Hacker News Reader

Comment by juujian | Hacker News Reader

The fine is only $5,000, while they have to pay $140,000 in back wages. Imagine you stole $140,000 and all you had to do was pay a fine. If anything, we are learning here that there is a pretty low risk associated with trying to pull something like that off.

View on HN

Whereas if someone had walked by an open bank vault and just walked off with 140k, they’d likely get several years in prison.

The difference between white and blue collar crime, along with the different way the justice system treats corporations compared to people.

There is a reason that there is a difference. The bank vault situation is a case of illegal taking. The person in that case is likely someplace that they aren't legally allowed to be or are using force (or threat thereof) to extract the money. There is no chance that this was an accident. The employment case is a failure to pay money that is owed. That is sometimes just a contractual failure and can be the result of malice or incompetence. Many states have recognized that the failure to pay lawful wages is greater than a simple contractual failure and have added double or treble damages to the awards to penalize employers in this situation. Still, it is generally recognized that we don't want to be throwing people in jail for just failing to live up to a civil contract. Imagine if we started throwing people in jail for failing to pay rent.

Well, that and the eternal damnation of your soul. They'd probably rehypothecated theirs already, but it's worth noting that: Absolution of an accomplice is a sin that incurs automatic excommunication.

By doctrine, you can’t be criminally punished for offences by the church if you confess to your superior.

Interesting, source?

I wonder if I can use this strategy to stop paying the church tax in Germany.

I was baptised Catholic but never practiced. But since the catholic church is internationally integrated I gotta pay the tax perpetually unless I get excommunicated.

You need to pay an enforced tax? Is it levied by the government on behalf of the church or is there official papal taxmen?

Seems like you should try to speed run excommunication. After all, there's a lot of fun ways to sin in the eyes of god.

It is paid on the salary. You have to declare yourself that you're part of a religion, though.

Excuse me, that what tax?

I know, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

Protestants and members of other religions don't really have to pay unless they're a member of a church in German, but since the Catholic Church is centralized, everyone who was baptized has to pay. Yeah it sucks.

I had never heard of this before[1] (as a sheltered obtuse American) - this seems like exactly the sort of thing that the US separation of church and state was established for. It looks like the church can opt you into their fold using deceptive dark practices - if this were the US, it would be like if registering with ancestry.com opted you into mandatory Mormon tithes[2].

[1] https://allaboutberlin.com/glossary/Kirchensteuer [2] https://www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/genealogy.html

In Germany's case it's only the Catholic Church that does this shady stuff. It should have been like other churches, that only charge you if you frequent them in Germany. But the Catholic Lobby is strong, so if you have a register of baptism in Papua New Guine they will chase you and charge back taxes, even if your parents left the church, forgot to tell you about baptism, and were adopted by a family of another religion. Ooops.

Why haven't you left yet? Obvious scam is obvious

Too much bureaucracy and I have to go back to my country for it, even to the same city/parish, apparently. And they might take their time and just "deny" it! It needs the approval of a Bishop or something like that.

I'm considering other avenues. Someone mentioned I can also be excommunicated if I punch the pope, but so far I'm trying to avoid violent solutions.

That’s not true. You sign a form where you write where you were baptized, if you remember, and that’s it. You have to pay for the privilege of exiting, however, although it was your parents who signed you up. Absolutely insanity.

Not the information given to me at a parish, but you’re probably right.

That's often true for citizenship too

These sorts of fines carry an additional penalty people generally don't account for, which is that if they do it again, they should get hammered by the justice system. The justice system doesn't like you breaking laws; the justice system hates you flouting the justice system.

It isn't just that they have to pay a fine; it is that they are now quite vulnerable and they'd better shape up and fly right or they really will be hit with something they won't like.

(Or so the theory goes.)

With something as egregious as this, I don't think that's sufficient. Other companies could see this and also think they can do it once without serious consequences. There should be a harsher penalty for even doing this in the first place.

I think, to parent's point, that still gives companies a 'freebie' to try. If you don't get caught, you win. If you do, well, you can't try for free money again, no big deal.

The $140,000 constitutes back-wages and damages. I agree it is still too low.

It's the prioritization of punishment vs restitution. If you can't have both, then which do you want first? For instance, we could have them pay $5000 in back wages, and $140,000 in fines.

Nor is it as simple as "well just toss them in prison instead of fines"... maybe not in this particular incident, but in many of those, incarcerating the offenders makes it even less likely that the employees receive restitution. (In this case, it probably would mean the restaurant closes, and they lose all employment.)

The shocking thing isn't how this case is treated, it's how other cases with similar or lesser harms are.

It's the social construction of crime thing. Stealing $140k is egregious. But because it's an employer stealing from their employees it's being treated as more of an administrative error than a great crime.

Where like, we know that people are in prison on decades long sentences for thefts orders of magnitude smaller, or simple drug possession, or spitting on a cop.

Put another way, try working at Walmart. If you pop open the safe and walk out with $140k, do you really think the outcome will only be a $5k fine?

> It's the social construction of crime thing. Stealing $140k is egregious. But because it's an employer stealing from their employees it's being treated as more of an administrative error than a great crime.

It's not as if someone subtracted $140k off of one guy's single paycheck.

This was nickeled-and-dimed, likely for years. And while I have no inclination to give the benefit of the doubt to a place that hires a fake priest to give confession about skimming the till, it's not that difficult for such a thing to be an administrative error. Rhonda in payroll keys in a wrong number somewhere, and you're getting the $8/month deduction for hemorrhoid insurance without actually getting that insurance. Or the punch on the mechanical time clock is bent, and shaving 5 minutes from the start of everyone's shift. Or a hundred other things.

Hell, maybe that's even an excuse, and it was always deliberate. But good luck proving it.

There are tradeoffs here, and if punitive justice is something you absolutely must have, then go for it. But don't start whining when the other stuff gets worse.

You're reading me upside down. I'm not arguing for retributive justice, I'm point out how our state and society are capable of a restorative approach when they want to be.

People are often saying that such an approach is naive or idealistic, when in fact we already have it. But only for certain relationships between criminal and victim.

Wait! Someone is in jail for a decade for just spitting on a cop? We need to protest this case. Who is it?

https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2023/04/14/texas-man-sentenc...

Fair enough, although his sentence seemed to be based on being a habitual offender with armed robbery and domestic violence convictions. It's similar to how people in this thread think that repeat violators of wage theft should face higher penalties.

ok lol sure

I assume that the amount of back wages is the actual amount of back wages owed.

Not necessarily. It might only be the amount that was settled on, because the labor board wants to do this administratively, and that's the most they can definitively prove.

You know, some wiseass was keeping a diary of his start and stop times, but his three other coworkers didn't and they're left out of this. If they try to go after more, the company will balk, take it to trial and then there's the possibility of much less (or even $0) being the payout.

Or it might only be what they can reasonably be expected to pay. What if they owe three quarters of a million, but there are no recoverable funds to pay that out? What if the restaurant goes tits up, and all those workers are out of a job permanently?

Unless it's handed down by jury and judge, it's probably negotiated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com