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Comment by mbillie1 | Hacker News Reader

Alternate headline: workers to receive appropriate compensation following accurate interpretation of state law.

I have never fully understood the insistence that employers should be allowed to demand unpaid work from their employees.

Surely if your business is only viable with coerced labour then it isn't a viable business?

Or maybe if you need employees help to run it without pay them then they can be given a share of the business so they can benefit from the future returns that their efforts provide?

No one is demanding unpaid work. The question is whether they are owed 1.5x their salary or just their salary.

Overtime rules say that if you work overtime (and the definition of overtime varies by state), they have to pay you 1.5x your salary. In this case, they were only paying their regular salary.

No one was working for free.

Ah, gotcha. For some reason I always associated overtime with "unpaid". Probably because when I was a kid and had crappy jobs there would always be stuff that would need to be done at the start and end of every shift that outside my regular hours and therefore unpaid. I wasn't savvy enough to ask for pay, or to tell them where to stick it.

edit concrete example: Blockbuster Video. Shop closed at 11, the time I stopped getting paid. At that point I had to lock up and do accounts stuff, clean, and general admin (plugging the CC machine into the phone line so it could phone home and get lists of updated cards to watch for) etc. Would usually take about half an hour ISTR.

GameStop is a company that had similar tactics. Had to close the registers, process and late trade-ins, and close/clean the store. Then they trusted me to take thousands of dollars to the bank and drop it in the slot. But all of it was unpaid.

Those practices are largely illegal. There's been a number of successful cases prosecuting wage theft.

Was it GameStop, or the store manager? I'd bet money the GameStop corporate HR people would have fired the guy on the spot if they heard about something like that. My own retail experience (big box office supply store) was so metrics driven I can absolutely imagine a scenario where the store manager tries to illegally cut work hours to make his store's numbers look better.

You were getting screwed. Most stores that close at say 9pm, still scheduling workers until 11pm to "Close" the store.

The worst part is it was probably just some shitty manager making 35k a year looking for a good year end review or a tiny bonus.

There is no way the corporate policy was unpaid overtime.

Yeah, what they were doing was flat out illegal.

The only time you are allowed to work unpaid overtime is if your job is considered an 'exempt' position. There are a number of rules that have to be met for a job to be considered expempt, including a high enough salary, autonomy over your work, and a few other rules as well.

Well, the article points out that the law specifically exempted this sort of work, except perhaps for the missing comma. I am a big fan of the Oxford comma, but in this instance saying that its absence means they are entitled to the overtime pay seems somewhat disingenuous, when the thing is taken in context. Truck driving (even those hourly jobs, as opposed to the much more common piece work jobs paid by the mile) is well-known for not paying overtime unless it is for a union shop and has been negotiated.

I was talking about the person I was replying to, who was asked to work off the clock at blockbuster video. That is always illegal, regardless of whether you are elible for 1.5x overtime salary or not.

Ah, sorry! Thought the comment had to do with article.

I was fired from a job once after I refused to work any time off of the books.

They expected us to show up 10-15 minutes before the start of our shift to open and if we were on the later shift, they expected us to work 10-15 minutes after the end of the shift to close.

I refused to work for free.

I have never regretted losing that job.

You should have documented and reported to the labor board.

Yeah, and have the labor board give them a "stern talking to"?

Not worth your time, nor return on time invested.

The labor board would, among other things, force them to pay for the missing wages.

These labor boards tend to be pretty vocal about defending the rights of employees. However, employees don't always know to invoke their help, and they don't have unlimited resources.

A company not paying wages for time that employees have worked is a pretty open-and-shut case for them to handle.

What?

Labor boards don't give a "stern talking to," they investigate violations of the law, issue fines, and even force companies to pay back wages, with interest, and other forms of compensation directly to employees. I just did a Google and this first thing that came up "Walt Disney Co. has agreed to provide $3.8 million in back wages to thousands of hotel- and timeshare-resort workers after the U.S. Labor Department investigated violations of minimum wage, overtime and record keeping rules."

I once reported a bank to the CPFB (not a labor board but similar) and it took 10 minutes to fill out an online form and they took care of investigating the issue for me. Ended up getting the $500 I was owed as well as an apology.

In Massachusetts, for example, the standard remedy for unpaid wages is triple damages.

Being that I refused to work off the books hours, I had no unpaid wages.

My co-workers might have gotten more out of it but since I got fired and they didn't, they should have been the ones to call.

The name for this is wage theft.

It's just as bad as taking money out of an employee's paycheck, and way more corrosive to society than petty theft.

I fully believe that, much like persons registering as sex offenders are not allowed to go certain places, persons found to be involved in wage theft should be banned from running a business or being in any kind of managerial position whatsoever.

My mall employer did the same thing back in the day. I kept meticulous records, documented what was happening with my boss. I also kept the receipts that I got from the mall depository bank at 11PM.

When I was ready to leave, I filed a Department of Labor complaint and got a few thousand bucks.

I'm sure that the definition of overtime varies by state, but I'm still pretty suspicious of any arrangements that cause time worked in excess of 40 hrs/wk not to receive time-and-a-half pay.

[EDIT:] That isn't even the worst thing here. Why should any hourly worker not get time-and-a-half, just because they're doing work that makes food less perishable? Is this some ancient tradition of screwing over the hourly workers who are least likely to have any other options?

No, it's just a recognition that if the employees go home for the day, the truck full of perishable goods will go bad, harming not just the company but also the Maine residents who were hoping to get a gallon of milk at a reasonable price. We can have a discussion about whether that's the best solution but first please try to understand Chesterton's fence.

Haha I haven't written any letters to the Maine legislature if that's what you're worried about.

If the food spoils, no one's going to force "Maine residents" to eat it. Rather, the person who hires and schedules workers will lose some money. Next time he'll do a better job of scheduling. Or maybe he'll go out of business, and his competitor will do a better job of scheduling. Since she's not such a skinflint, she'll pay both the fishermen and the packers more. Then she'll charge the customer more, but that's OK because the low-cost competitor just went out of business. If fish costs too much, then the government can subsidize it.

Agricultural subsidies and time-and-a-half are both more widely established Chestertonian traditions than this weird northeastern "screw the packers" thing some lobbyist dreamed up. Trust the market, dude.

It's just that every job is designed and paid for differently. I think the company simply has a budget to offer as payment for a certain outcome.

Think about it from the opposite direction: a business owner could state I have never fully understood the insistence that employees get paid when they are using the restroom.

It would be insanity.

I attribute a lot of this to the unreasonable demands from some unions to create job definitions that are impractical ("driver cannot be the person who loads truck"). Fortunately, unions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Unions can be useful or harmful depending on the details, but I genuinely think some kind of collective bargaining is essential to protect society as a whole. Entities with capital want to turn some of that capital into labor in order to generate more capital. Entities who have the supply of labor (populations, or skilled sub-groups) should be able to negotiate as a group if they choose, and get a better deal for themselves while still allowing a profit for the ones with the money. By disallowing the formation of labor unions, we tip the scales in favor of those who already have capital so that returns are maximized and worker gains are minimized. And when the economy grows, the gains go to the top, because workers can't collectively control the labor supply the way other entities control the supply of capital.

Demanding that other people work for you, to their expense and your betterment, is one of the most natural and ancient ideas in the world.

We fight against it, and have won certain protections in the laws of some countries, but that desire is permanently a part of the human psyche! Don't ever be surprised when you see it.

I agree that unpaid work is foolish and it's all too common these days. I would counter the expectation of unpaid work with "I can't sit around doing nothing at work and expect to be paid." Really it's the same thing only in reverse.

I bet a large amount of companies are not viable due to dumping even more tasks on employees each year and also expecting unpaid work.

Even in just the last ten years it seems so much burden has shifted to lower rung employees. I can't imagine what business will expect ten years from now.

I'm glad the truckers got their money, but I don't really see one interpretation as more or less accurate than the other.

I've volunteered at Meals on Wheels before. What I'm usually told to do is unload shipments of donated food products (crate full of mangos, crate full of granola bars, crate full of apples, etc.) and pack them into shopping bags (e.g. 1 mango into each bag, one granola bar into each bag, two apples into each bag). The shopping bags are then be given out (distribution) or picked up by other volunteers who drive them to homes (shipping).

So I think both "packing for shipping" and "packing for distribution" do seem like reasonably separate things and the law may have been wanting to list both so that someone packing for distribution wasn't excluded like could have happened if the law just said "packing for shipping".

But if you take the law's meaning as targeting "packing for shipping" and "packing for distribution" then it no longer includes people who are just doing distribution and not packing (truckers).

We know the law meant the last two things as separate anyway, though, because there's no "or" before "packing", so the end there was two separate items and not one last item. So "distribution" was meant to be a separate item and not part of "packing for". Which is the opposite argument that didn't hold up in court.

> We know the law meant the last two things as separate anyway, though, because there's no "or"

The judgment by the appeals court covers that too. Interestingly they don't side one way or the other on what the text means, instead they simply conclude that it is ambiguous. Having concluded that, they follow a separate rule which says that if there is ambiguity, then the judgment should favour the employees.

This is Hacker news comments. Workers are just suckers who haven't figured out how to suckle from the VC teat.

Well, whether it was 'accurate' depends on whether the intention of the law writers was this liberal reading. Which is unclear; I expect if they actually meant `packing for (distribution or shipping)` there would be another or before packing:

> The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, OR packing for shipment or distribution of ...

as the last logical entry in a list almost always starts with a conjunction.

So the intention probably was to exclude distribution from extra pay, but the phrasing was lax enough to allow this liberal interpretation.

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