throw93

> Apple employees..get to do some really meaningful and impactful work.

Meaningful and impactful in what way? They make phones, that’s it. They are not solving some big world issues. World won’t end if we don’t get phones with bigger screens and better cameras every year.

> Some would even argue that Apple (and other big tech companies are OVERpaying...)

No. None of the tech companies are overpaying, they are in fact underpaying. Employees get a tiny fraction of the profit they generate. They are not even paying the taxes they’re supposed to.

> It is also worth noting that bonuses are customarily paid when the business is doing better than projected, but Apple's revenues were down 5% in 2022.

Apple made $117.2 billion in profits in 2022. Surely they can pay their employees bonuses and better wages in general if they want to.

> Although I maintain there are going to be a lot more than 100 children illegally employed as cleaners in the US

The point is the minors working at a meat packing company are victims, it’s ridiculous to blame them regardless of whether they lied or not and in this case they didn’t. The real entity to blame is the company which allowed this to happen and got away with meager $1.5 million fine.

> I don't care if they are injuring 18 year olds or 13 year olds..That is an issue, but it is an issue that is unrelated to employing underage workers.

It is related because meat packing is a hazardous job and there are more chances of injury for a minor than an adult, regardless of the training. That’s the whole reason the law specifically has an age limit for this type of jobs.

I mean it’s clearly written here, there is no ambiguity. “Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors”

The real question is why so much trust in a company which has clear motive to ignore these red flags for the sake of profit.

The agency had enough information to prosecute and fine the company. I would rather trust a govt agency than a for profit company whose only motivation is earn profit by any means necessary.

The age of the kids was in their system. So the children did not lie about their age. It’s weird to defend the company that knowingly illegally employs kids in hazardous job and instead doubt the govt agency that brings this problem to light.

> The children in question are already violating local labour laws;

No they aren’t. Their age was in company’s system and company ignored it. Also they are “children”. You expect a 13 year old on ideal behavior while grown adults at the company were knowingly breaking the law?

> I'd be happy to claim 10 years of Kubernetes experience if I thought it would give me an advantage in the job market, no question

1. Software development is not a hazardous job, 2. You’re an adult.

This story is not about fake identity. Company knew they were minors and ignored it.

Excerpt from story: “Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags.”

> Presumably the children in question lied about their age when they signed up.

That’s not true though. The company knew exactly what they were doing and still they went ahead and doubled down on it.

Excerpt from article: “Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags. When the Wage and Hour Division arrived with warrants, the adults – who had recruited, hired and supervised these children – tried to derail our efforts to investigate their employment practices,” said Wage and Hour Regional Administrator Michael Lazzeri in Chicago.

> There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs.

How is this related to the story? The story is about companies using children as workers in hazardous job. It’s illegal regardless of their documentation status. Iowa has proposed bill to to legalize exactly this. This is happening because companies don’t want to pay fair wage.

Meanwhile Iowa proposes bill to do exactly this. https://www.weareiowa.com/amp/article/money/business/sf-167-...

“the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee(102)”

The title of the referenced article itself should be good enough "Apple and Foxconn win permission for 12-hour shifts and night shifts for women at iPhone production in India". The original poster omitted the words "and night shifts" for some reason.

It’s always race to the bottom for workers when multiple states are fighting for iPhone factory. They drop the labor protections, drop minimum wages($2-3 per day), increase working hours. It’s just a win for Apple and nobody else(maybe politicians). All this for a bigger screen to watch TikTok on. What a sad time we live in.

The HN headline is incorrect. It’s not “12 hour shift for women”. It’s “12 hour shifts AND night shifts for women”. Night shift were not allowed earlier most likely because of safety reasons considering India’s not so great women safety record. Not saying it’s justified but that was the reason most likely.

Lawyers definitely cost companies less than paying victims, that's why they have them in first place. You can refer to DuPont lawsuits for this.

As regards to the accurate number I don't have any, but it should definitely not be this low.

The penalty definitely needs to be steeper. Companies this big see $1.5 million penalty as just “business costs”. It doesn’t act as a deterrent. I think it should be steep enough for GoodRx and other companies to think 10 times before doing this kind of shady stuff.

As with class action suites, big companies have armies of lawyers to fight such cases for ages and ultimately the victims tend to settle for less because they can’t afford to fight forever.

FTC was created to protect consumers though "strong and effective law enforcement"(their mission statement). This FTC action is not "strong" enough, it's just a slap on the wrist.

> If you also give them the ability to issue punishments then what prevents them from using that power to sabotage (or threaten to sabotage) well behaved companies to line their own pockets?

"Own pockets" - FTC is not a for profit company. GoodRx is a for profit company. Companies have more to gain by acting in bad faith than FTC. So I would trust FTC any given day over a for profit company.

> GoodRx hasn’t turned a profit since 2019

This doesn't necessarily mean company is in bad shape. This happens when company is investing in growth at the cost of profit margins during it's initial years. If they can shell out half million dollars on lobbying then $1.5 million is indeed a pocket change for them.

I want FTC to put fear of god in bad actors like GoodRx. $1.5 million is pocket change for a company with $765 million annual revenue. They've spent $400k just on lobbying. This isn't gonna change anything.

This is awesome. I hope people realize this came out of public funding and not made by a corp. Although eventually some corp will make a minor tweak to this and copyright the hell out of it. Really excited to see this in a car soon!

Wow, this is eerily similar to what happened in India during second wave of COVID. Tweets complaining about oxygen shortage or handling of Covid in general were restricted in India.

It’s just weird why some governments do that. Playing down the crisis just delays the recovery efforts.

Source - 1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp 2) https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pande...

I will rather trust the democratically elected union leaders who are also my co-workers than the management. I don't really know what else to say at this point. It's just weird taking side of the management.

>> If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete.

Yes definitely they will.."today". Companies don't need to do anything special if supply overtakes demand. We feel we are special today only because IT is still relatively a new field and the demand still outweighs supply.

But the rate at which universities across the world are churning out CS grads and the increasing focus on automation, supply will definitely overtake demand. And when that happens we will end up in the same predicament as other professions. At that point, companies don't have to cave in to the demands from their employees or the people they want to hire.

Again, which entity forces the employer to write these terms in the offer letter in the first place? Govt or courts can't. If you as the person interviewing asks for these terms, employer can just say no and move on to next person in queue.

In other countries the notice periods are written in law. But then again, do we really want to wait(& trust) for the govt which is heavily lobbied by FAANG to legislate this? Isn't it more efficient to organize and demand your terms from the employer.

Who will enforce that? The policies are made by companies themselves and they can change them whenever/however they want with no employee welfare in mind. We as individual employees don't have any power influencing or enforcing those policies.

The idea behind organized workforce is to balance the power dynamic between employer and employees. It's harder for employer to ignore the demands of an organized workforce than individual employees.

>>But is that the end goal? for the union to have power? sometimes it does seem like that is in fact the goal.

The end goal is to balance the power dynamic between capital owners and the labor. As of today especially in US, the labor has little to none bargaining power and capital owners have infinite power to even influence govt.

The only reason we had relatively higher salaries than other fields "till now" is because of lower supply/demand ratio and it's still a relatively new profession than others. This ratio will eventually balance out and when it happens we will be left with no bargaining power.

>> I work in the tech industry, I never worried for one second that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk gets paid more than me.

We're definitely not getting our fair share of the value we produce and that's just theft to me.

Organizations are nothing without labor. The 500k salaries are a but small percent of revenue the labor is generating. These companies are sitting on the largest ungodly amount of cash piles ever seen in history of mankind and that should be cause of huge concern.

These so called tech icons were at the right place at right time and nothing else. I refuse to believe that these individuals are somehow 200x smarter or deserve 200x more than the people who are working for them. The reason they have intergenerational wealth while you & I still have to worry about mortgage is because our f'd-up system allows these "titans" to steal the profit we the workers generate.

It's not a bad thing to generate useful products to improve society but it's definitely a bad thing when labor doesn't get their share.

This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power.

You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours. The cost of those amenities are a fraction of profits these workers make for the company.

You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. "Our profits dipped 5% this year? well too bad you gotta go even if you worked 20 years for this company".

Also don't be under any illusion that the golden era of a high paid dev job is going to last forever. As the supply for skilled tech increases and the automation evolves, the average tech workers are going to be as expendable as any other profession, they already are in fact. In fact the sole reasons these companies promote "teach your kids to code" is not because they care about our kids development, but it's because they want a steady supply of tech workers in future at low cost. The more tech workers there are, the less they have to pay.

In the end, the fact that these companies are making ungodly amounts of profits should be seen as a huge red alert. This is nothing but exploitation of labor no matter which field you are working on. Exploitation doesn't have to be working in poor conditions. If a worker is getting paid only a fraction of value they are producing then it qualifies as exploitation and should be looked with scrutiny.

I hope this teaches everyone a lesson that all these glorified CEOs can be as dumb as rocks. Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk, Nadella have proven this in last few months. We need to stop glorifying these people as demigods. Their only job is to exploit workers as much as they legally can to produce maximum value for shareholders. The people who actually create this value are the ones who always get the short end of the stick. Meritocracy is such a lie, I’m sick of it.

CEOs have an army of people at their disposal to do the said “PR talent” stuff. They absolutely do not deserve what they get and they are not tech gods as media paints them to be. I’m sick of media defending CEOs instead common workers.

Just a guess, that's all this is. Year 2022 has taught us that even the most worshipped CEOs are not necessarily as smart as people like to think. Zuckerberg thought Metaverse was a great idea, Musk thought buying twitter would be great and we already know what happened to Sam Fried. We need to stop worshipping CEOs like they are gods. They exist just to maximize company's bottomline and minimize workers pay.

Genuine question - What problem is it solving exactly?