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We love to talk about crime in America and usually the rhetoric is focused on the acts we can see: bank heists, stolen bicycles and cars, alleyway robberies. But Zachary Crockett writes at Pricenomics that wage theft is one of the more widespread crimes in our country today - the non-payment of overtime hours, the failure to give workers a final check upon leaving a job, paying a worker less than minimum wage, or, most flagrantly, just flat out not paying a worker at all.
Most commonly, wage theft comes in the form of overtime violations. In a 2008 study, the Center for Urban Economic Development surveyed 4,387 workers in low-wage industries and found that some 76% of full-time workers were not paid the legally required overtime rate by their employers (pdf) and the average worker with a violation had put in 11 hours of overtime—hours that were either underpaid or not paid at all. Nearly a quarter of the workers in the sample came in early and/or stayed late after their shift during the previous work week. Of these workers, 70 percent did not receive any pay at all for the work they performed outside of their regular shift. In total, unfairly withheld wages in these three cities topped $3 billion. Generalizing this for the rest of the U.S.’s low-wage workforce (some 30 million people), researchers estimate that wage theft could be costing Americans upwards of $50 billion per year.
Last year, the Economic Policy Institute made what is, to date, the most ambitious attempt to quantify the extent of reported wage theft in the U.S.and determined that “the total amount of money recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million.” Obviously, the nearly $1 billion collected is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government. Commissioner Su of California says wage theft has harmed not just low-wage workers. “My agency has found more wages being stolen from workers in California than any time in history,” says Su. “This has spread to multiple industries across many sectors. It’s affected not just minimum-wage workers, but also middle-class workers.”
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @01:07AM
At my previous employer I was not paid for the first hour of the day nor anything I did after I clocked out. My official start time was an hour later than my mandatory on-site time and it was an everyday thing to be called up for something after I was done for the day. When it was most obvious was when my boss would wait until I "clocked out" then tell me to do something. The consequences of not doing these things was being fired. All in all I estimated it averaged 11 hours a week unpaid.
The employer before that I worked in a paired environment. Employees worked in teams of two with identical schedules and responsibilities. It was obvious something was up when my partner was being paid several hundred dollars a week less than me. So I went through our billable hours history with payments journalized and found my employer was rounding down time worked. The amount they rounded down by seemed to be dependent on how much the accountant liked the person. It ranged from five minutes to two hour intervals. I checked everyone on staff and saw the average time lost per week was over five hours. I lost nearly 300 hours in the past year alone. I billed them. They paid it, then I was laid off. My partner was let go before he could bill them. I do not know if he ever was paid.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 25 2015, @01:21AM
So the most effective countermeasure is to log all hours and find a new job. Once that is done one can first bill them and later sue if necessary?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @01:35AM
That still doesn't solve the problem, only remediates it for the person willing to put in all that work. Note this can happen for multiple employers in a row. It may be a locality problem.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @02:55AM
This kind of thing used to be illegal. Too bad laws that are harmful to the rich and powerful never get enforced.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday May 25 2015, @05:48AM
If your boss tells you to do something after you punched out, you punch right back in again
If you must be onsite at a certain time, you punch in at that time.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @08:03AM
Read further: you'd get fired for doing so. Unemployment is the new threat.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by KGIII on Monday May 25 2015, @05:10PM
Most of my working life (years in the military aside) was for myself as I owned my own business (since sold and now retired) but I did work for other people/companies as part of my business and prior to that time. I never was willing to work for free and I did not encourage my employees to do any work that was not billable - even billing for partial hours (with rounding - simplicity sake). I find it sad that businesses would even consider this (much less get away with it) today. It shows me how much the corporate structure has changed and makes me feel even more fortunate for the luck I have had. (While in school a project I did was to model vehicle traffic at a time that such was not being done with a computer. An instructor shared it with a friend who worked for the State. I then went to work consulting and eventually moved on to model pedestrian traffic -- like in a grocery store or a mall -- and expanded to include more than government consulting work. Yes, luck. Some skill but mostly luck.)
My point is that it is shameful to see businesses or government bodies acting like this. Your time and labor are the two things you trade for your livelihood and you should be in a position (we all should) where we work to live and do not live to work. Not compensating you for your time and effort is truly theft and should be punished as such. As our (I live in the US) SCOTUS has decided that corporations are people then they certainly should be subject to the legal system and punished for the crime of theft if they are guilty of this practice.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @06:17PM
Your story about modeling...that's absurd! Not your story, not the outcome, not the luck, but that is how things work and every instance reinforces our knowledge of it. Good for you. Good for society that your work has been of use. Terrible for all the other poor slobs, along with the rest of us, that are brilliant sparks but never get the chance to shine. For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Monday May 25 2015, @07:49PM
Very true and why I specifically make it a point (I don't share that often) to point out that it is entirely luck. My project, a fairly simple thought exercise, was discussed with someone in the higher levels of the Highway Department by my professor. He, the State employee, came in and took a look and had me demonstrate it to him. A few days later he brought in a few other people and I demonstrated the project again. About a month later I was asked to go over Boston to demonstrate it. Six years later I have a rented floor in North Carolina and a small building up in Dorchester. About five years later I had a rented place in Florida and a small sub-office in Vegas. A couple of years later a large business that does nothing but government contracts pretty much (a lot in the defense and intelligence realm) had a lawyer contact me and offered me a sum I could not deny. I made sure that the contract included protection for my employees, took the money and ran to retirement, and haven't regretted it at all. Was it skill and hard work? Absolutely. That is not the main reason I managed to do that well (and, while I hate the term, I feel "blessed") -- the reason I was able to get the chance to do that well is entirely due to luck and being fortunate enough to know the right person at the right time and that person knew someone who was able to get the ball rolling as to do something that would benefit from the modeling at the right time.
I would be an ignorant ass to say that my experience (success?) was mostly attributable to my work ethic or skill. No, the reason is luck. I am well aware of the other paths that might have been opened and I am grateful for my luck. I look at other people who have certainly more skill and have employed far more labor than I and I am reminded of my Dad's repeating the adage (he was a prison guard and also a Marine - he guarded the old military prison in Portsmouth, NH) that stated, "There but the grace of God go I." Some get their start with the grace of being in a certain family (and having money - I had to use the GI Bill to attend school) and others have family friends or the likes to get them started. Some get there through hard effort but, mostly, it is just luck of birth, time, place, and niche. I wasn't even interested in traffic modeling, my project was just because it was something different and I had read something prior that talked about the psychology of, specifically, foot traffic in retail buildings and how even the parking lot could change the perceptions. Traffic: Aggressive people drive faster and people tend to go the speed of traffic in general without regards to the speed limit - and this is safer. Adjust to that as you are not going to get people to adjust their habits regardless of ticket campaigns. Enforce seatbelt laws and seek the aggressive drivers to police. (Not that they always listen, the private sector is better at listening.) Pedestrian: People go to the right, more often then not, put something that assaults their senses in that area (bakery, deli, bright colored products.) Slow traffic with islands in the aisles to get people to pay attention to high profit areas like the deli, fresh produce, and meat/butcher sections. Monetize your end-caps (the things at the ends of both aisles) and ensure that they are bright with prices posted in a large format. You start there and then customize to each client's needs specifically. Those are the basic rules and are easy to put in place programmatically.
As an aside, spell-check is silly. It does not recognize programmatically which is, certainly, a word.
Anyhow, I include the novella to ensure that there is every effort to be clear and open (and reasonably sanitized) so there is little chance of confusion. Success (in a modern sense) is, I have found, almost entirely attributable to luck. Screwing your employees is stupid. Getting screwed, in the form of wage theft, is not a part of employment that anyone should tolerate. If you will be fired for insisting you be paid what you earned with your time and labor then go ahead and get fired and win your legal case against them. There is an almost certainly that a lawyer would take such a case (document everything - with cell phones today you can even use photographic documentation as well) on contingency. If the company is large enough you may even find some lawyer who will take the case pro-bono. Your time and effort are what you give in exchange for financial compensation - this is tacitly part of the contract (and contracts needn't be on paper I have learned). Giving the employer permission to not compensate you with your silence is probably going to encourage the employer to assume they can do so with others and to make the problem worse. Insist on it regardless of the threats (if you can stomach it) and be ready to show the damage done as well as the illegality of the process.
(Score: 1) by acp_sn on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:44AM
And you are entirely at fault for staying at a job that did this to you.
They say you have to be there at a certain time, you get paid for that time. If they say "you have to be here for unpaid time" you have two choices. 1 is tell them to go fuck themselves, 2 is agree then show up when you start getting paid.
The very first time they fail to pay you for the hours worked you find a lawyer. Again if you put up with it then you are the one who is letting someone else shit on you.
If they are real assholes and it looks like you are about to get fired go to your doctor and say you hurt your back doing something at work and file a workers comp claim. Since its almost impossible to prove you didn't hurt your back if they fire you then it looks like retaliation.