Reminder that wage theft is estimated to cost workers over $50 billion a year, more than the cost to victims of all robberies, burglaries, and larcenies combined: http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-w...
If there's money in the bank and it doesn't go to paying the employees or executing a maneuver to get the employees paid, its theft plain and simple.
At that point leadership is deciding not to pay all that it can. If there's 0 in the bank, it's just bad business, but they can't do anything else, other than at least be forthright, which it seems like they refuse to be.
Crytek is also German, right? So I have no idea how that works there.
When the person starting bankruptcy proceedings is an employee with outstanding salary payments, said person can start proceedings with no money down, and the state covers all costs of the proceedings that can't be recovered from the company.
On top of that, as long as your demand is timely, your salary up to a certain limit can be recovered from a government insurance system if the company is truly insolvent and the money can't be recovered from the estate.
This strongly incentivises employees to not put up with any nonsense over unpaid salaries, as there are few costs involved, and while it will take some time to get your salary paid, you will get it eventually (and Norwegian unemployment benefits are substantial enough that getting them is certainly far better than waiting for an insolvent employer to drip-feed you payment).
And as a result it strongly incentivises employers to prioritise salary payments or otherwise negotiate a suitable agreement with staff rather than just stringing people along, and quickly weed out insolvent companies that often would otherwise be able to drag things out by sweet-talking creditors - it's harder to string staff along when they can demand you bankrupt if you don't treat them properly.
Yes, the norwegian system is superior.
PS: The german legal system is full of those laws that cause extensive legal-battles, shipping the money of the cause to the laws soldiers of fortune. To navigate around these black holes of law is quite a art.
Take the outrageous concept of the "Erbengemeinschaft" as example. If a companys owner does not have a last will, the company ownership gets by default split up on all descendants and their descendants, making it basically impossible to continue such a company- as this creates a hostage situation with anyone, who is unwilling to get paid out.
Or this one, where pg suggests that people don't downvoting a grey post (I think people do downvote grey posts now, more than they used to.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683
this thread also has some comments about voting (and a bunch of other stuff, including ahem politics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696)
Rather than say "well, I just failed to pay money I don't have" you can just say "oh no, it's cool, I'm just downloading it"
If you believed everything you read here the world would be a very alien place.
You're the one jumping to conclusions. All I said is that they got a bunch of free labour, which is true regardless of whether they knowingly did so or not.
The issue at hand is making a contract for something/labor, using it up, and not paying. It's a totally different topic.
Specifically for wages and insurance dues there's this law: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st....
Summary: Up to 5 years in prison.
But even that's called "criminal bankrupty", and not "credit theft" or something. Possibly because you can't steal credit - it's either given, or it's not given.
In the same way, work is either performed, or it's not performed. It's not somehow stealthily extracted from you while you're not looking.
But putting aside the legalism, it's just plain wrong.
People just want to rationalize using the word to mean something different from what it actually means, for dramatic effect.
Your correction didn't apply, btw.
Btw, where's your evidence that 'everyone' on HN knows the difference? We are speaking literally here of course, where 'everyone' means literally every single individual who uses this site. Surely you're not just using hyperbole for 'dramatic effect', as you put it?
At any rate it's ok. I think I understood your non-literal meaning (i.e. the vast majority). But good on you for clearing up that whole 'theft' issue; people were getting very confused there...
- I said credit is given
- You said credit is given <and stuff>.
It really is safe to assume that we all have a shared understanding of what "theft" means in the real world.
It's a simple word, and a simple concept that generally applies to physical property that is taken from its rightful owner, without the owner noticing, or at least without coercion being employed in acquiring it.
If taking someone's property involves coercion, then we're talking about robbery, not theft. We all share this understanding too.
Some people want to use the word for dramatic effect when virtue-signalling online, but that doesn't change the shared understanding.
- Physical property
- Taken from the rightful owner
- Taken without the owner noticing / no coercion
So let's say I take your ATM card without you noticing. That's theft right? What if I then go to an ATM and drain your bank account? Given that money was never in your possession (it was just a number in an electronic ledger somewhere, one keeping track of all the loans made and credits owed by the bank [your deposit is credit to the bank, for instance]), then I'm not committing theft, right?
Boy, this literal language stuff sure is tough! But I'd appreciate your clarification, as it seems so very important we only ever use language in a completely literal manner.
It's interesting you bring up 'shared understanding'; you beat me to it. I doubt very much that anyone, except maybe your literal self, thinks employers are paying their workers and then physically stealing the money back when people use the phrase 'wage theft'. In other words, there's a 'shared understanding' of the non-literal meaning of that phrase.
I mean, when someone calls someone else an 'oxygen thief' I don't think anyone else (again, except for maybe you) actually believes someone is running around stealthily taking oxygen molecules that don't belong to them. It's just a funny insult that literally everyone (-1) mutually understands in a non-literal way.
And sorry, I have no idea what 'virtue signalling' is. Is it some kind of secret hand signal?
In most cases, salaries are paid for work already performed. So, for at least the first cycle of a missed payroll, the non-paid work was stealthily extracted from you.
And, typically, that's when the company starts telling stories about technical payroll glitches, and so on. Arguably more stealth.
Apples and oranges. Shoplifting is a particular kind of theft - not paying someone's salary is not.
A shoplifter takes something from a shop. An employer that doesn't pay someone's salary does not take something from the employee - he refrains from giving.
Besides, work is not physical property. Most people on HN would object to pirating movies being called "theft" of intellectual property, but somehow it's alright to use the word when talking about not being paid one's salary.
In Australia we have the same thing in our Corporations Act: trading while insolvent. Penalties are levied against company directors: $200,000 civil penalty, 5 years imprisonment, and directors being made personally liable for compensating creditors (i.e. 'piercing the corporate veil').
If your business fails, that's unfortunate and you have my sympathy. But it does not give you the right to economically damage the businesses and people around you on your way down.
The money workers are not paid are wages lost due to theft of their work.
I've had my car broken into twice for, well, nothing. I don't remember exactly how much it was to repair, but at most $200.
On the other hand, I've had a company steal around $15,000 from me. What's worse, some idiotic junkie, or some corrupt manager or investor who's buying an Audi on my and my coworkers' dime? If we're talking who deserves to hang, I know who certainly ranks higher on my own list.
But as cperciva pointed out, the Crytek case doesn't sound like a case of a "corrupt manager or investor who's buying an Audi on [their employees'] dime". It's a company with a history of both successes and difficulties, struggling to survive in a notoriously risky industry, and facing serious cash-flow problems.
Of course we don't know the details of what's happening at executive level, and we can safely assume there's been some poor management and poor communication to staff.
But we can also assume that the management is sincerely doing everything they can to keep the company afloat, to get their staff paid and to keep them employed well into the future, which is what the staff want too, given that the alternative is to shut down the company immediately and for everyone to be made unemployed.
Conflating this situation with wage theft is quite unfair, at least in the absence of further evidence.
Morality is a spectrum, and you can only make a judgement call on it when all the details are known, which right now they aren't.
Robbery? Now that's a different thing. But theft? Close enough.
If the company let them know, shared the plan to make them whole and asked them to stick around then it's not wage theft, if they lied or hid the situation then it is.
Sounds like the latter to me but obviously don't know the details personally.
That's the most naive thing I've read all week.
If managers/owners want to prove sincerity (and some do), they pay for their wage bill out of pocket or borrow against the value of personal assets to do so. That's how you prove that you believe in what you're doing.
Until that point, assuming sincerity is the best way to get completely screwed.
For all we know they're doing or trying to do all those things. I'm not saying they are. I'm just pointing out the fact that we don't know all the details.
Staff are perfectly entitled to leave the company and take legal action to recover what they're owed.
Equally, the management is entitled to the presumption of innocence regarding criminal or immoral conduct, particularly when all we have to go on right now is a few anecdotal reports.
Then, would you sue the company to get your money back? Exactly how, if you don't have any money.