How Employers Get Out of Paying Their Workers
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Examples:
Downtown minimum wage job. Impossible to afford downtown rent, resulting in a non-optional hour long unpaid commute.
Business travel staying overnight. Direct expenses dealt with, but no compensation for the hours spent away from family stuck in front of a hotel TV.
Retail job. Shift ends at store closing time. Shuffling off the last customer and closing and locking up ends possibly 20 minutes later.
I could go on. Most people I know basically think this stuff is 'normal' and that you are just being lazy or finicky if you refuse to do so (maybe you 'deserve' to lose your job).
This is basically what poverty is here... an extreme lack of time and state of stress or tiredness cauaed by ridiculous employment. Many minwage workers would genuinely be better off camping under bridges and reading books, if they didn't have families and social connections.
The bottom end of the labour scale really is a horrible place to be at. I think that wealthy right wing folk don't often really understand it in the correct way. I think the idea these people have is that the poor have, or at least have the option of, a life that is just like being rich but with less fun stuff. e.g. a bike instead of a car, a flat instead of a house, and so on.
The reality is that there exists a qualitative difference between being working and middle class in the sense that you are spending most of your mental cycles just trying to make ends meet at all.
Minimum wage works because it improves some workers' negotiation positions so that they can capture more of their job's economic surplus -- likewise, somebody sprung with surprise business travel, or surprise retail job responsibilities, is in a poor position to negotiate just compensation for this change in situation. So the presence of some sort of weakness of negotiation position might be what characterizes your generalized notion of wage theft. The minimum wage example is distinct from the others though because it doesn't spring any surprises on the employee.
It makes much more sense to simply reason about what is morally correct (assuming we accept capitalism and the idea that employers deserve to dictate to employees to some degree).
In the full blown Marxist world view any appropriation of surplus value is essentially 'wage theft'. Of course, if that were completely returned to workers, there would be no point in bothering with employees.
Instead, we can consider that if a worker has a wage low enough that their quality of life is really bad (e.g. complete inability to build capital as 100% of wage goes on absolute essentials), if there exists any more surplus value with which they could be paid more, it is reasonable for the employer to do so and unreasonable for them not to.
Is it 'theft' not to? Well... no. In the same way that my landlord doesn't 'steal' my labour by exploiting the fact that buying property is difficult. It's still not great though.
> if there exists any more surplus value with which they could be paid more, it is reasonable for the employer to do so and unreasonable for them not to.
The one problem in practice with this is that typically, in a retail setting, employers are in a race to the bottom, and those that don't squeeze their workers get beaten in the market by those that do. It's really the evil customers capturing everything.
Of course, in the technology industry it's par for the course -- it's basically how the patent system and certain aspects of immigration law are designed.
That's great, if the job has enough economic benefit to the employer to cover minimum wage. Once upon a time, it was common for early teens to get their feet wet in the job market by e.g. sweeping a gas station parking lot or washing windows. These were activities that provided some marginal value to the employer, but not enough to cover the current minimum wage. Those jobs don't exist any more.
Instead, kids have to convince an employer that they can provide a much larger return, but with no work history. They also have no way to gradually "ramp up" into the work force. My older kids struggled to get started in the workforce as a result.
Sure they do. My first few jobs were paid under the table for less than minimum wage in the late 90's. Those businesses are still around and still employing youngsters at that age. They keep it quiet because it's illegal; you have to know someone.
At those first jobs, I received secretarial and retail training and experience. This didn't help me at all when I applied to actual paid positions at retail stores. Nobody gave a damn about my retail experience when I was interviewing because they see it as "unskilled labor". They can hire anybody off the street and teach them to use a register. It also didn't matter when transitioning to programming since they didn't care about anything other than if I could program.
I struggled just as much as your kids did at getting started in the workforce. There's a huge gap between skilled and unskilled labor. The unskilled labor positions are also few and far between. There are too many applicants and not enough positions. For skilled labor, there's a huge gap between what you're taught in college and what's valuable to an employer, but that's another conversation.
The average 35, yr old min wage employee isn't impressed that her wage is governed by a law intended to apply to a mythical teen that could be doing her job.
Say you forced employers to account for the time closing and locking the store or to compensate people for spending hours away from their family. What would happen is that the hourly salary would drop to account for that, since in reality the workers are already taking those into account (as you say, they already consider it normal - and therefore expect it) when they accept the job.
Except for minimum wage workers, they are just examples where the actual contract is an informal agreement, and not the piece of paper that was signed.
According to surveys, besides personal experience, something like 80%+ of retail jobs have at least shifts, if not full on-demand schedules, so there's no set of workers that always close the shop and others that don't - they all do, some of the days.
The minimum wage on the other hand is meant to make someone able to feed themselves and maybe even a family. Especially when holding multiple jobs, such unpaid overtime, even just opening/closing a shop can cut into that ability in a serious manner.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-rul...
Also I'm not sure how a meeting for work could be considered non-work, it is again time out of your life that you are doing a task to meet the needs of the company, thus you should be paid for it.
If your company does client work, but doesn't bill meetings to the client, that's their prerogative, but I as an employee should by contract be paid for the work I am doing for my employer. If it's in my contract that I should do meetings without being paid, then I'm probably an idiot for signing that contract.
For salaried work, I don't think it should matter if you show up anytime within 1 hour of the start of business so long as no one is relying on you to be there (e.g. for a meeting or to work hand-in-hand with you).
There are lots of things associated with a job that people have to do besides the work itself. I shower in the morning. I get dressed. I commute to work. Those aren't compensated.
It's even part of our culture to take pride in doing bad (immoral) things because it's within the law but is for some supposedly greater good. A particular example of that would be quite a lot of episodes of Law & Order.
"But people may purposely do things to slow down the pre-task and make money doing their non-task."
Then fire them for being laggards or figure out what is wrong with your process.
In 1802, SCOTUS would rule 9-0 in favor of slavery, because the law was clear. SCOTUS fixes incoherent law, not morally wrong law.
The Portal-to-Portal Act was in response to miners suing for back pay the time they spent moving between mines (after Congress enacted laws that made that seem like a winnable case). It was understood and customary that the time was to be unpaid (thus presumably their wages already took that into account).
The relevant portions of the Portal-to-Portal Act (as quoted by the court) are:
(a) Except as provided in subsection (b) [which covers work compensable by
contract or custom], no employer shall be subject to any liability or
punishment under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended, ... on
account of the failure of such employer ... to pay an employee overtime
compensation, for or on account of any of the following activities of such
employee engaged in on or after the date of the enactment of this Act—
(1) walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of
performance of the principal activity or activities which such
employee is employed to perform, and
(2) activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said
principal activity or activities, “which occur either prior to the
time on any particular workday at which such employee commences, or
subsequent to the time on any particular workday at which he ceases,
such principal activity or activities.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context...
Also, I know this is anecdotal, but when I worked retail/fast food in HS/college, we were always paid up until we were done work. If the store closed at 9 and we couldn't leave until 10 because of customers and cleanup, we got paid until 10. I would have thought it bizarre if they did anything different - I'm sure it happens, but it didn't where I worked (a few national/international chains). This could of course cause some perverse incentives with closing up slowly, but there are other ways to deal with that, the simplest of which being to just fire people who are intentionally working slowly.
If you don't want to pay someone for 4 hours of commute per day, maybe dedicate some time to locating a closer place for them to live and paying for a move. Like you said: there are other ways to deal with it.
If employers should not pay for events out of their control then employees should not work if it exists out of their control (e.g. shift work).
In this case though the premise is wrong. Take a McDonalds restaurant in central London. Their workers have to commute. The store knows this. The workers don't choose it out of some sort of work life balance decision - it is impossible to rent downtown on minimum wage (as in, literally the rent is greater than 13K GBP a year).
25 years ago at the food store, it was explained to me that the owners liability insurance only covered employees on the clock, and customers while the store was open as per posted hours. He would "generously" allow us to walk thru the store uninsured on the way to the exit door, but we'd be fired if we were caught working off the clock uninsured as he had no financial interest in losing the store to someone with a foot run over by a pallet jack or something.
Obviously employers no longer have liability insurance issues like this or they'd be insane to have people working off the clock. If you want to get rid of slavery, make it too expensive by reversing whatever insurance regulation changed sometime in the last 25 years. Could also play an OSHA game where any accident of any sort not matter the facts is automatically guilty if the employee is off the clock under some doctrine of them being a member of the general public not an employee. Either way your best bet is not a morals or ethics argument (businessmen if anything tend to oppose them in general because usually the people making them are usually trying to screw them) but change the game rules to make it a simple financial argument.
For that matter, the kind of shenanigans employers pull with on/off time and wage theft mostly happen on the books. Even employees don't necessarily know if and how they are cheated on at any particular point in time.
This is the part that really gets my goat about being an employee in this culture. My coworkers, by and large, have this idea that if they are not almost wholly devoted to our employer, then they "must be" morally bad people. Like someone who works on the same team as me got an e-mail from our boss on a day that is weekend for us (we work shifts that don't line up the normal weekend days) saying "So-and-so gave you the information for Project X and says you should be able to run with it; how soon can you get started?" He interpreted that e-mail to mean "better get started immediately, even though it is my day off" versus replying to our boss with "I will begin on [day I return to the office]."
All of my coworkers are employed in high-five-figures to mid-six-figure IT jobs for a large company. Most of us work defined shifts and, thus, we always have someone working in the hours before our shifts start and after our shifts end. We, in all seriousness, have the absolute best work-life balance anywhere in IT, but there is still the expectation and belief that putting in anything less than 15% over means one is a slacker and deserves to get cut.
I work odd hours and have been at this long enough that I'm done with it. My employer pays for a certain number of hours from my life. Barring a one-off or rare crunch emergency--which, truthfully, does not happen very often--I am working the hours they buy from me and no more. I'm tired of feeling like I owe my employer above-and-beyond extra because I get to have a life without having to perpetually compete with the hordes of nothing-but-work-matters folks.
You had me up 'til there, but this isn't a left-right issue at all, wealthy champagne socialists trample the workers as gleefully as any capitalist running-dog. The only difference is they tell the workers it's actually for their own good.
You exist in a place you have no control over, far away from family, with dramatically curtailed freedom over activities you can perform. It doesn't matter whether you are 'labouring'. You wouldn't be there otherwise. Doing that for free is selling yourself short.
At best, "wage theft" could be considered "wage fraud", with a slightly better connotation (if at all).
We're not really talking about middle-class workers who think their boss is a douche.
In most countries you'd have free access to medical assistance as well and quite possibly a state pension when you're over 65 as well as if you become disabled or simply out of work.
Taxes are not always spent efficiently which is a real problem and plenty of times they are used to be spent on things we don't actually need but on the whole you can't really argue that all taxes are theft.
Genuinely interested, as where I live the only tax taken from our wages is federal tax.
The poster did not state that taxes are theft, nor that they are stolen from you. Stealing is taking without the right to take, or the permission of the individual.
Whilst you may not like paying taxes or agree with them, I am fairly sure the government has the right to take them.
I'm also bothered by the fact that I am taxed by a legislature that I cannot vote on and I'd question their right to tax me without representation.
Imagine you are in a bar with friends, and they agreed, that you should pay the bill. Can they collect your money by force? Clearly the answer is no.
To your example, specifically, if you and your friends had an explicit system of law governing your night on the town, then yes, they could agree that you should pay the bill and collect the money by force.
In modern states, you don't have a lot of choices either. But at least, even though you are "forced" into a society, you eventually get the right to participate politically.