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Comment by hangphyr | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a tangent, but one should be careful with that path. Not all employers are 'evil' and have negative intentions for their employees. Think of an example such as the independently owned restaurant that cannot afford to pay employees high wages and their owners are not wealthy. Just as not all employees can be painted as untrustworthy and hostile, not all employers should be painted as untrustworthy and hostile.

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I've been a line cook, restaurant owners are absolutely untrustworthy and hostile. The food industry is one where exploitation, highly aggressive staff retention practices (making employees dependent on you for a visa, threatening to spread lies about you, etc.), crazy unhealthy hours and just a generally awful culture are standard.

Can vouch for the life science industry being like this as well. Management threatened to make us check in every hour of work. Spending an eighth of that hour writing an explanatory email was pretty toxic.

I've worked in the restaurant industry in the US. It's nothing short of horrifying, and often traumatizing for those involved.

I've seen no overtime pay happen, lies from management to get unemployment claims denied, management not actually firing people but just giving them zero or reduced hours to mess with the unemployment claim process, the VISA fuckery you mentioned, harrassment. Intentional scheduling of conflicting days for people with multiple jobs. Being made to work 7 days a week for long periods of time. Being made to repeatedly close late at night / early in the morning and then open the restaurant the next morning, a few hours later, and work a double. Being made to work while sick (this happens a lot).

A gold comment I heard from one manager was "I don't pay overtime because these motherfuckers already take enough of my money" (referring to the employees). This same guy was shaving time slips to keep them below 40 hours.

All employers will value the enterprise over any one of their employees individually. When is the last time you saw an employer shutter their business but continue paying their employees? It isn't that they aren't trustworthy, it is that it is a mistake to trust your employer to act in your best interest. As an example you yourself bring up, think of all the restaurants that only function because they pay their employees peanuts and give them unstable hours.

I had a boss sum it up pretty well for us once. It was stressful and a bunch of people had been arguing at work. The boss rounded everyone up and basically told us all that in the end, the business would go on whether he had to run it alone or not. We could all keep arguing, fucking up jobs, pissing customers off and losing the business money, but then nobody would have work at all. Or we could all get over our differences, work shit out and keep getting paid.

That was pretty much all it took.

And I understand, he'd been running that business for over 20 years and started it from nothing. He was fairly successful while I was working there, but he'd been at the bottom before and would keep working back up from there again if it came down to it.

He's probably one of the best bosses i've had, he was fair and would invest in employees and the business, but the business always came first.

> When is the last time you saw an employer shutter their business but continue paying their employees?

Just last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20200410153705/http://www.lafari...

(They've since re-opened)

It's possible that a UBI could work out to the benefit of employers that respect their workers. Suppose your job choices are an employer that treats you well and pays $20k/year, and an employer that treats you badly and pays $30k/year. You might end up having to take the higher pay and put up with the abuse just to make ends meet. But with a UBI of $15k/year, the lower paying job becomes a viable option.

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