably ended up getting about a quarter or what I was owed.
This was a "friend" (note the quotes). I can only imagine what happens with the contractors that hire laborers from the side of the street, in the local hispanic district. Those chaps don't have any recourse (Unless you count the local MS-13 chapter).
I hear a lot of people tell me about the "wait to clock in" gig. Many of them "help themselves" to their employers' assets. I don't condone that, but I also don't condone their getting ripped off.
Large-scale, white-collar employers probably reap billions from stolen wages. My first job was hourly, and I made a lot of money over my standard wages (it was actually an honest employer -defense contractor, so they were audited with a proctoscope).
During my exempt career, I encountered all kinds of nickel-and-dime behavior. Those nickels and dimes add up to new Porsches in the driveways of senior managers.
Laborers on the side are paid daily, unless a lot of trust has been built up.
The most they'll be screwed is one day's labor. They're in demand because they work very hard, and they'll quickly find work.
If they did so could you not bring up the suspicious timing with the labour board?
Obviously every state is different, and all state labor departments do surely go after wage theft to some extent. But as an example, my state does not have a "department of labor" - too commie! Instead it's the Department of Economic Opportunity. So one might imagine how much effort they put into small-time wage disputes.
I honestly think managers responsible for this sort of thing should go to prison for it. That would end these sort of practices really quick.
But somehow companies seem to have more rights than people.
A danish labor union is currently suing for this. They have already settles on ~25.000 USD being paid out to one worker who was paid for 37 hours a week but according to his clocking in and out of the building area had worked up to 60 hours per week.
This is exactly one of the key responsibilities for labour unions to manage this interest on behalf of their members.
This is more of a shade of gray, but I think over-assigning side work is also a form of unpaid labor that managers allow to happen to their front house staff as well.
Similarly, I worked for a restaurant in high school that abused tips to pay wages for non-servers. When I was hired I asked about tips, and was told "yep, you get tip share". It turns out "tip share" meant "you get a flat wage, and we pay for it using tips from the servers".
I turned down a job at a nice Italian place to work there because of that lie and a $1 difference per hour in the base wage.
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.
I worked at Texas Roadhouse as a kid and this was the norm even for a chain.
Maybe it's every industry. My wife was told she needed to be sitting at her desk ten minutes before clocking in when she worked at Accenture "so the computer could warm up"