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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a common trend among tech companies. Misclassify employees,pay them a less than is legal, design the program to force them violate a bunch of laws, all the while telling them not to violate laws. Then claim you can't control them because they are contractors. Maybe when you get caught pay a token fine admit no wrong doing and reclassify the employees or shut the thing down.

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It's not just tech companies. The whole shielding responsibility via contractors is basically the name of the game for any large corporation. One quick example is chicken farming.

This article was about a lawsuit about chicken waste in 2010

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...

The relevant quote from the article is a statement from Perdue Chicken "Perdue owns no factory farms," the company said. "Families that raise poultry for Perdue are independent farmers."

It's even better. Perdue doesn't own farms, but they own chickens that independent farmers grow for them.

John Oliver had a segment about this last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9wHzt6gBgI

Nah, you don't see Uber or Lyft contractors having 15% to 30% of their hours driving go completely unpaid. They do mis-classify employees as contractors, but they don't go quite as far as Amazon and many other employers doing wage theft.

We should be enforcing our laws that make wage theft a felony, but at least in the US there is minimal funding for enforcement, so only small businesses are policed. Jeff Bezos can keep committing felonies and forcing those below him to do the same due to the lack of enforcement.

Actually, Uber and Lyft contractors are not paid for quite a bit of their working hours. If you don't have a passenger in your car, you're not getting paid. That includes time between passengers as well as however long it takes you to reach the pickup location. That can easily be 15-30% or more.

True true, I didn't say the model wasn't messed up and that practically the same effect didn't occur, but my comment was primarily on the overt wage theft at Amazon, versus the hidden wage theft that occurs as a contractor at Uber & Lyft. The equivalent there is if you just didn't get paid for quite a few rides at all.

That is at least consistent with any other taxi/private hire service though, at least in the UK. I'm not aware of any taxi firms that operate on a standard hourly wage. Drivers pay a fee to the base to be registered with them, and in some cases a fee for each fare they are allocated, but the drivers themselves are self employed and the fares they collect are their own. The only difference with Uber is that Uber process the fares for them rather than the driver collecting cash.

I am a automotive tech worker. i dont know how a lawyer determines h1b minimum wage but i get paid a lot less than Americans in my company who dont even have a masters degree. Yes its very easy to trick the laws

Does one really have to have a masters degree to be a automotive tech? In any case at least you can change employers with reasonable ease, not like the workers on L1 visa who can either put up or pack the bags and go home.

i should have said automotive engineering

Talk to your state's Dept of Labor and Industry. Your state has a hotline for you to anonymously ask if what your employer is doing is legal, and if your employer has other H1B visa holders, you can likely stay anonymous during their investigation.

They won't move fast, but triple damages and a nice fine for your employer can be a sweet reward for their fraud against you.

On a sidenote, the H1B strategy is very common in the Engineering field, most consultancies figure they can get a decade of work at below American wages out of the average H1B visa holder, saving them a few hundred thousand.

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