New Weapon in Day Laborers’ Fight Against Wage Theft: A Smartphone App
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Then again, Donald Trump could get elected.
P.S. This is not a criticism of you or your comment, danielvf (I think that the point you brought up is valid). One thing that does bother me about Hacker News, though, is that the top comment is almost always a rejection of the innovation at hand. The hacker part of Hacker News should be about improving imperfect systems, not instinctively criticizing and rejecting them. I feel like HN would be a much more interesting site and much truer to its culture if every critical comment had to include a potential fix for the criticism. If someone can't come up with a potential fix to add, then they haven't done enough research to justify making the comment in the first place.
It frequently appears that people react negatively on HN purely based on instinct, without doing any research. The response to Dropbox's launch is particularly illuminating: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (I think that every Dropbox user can point out half a dozen ways it is better than FTP or a USB stick)
All of the criticism on the Dropbox post is addressable, but the discussion would have been a lot more interesting if the original commenters pointed out solutions themselves. That shifts the discussion from a feeling of "This will never work" to "Cool idea! Here's how you can make it better." The latter, and not the former, is important to the culture of HN.
But for many of the people here, getting something "right" is an explicit and fundamental part of what we do. It's a specific, on purpose focus. So it's natural (and good) that we'd think that way.
In my experience assuming people are competent in their security is usually a really really optimistic view point and very often untrue.
Day labor is not illegal.
And I think the point was that this data is potentially one subpoena away from getting a list of illegal immigrants (who themselves would be very susceptible to exploitation).
I don't think law enforcement is able to extract data for illegal immigrants from Mexico. They aren't terrorist after all.
10 years ago, this would have been crazy, given the cost of devices. Now, it's a great idea. In a few years, it will be obvious.
There have to be a lot more tech solutions out there to help with societal problems.
Someone should write the companion app to prevent wage theft from time clock workers. My understanding is that that problem dwarfs the theft from day laborers. The app would log GPS coordinates as a shadow time clock, and a back end that can ingest a time sheet and validate that the recorded times are correct.
Multiply that times 10-20 employees a night at ~1,000 stores and you've got a good chunk of change.
Ridiculous but true: "I'm locked in at work after I clock out and need to wait to be let out the front door."
Legitimate but true: "The front doors are locked after closing and the manager is finishing a task before unlocking it for me to go home."
Presumably there are still fire exits in the building so it's not necessarily a safety issue (or would be more of a safety issue if the front door was left unlocked while the employees clean up).
The employees likely wouldn't mind staying 3 hours after work while the manager does Whatever if they were getting paid overtime.
Basically, people are deciding that they are willing to work for sub-minimum wage, and so they accept it.
Ultimately I just left.
I think the way to fix this is to give employees negotiating power. We shouldn't be in a situation where an employer only treats employees well because of fear of reprisal.
When we think about SV perhaps going through a downturn, we must remember that there are still hundreds or thousands of opportunities to write apps to help the extremely poor and vulnerable. This is great territory for app-writers who have teams of 1,2, or 3 -- but it'd make no sense at all to pursue if you were an established startup with a ton of overhead.
Anonymously identifying officials that asked you for a bribe. That'd be a great app.
Finding the nearest potable water.
Job search for unskilled workers.
Craigslist for illiterate people (add in geo-location instead of cities)
Wage theft laws are becoming tougher. Some states allow triple damages. Some make it a crime. California has been sending employers to jail.[2][3]
[1] http://www.wagetheftisacrime.com/ [2] https://www.dir.ca.gov/DIRNews/2015/2015-133.pdf [3] http://www.alcoda.org/newsroom/2015/feb/convictions_in_wage_...
What would disrupting Labor Ready look like? An app matching employers with employees?
App processes payments, right? Maybe some sort of escrow.
As for deterring wage theft, there's got to be some good strategies. Maybe both sides enter hours worked. If values match, the payment is processed. If not, the disagreement is escalated somehow.
Each sides could rate the other (up or down). Leading to mutually assured (ratings) destruction if either sides cheats/rats.
In a union shop, that's what happens. The worker files a grievance and it's settled or arbitrated. This happens all the time; it's no big deal.
In Germany, there are workers councils to which such problems can be brought.
In the US, the worker gets fired for raising the issue, and can then sue for damages, maybe getting paid years later.
The article unfortunately has no info on what if any measures are taken in the app to anonymize/potentially encrypt this info. I'd be highly skeptical, especially as the US government has no problem twisting the arms of companies to make them give up users' personal info.
Let's not forget one of the two presidential front runners is quite the outspoken critic of immigration. This could have real consequences if it isn't done right (otherwise I think it's a good idea).