
How Employers Get Out of Paying Their Workers - nols
http://priceonomics.com/how-employers-get-out-of-paying-their-workers/
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stegosaurus
Wage theft is quite a vitriolic term (and so might only be reasonably
applicable to actual breach of contract), but I think I can reasonably make
the claim that this is essentially a thing that happens to all workers. A
lucky few upper middle class folks might be outside of this.

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.

~~~
icebraining
Except for people on minimum wage, I don't agree that those really count as
wage theft.

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.

~~~
chrismcb
Of course they should get paid for locking the doors, minimum wage or not. You
claim hourly salary would drop, but at places that pay people correctly, it
doesn't. Say a store is open from 10 am to 10pm. You hire one person to work 8
hours in the middle of the day. They come in say at noon, work 8 hours and
leave at 8. Someone else comes in at 2 and works till closing, say 10:30. They
do an extra half hour to clean up and lock up, so they should get paid less?

~~~
icebraining
I suppose in a shop where workers have a fixed schedule (e.g. noon to 8pm, 2pm
to 10pm) that might happen, but the vast majority of retail jobs aren't like
that.

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.

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snarfy
This is how employees get free stuff. The only thing that stopped them before
was morality. When employers steal their tips, don't pay them, etc it makes
stealing so much more justified to the employee.

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pascal1usa
They left out the most egregious form of wage theft: taxes! Taxes (often
called income taxes) steal wages from the hard working middle class on scale
orders of magnitude larger!

~~~
jacquesm
How are those roads you're driving on? Did you go to school? What about the
police force, did they ever do anything useful for you?

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.

~~~
monort
Do you mean anyone stealing money from you and then using some percent of them
to provide services for you is not a thief? This explanation do not explain
why non-government entity doing the same thing is still a thief.

~~~
Squarel
That is neither what the poster meant, nor what they said.

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.

~~~
schreiaj
Not the other poster, but I am always bothered by the fact that, because I
live in NH and work in MA, I have to pay MA state income tax. Now, because I
DO use the roads there, and in the case of an emergency in that state I'd make
use of the emergency responders I'm not completely opposed to paying any taxes
to them. But to be taxed at the same rate as a resident does bother me. I
cannot make use of public schools nor do I count as a resident for the
purposes for in state tuition for MA's state universities. I wouldn't count
this as "stealing" but I could definitely see how it would feel like that.

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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Work from home in NH, and have your employer pay you there through an HR firm
like Trinet.

