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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: 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.