> a fine of $3,500
Are you fucking kidding me? Sounds like it's worth the risk in case you don't get caught. Cost of doing business, baby!
Are you fucking kidding me? Sounds like it's worth the risk in case you don't get caught. Cost of doing business, baby!
Per the story, there were 8 technicians and some worked up to 122 hours a week. Let's assume they worked an average of 60 hours a week (extremely generous to the employer). Let's also assume that their work was minimally technically demanding, just requiring reasonable care to break down, transport and set up computers from one location to another; I think $15/hour would be a cheap wage for that sort of work in the Bay Area.
8 staff x $15/hour x 60 hrs/week (no overtime) x 14 weeks is still around $100,000, far more than what the firm has had to pay out. If one were to include all applicable taxes and follow laws on overtime etc., I guess a realistic bill for that amount of work would be double that amount. So far it has cost them maybe $50-60,000 including legal fees - a bargain >:-(
I think the "triviality" of paying the back wages and the "triviality" of the fine are directly related to each other. $40K / (7.25-1.21) = 662 underpaid hours [1], or put into probably an even better unit for comprehension, 16.5 man-weeks or 4.25 man-months.
This is bad, and in particularly bad in a very revealing way. However, it's not like this was a sweatshop employing hundreds for months without detection, which I suspect the mental model people are reading into this story. While I suspect 3.5K is a bit low, the millions upon millions that I suspect many people are emotionally calling for would also be inappropriate.
[1] Forgive me if I don't fully spell out the units here.
Now you're right that it's better than large sweatshops where hundreds of people may be underpaid. And it may well be that these employees were put up by the company and din't have to spend anything on rent or food, so while they were only being paid $100/week to work here they might have been coining it by Indian standards. But as I said above, even after the payout and fine the firm got a bargain! How much would you budget for 6600 hours of IT department grunt work?
Yes it was, it shreds my entire point, and add my pitchfork to the crowd. Whoops. Thanks for catching that. Can't delete or edit the message now, or I would.
Second, I hope you're wrong since a hearty income for the law firm would not benefit the underpaid employees, who I think still got a shitty deal even including the back wages.