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Comment by MOARDONGZPLZ | Hacker News Reader

Not quite true, DOL will go to bat for you and fine the employer and get you paid. Violations of labor law are not simply small claims civil matters. Some employers get large fines.

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The whole article is about how DOL mostly doesn't go to bat for people. Of $50 bil in wage theft, DOL recovered ~$3 bil.

Ultimately dealing with the DOL will hurt the employer financially, but the employee probably won’t see anything from it.

The lawyers will though.

> Ultimately dealing with the DOL will hurt the employer financially

It looks like corporations make far more money stealing from workers than they'd ever lose in their dealings with the DOL. If enforcement were inevitable and fines high enough to actually hurt no company would ever dare steal from their employees, but because they do (and at such large scales) we know that they make more money from theft than they risk losing by stealing.

It's not about the fines. It's about the cost of hiring attorneys to deal with the DOL complaint itself. I agree that scale matters though.

Often times it is due to the employee not properly documenting anything. They still have to prove they are owed the money. you cannot just go to the DOL and claim you owed something with no proof.

The problem is that when the fine is the "cost of doing business" nothing really changes. Criminal charges/jail time (i.e. holding people responsible for these violations) might help keep businesses in check.

I think the point is the employer simply gets a fine while the reverse would see criminal penalty. This lopsided application of the law shows it was rigged from the start. We should be holding managers and whoever gave them the order criminally liable.

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