He Died Building a Ship for the U.S. Government. His Family Got Nothing | Hacker News Reader

He Died Building a Ship for the U.S. Government. His Family Got Nothing

propublica.org

21 pointshn_acker22 comments

The immigration status of the parties involved is just about the least relevant part of the story.

There are deeper forces tugging on the macroeconomic picture that that lead to the tragic chain of events being discussed here and I think the author and the intended audience of this piece ought to do some thinking about where all the other straws on the camel's back came from.

Actually, I think the fact that he entered the country illegally and then proceeded to commit multiple forms of fraud to get hired by an contractor for the US government is extremely relevant. There should probably be massive penalties put upon the subcontractor and the government should demand termination of their contract.

Probably some combination of plausible deniability/buddy buddy somewhere is going to stop that.

Its far more likely that there is no mechanism forcing the contract manager to care. The threat of law enforcement action is hazy, at best, and they know they can continue on scot-free.

Or the government for that matter, had the welder been a citizen this would have probably cost $500,000. Instead they walkway with $31,000 of profit.

It’s even more absurd. This could be pretty easily identified by allowing, or even requiring, instead of expressly forbidding(!!) employers from submitting the I9’s [https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9...] they already have to fill out to the gov’t.

Or having SS or the IRS follow up on obvious identity fraud when paying in taxes.

But then the gov’t wouldn’t get the taxes from the sweet grift they have running, where illegal workers end up paying taxes on programs they can never collect on, and get taxes withheld they can never get back.

Because you better believe the gov’t will go after them if they try to collect instead of just pay in.

Next of kin certainly isn’t going to get any SS death payout here, that is for sure.

What I don't get is why we don't have prison time associated with hiring illegal immigrants. Combine that with a ~100k bounty (that anyone can claim, including illegal immigrants themselves).

It makes it much more risky to hire someone who has incentives to tell the government about your illegal hiring of them.

Because it would put multiple US industries out of business, beside being absurdly punitive.

Yup. Toss a Big Ag CEO in prison for hiring illegally and watch the issue resolve itself the next day.

> "When Pérez’s partner sought death benefits from G-4 Services, the local staffing contractor that had hired him to work for Thoma-Sea, G-4 rebuffed her. “Pérez was a self-employed independent contractor and thus a claim for death benefits is not compensable..."

Brutal

All shipyard work needs to first be evaluated for safety by a dedicated safety engineer. It's the job of the safety engineer to evaluate risks and order steps to minimize if not eliminate them.

There also needs to be a Stop Work allowance that allows any employee to immediately order work to stop anywhere if a safety risk exists until the safety engineer can review the risk.

As for contract workers, they always get the short end of the stick. Ideally the shipyard work must be done by full-time union employees only. If management doesn't like it, they should use robots to automate.

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