I live in Mexico, I've never seen anyone in Mexico make minimum wage, ever. And I do know people from all walks of life.
As to what they earn, again, I live in Mexico, I am employed by a Mexican company, and work for Mexican clients. I make their yearly salary in 15 days or so. It really is disgusting that they would treat employees this way, specially when they were such a big success.
As yearly salary it is indeed atrocious. Still, worth saying, not an illegal salary. But yeah, I don't see many people enticed to work for that amount for a for-profit company they don't have significant ownership of. The point is not on whether or not it is advisable to resign in those conditions (of course it is), but on whether it is viable to sue (I doubt it is).
And... many people in Mexico do make minimum wage (around 13% of the country does), but usually not anyone in a specialized profession in a city.
"This is so shitty that the nicest thing that can be said is it's not actually illegal" doesn't merit the exculpatory nature of this sentence. And the sentiment behind it isn't really worth much in the first place.
We dont know how much the coders were making.
Much of that depends on specifics. Some of these devs traveled. Any work done while in other jurisdictions must have been done at local minimum wages. It doesn't take many days spent on the road promoting KSP in the US before you are legally entitled to more.
There are prosecuted cases of offshore firms sending below-minimum workers into the US. It is a crime.
(From British Columbia, a typical such jurisdiction.)
"If a third party is or will be indebted to a person who is required to pay money under a determination, the Branch may demand that the third party pay all or part of their indebtedness directly to the Branch."
"The Branch may seize personal or business assets of a person required to pay under a determination, settlement agreement or order to satisfy the amount owing and the costs of the seizure. The Branch may direct the Court Bailiff to seize assets to recover the amount owing. "
http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/employment-business/employ...
The devs agreed voluntarily to accept this salary for a number of years. It is not ours to judge whether this it was too small, because for them it was not (until now)
Likewise, if you insist on "this salary is too small for them", you're saying that you know better what's good for them than they themselves. I would find that offensive.
Also worth noting that at least half of Mexico's population lives below their own poverty line.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-economy-analysis-id...
Many of the other comments seem to be accusing the employer of acting in bad faith, or of immoral behavior. If the employees knew exactly what they were getting into, these accusations seem baseless.
Regarding immoral behavior on the part of the employer: I still don't buy that either. Someone can be a bad employer (ie, one that i would never want to work for), and still be perfectly morally upstanding. If someone, in a competitive labor marketplace, takes on a job which has low pay, I don't think they can accuse their employer of immoral behavior because of low pay. Such accusations should be saved for those scums that pull a bait-and-switch and refuse to honor their promises.
Squad is taking advantage of its developers. There's no other way to put it. It's over-working them with massive crunch times (that may not have been communicated clearly to job seekers up front) and paying them a very tiny fraction of what they could be earning elsewhere. Who knows how much of that is related to false promises. A lot of scummy employers will say things like "The pay will go up after an introductory period", or "We'll give you a raise soon", and then it never happens. Maybe it happened here. We don't know until we listen to the employees' stories. That's why my first instinct is not to look for reasons why it's their fault.
And working conditions are not an accident.
It's no different from people choosing a career in early childhood education. Some people insist on doing what they love, ignoring ugly financial issues caused by supply and demand.
People take very stupid decisions when they are desperate.
- Working on games is their dream job. They want to do it so much they'd do it for free.
- Long-term unemployment makes one desperate. I have personal experience with this: I once took a job that offered no benefits and low pay because I had been unemployed for two years and was desperate for a job.
- For the same reasons people don't get out of abusive relationships ASAP. They come to believe they deserve the abuse. Again, personal experience: working at a company with low pay and abusive management convinced me I wasn't cut out for anything better, and it was a long time before I broke free of that mental trap and eventually sought employment elsewhere.
- They think that the low pay is temporary and that it'll go up when the product takes off. And then the employer keeps delaying the salary increases by moving the goalposts. Hey, another trap I've fallen into... (and yes, all of my personal experience comes from the same company)
Sorry, but have you really met actual working class people that work in "maquilas"? It is not uncommon to see people earning around 600 MXN pesos a week which is barely enough to count as minimum wage.
I'm sure they aren't paid to work on international software projects.
Hmm, there are dead poor people in Mexico and even the US, including people that make less than minimum wage (from part time gigs they can manage to find, etc).