'It has gotten out of hand': wage theft rampant in US construction
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I worked on the construction of 399 Franklin St building in Houston TX [1] when I was 12 years old.
My father was the architect and he couldn’t afford daycare so he gave me his old hard hat and the foreman assigned me to someone to work with as an apprentice each week.
I did everything from tie rebar to anchoring studs.
There wasn’t a person on that crew that wasn’t being underpaid or hustled out of some wage by the owner. In fact that same owner failed to pay my dad (common story) fully before he went “bankrupt” and sold the property.
So yeah hi everyone welcome to how the rest of the world has lived forever.
The city could just monitor the outflows of the site's wallet and make sure that the employees would being paid regularly.
The IRS could monitor outflows of the site's bank account and make sure that the employees are being paid regularly.
Wouldn't be an issue with enforcement of the law.
Employees could monitor their own bank account to ensure they're getting paid properly. If not, they can report it to the labor board who will enforce the already existing laws.
This is not a technological problem. Quit trying to make things even worse by shoving cryptographic woo woo into social and legal problems and insisting it will somehow magically solve everything. This is a social, legal, and political problem. Technology will not solve it. Technology hasn't solved it in the last century, it's not going to solve it now that the math is fancy.
IRS currently does monitor the outflows probably through 1099s but I guess there's probably also W2s. But the IRS only cares about it annually where presumable the employees care bi/weekly.
> Employees could monitor their own bank account to ensure they're getting paid properly. If not, they can report it to the labor board who will enforce the already existing laws.
If this was the case then the city wouldn't need to send inspectors. I would bet many of the laborers don't have a proper social security number and so won't report it on their own but will to somebody already in their face.
> This is not a technological problem.
Neither is eating but better technology has certainly reduced famine. If on a forum self labeled as "Hacker News" you don't understand that you can use technology to assist with solving problems I haven't much hope for you.
Your original claim was that auditing of bank accounts would solve the problem. Since you've admitted that we already have auditing mechanisms in place, what does cryptocurrency add?
Maybe take a second to consider why the problem exists, what the current mitigations are, and why those mitigations don't work. Then reflect on what your solution does differently than everything else we've tried over the last hundred or so years.
> Neither is eating but better technology has certainly reduced famine.
Agriculture is a technology. Growing food at industrial scales is a technological problem. Without cheap synthesis of fertilizer, absolutely no amount of manpower, social movements, or laws can produce food at these scales. It is purely a technological issue. Distributing that food to the world is a social problem that technology has not solved in the last century.
> If on a forum self labeled as "Hacker News" you don't understand that you can use technology to assist with solving problems I haven't much hope for you.
People usually resort to condescension when they know they don't have an intelligent argument to make but still want to feel superior. How's that going for you?
By changing the amount of effort required to enforce it. How long would it take to poll every worker how many hours they worked, their wage, and how much they were paid (a day per site?) ? How long would it take a computer program to monitor the outflow of a wallet (milliseconds?) ?
Laws not being enforced comes down to mostly two reasons. Will and Practicality. Surely not everybody in the city is corrupt and wants the laborers to be underpaid. So if you make it more practical for them to figure out who is underpaying then they can enforce it better.
> Your original claim was that auditing of bank accounts would solve the problem. Since you've admitted that we already have auditing mechanisms in place, what does cryptocurrency add?
That was not my initial claim; that was calamari4065 (you) and I disagreed with them that auditing the bank account worked.
Specifically a public ledger (bitcoin) means anybody can audit and for whatever reason. The IRS cares if you paid your taxes to the government not if you paid your employees legally.
> Agriculture is a technology. Growing food at industrial scales is a technological problem.
I can play this game too. Bitcoin is a technology. Paying people at industrial scales is a technological problem.
> How's that going for you?
Better than expected. I thought surely a pro-bitcoin comment would get a negative 10.
Faster discovery doesn't change the resolution. Random citizens cannot do anything even if they could see it. An employee can already post publicly, shout to the rooftops. Plenty do.
Technology can't fix this problem because it is fundamentally not technological in nature. We do not lack the technology to process payments at scale. We've been operating a global economy for a few years now. That is indeed a technological problem, but not the one we're talking about.
Wage theft is fundamentally a breach of contract. Your employer has entered a contract wherein they are legally required to pay you some explicit amount within some explicit timeframe. The problem is not that the transaction can't be processed or audited. The problem is that a person chose to never initiate the transaction, or they paid less than they agreed on. This is a legal problem which requires legal action to correct.
No matter how the evidence is collected, you still have to go through the legal process. The resolution is still retroactive and the employee is made whole for all missing wages present and past. You still have to pull bank records and have an auditor look at them. It really does not matter in the slightest if it takes milliseconds or days to pull the records. The legal process takes weeks or months and the employee is made whole for the same amount either way.
I'm not saying you're wrong because I don't like cryptocurrency, I'm saying you're wrong because you're proposing a technological solution to a problem that fundamentally cannot be fixed with technology. Your solution simply does not address the problem at hand.
The only actually relevant point you've made so far is that a public ledger would make audits easier. And sure, why not. Totally valid point. Also totally irrelevant. The outcome is precisely the same no matter what. The employee gets the same settlement either way. The legal process is still the same. The incentives for governments to investigate are still the same. The social and political issues driving lack of enforcement still exist. A public ledger just doesn't change any of that.
Cryptocurrency might solve some problems, I don't really know or care. But it definitely won't solve this problem. No technology will.
A lot of people I've met who have had this happen know it's not legal, but they also know the odds of anything happening except them getting fired are slim to none, and even if it does, it'd be years before anything ameliorated that. And these people cannot afford to go that long without a job.
So the risk/reward is completely broken for people to report anyone, even if they know their rights, because pragmatically, they absolutely cannot afford the risk.
It might be a relatively cost-effective thing, depending on how many reports they have on a backlog to investigate, to just say the gov't will pay your income if you get fired in between reporting wage theft and them resolving the case either way, for people making below $SOME_NUMBER - a lot of wage theft happens for people who make relatively little, and/or are in contracting positions where you're not getting benefits, so as gov't funding numbers go, paying whatever percentage of people come to you and report "THIS IS HORRIBLE AND I GOT FIRED FOR TELLING YOU :C", if you put a ceiling on how much you can be paying per person, is probably cheaper than the time to carefully triage who to pay, while also severely mitigating the risk for the most vulnerable people reporting...and if you implemented useful amounts of damages for people who get caught doing this, and do enough enforcement, you can probably recoup the cost.
(It doesn't help at higher-paid roles, or if blackballing happens in an industry, but that's a more complex problem to try and mitigate...)
You can't make the people wait on you paying them until after the resolution, or they have the same insecurity.
But you can't pay everyone that much in damages upfront, probably.
So you may give them a larger payout later, but a fixed payout now so they don't think it's purely a lottery roll, but then what happens if the case is over and you said no _and_ they're blackballed? Do you use them being unhireable elsewhere as evidence of it? And then, if they switch industries because it's more reliable to get a job in another industry, does that serve as evidence they're not blackballed and you should stop paying them?
So you'd probably want to make it some nontrivial percentage tied to the company's pre-tax+expenses income, but then you'd need to worry about them playing games with where the money goes, and also the gov't incentive to then seize huge piles of money.
The tempting answer feels like "kill the company" amounts of money, but in a lot of cases, putting the entire company out of work would be extremely disruptive to the region, and then you'd have other workers resenting anyone who reported it.
‘I have not seen one cent’: billions stolen in wage theft from US workers
In my opinion, a manager or employer who threaten a worker should face the same consequences as a robber. In most countries it's prison.
https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-...