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Don't you think there's also a place for law enforcement? In California many public works projects are delayed because inspectors regularly come to the work si

Don't you think there's also a place for law enforcement? In California many public works projects are delayed because inspectors regularly come to the work site, stop all work for the day, and interview the laborers on the site to make sure they are getting paid. This is disruptive and the only reason they need to do it is because when they find wage theft they don't really prosecute it. There are small fines and then everything continues. What the inspectors should do is give the contractors in question the figurative death penalty: permanently revoked contractor license, revocation of work orders, clawback of money already paid, jail time and serious fines for the individuals responsible. We for some reason have a high tolerance for white-collar crimes when we really should be prosecuting them vigorously.

knuththetruth 8y ago
Given the scale of wage-theft in the US, as documented by this study, your emphasis on a narrow and specific concern related to inspections seems disproportionate. I'm not saying this isn't a difficult burden for those who deal with the inspections, but in terms of priorities, huge numbers of people getting robbed by their employers would seem to deserve more attention?
wpietri 8y ago
I would love to see law enforcement take this more seriously. But we should be honest with ourselves that in this moment in America, government is much more responsive to the needs of the rich. One only need look at the newspaper to suspect that, but studies agree: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi... One of the fundamental problems with employer/employee relations is that employers usually have more workers than employees have jobs. Losing your job is worse than having an employee quit. This fundamental imbalance of power means that we'll always need ways to even things out if we want reasonably fair situations for employees. Labor laws and law enforcement can cover part of that. And we should certainly pursue it. But I think people should also pursue collective action, be that as formal as a union or as casual as Google's workers all pressuring their employers to stop doing military work. Resilient systems always have multiple ways to keep a problem from getting out of control.
- dmix 8y ago
  It's funny that people blame law enforcement's lack of interest or effort in white collar crime when for the last many decades the automatic response to every economic 'issue' or moral panic of the day has been to set up more and more agencies and more and more economic regulations. Courts and law enforcement has evolved to become the very last resort for dealing with these white collar issues. It's become the cultural automatic solution to everything in American (or should I say western) government systems. Every time something goes wrong we're always told the solution is more new agencies to be formed and more complex - slow changing - laws. And these agencies and law always have little mandate to prove efficacy and ROI. They get put in place and stay that way for years. What matters was 'something had to be done' at the time. So of course law enforcement hasn't been doing a good job at punishing what the rich do. Looking at law enforcement in isolation as the only solution of course is going to look like it's doing a poor job vs enforcing typical criminal laws, which tend to affect middle/lower class people far more. As income is the greatest indicator of standard criminal acts (drug crimes, theft, violence, etc). Wealthy people simply don't get involved in such crimes and are far more likely to be involved in white collar crime, which thousands of US agencies have been set up to punitively enforce. There may be serious issues in the justice system (in terms of sentencing, representation, law enforcement culture, etc) regarding the way the wealthy are treated in terms of standard criminal issues. But applying the same lense to white collar crime while ignoring the larger scope of regulatory frameworks and agency based intervention is to severely misunderstand the issue. These non-law enforcement agencies play a massive role in the US economy. Yes, the efficacy of always turning to agencies and regulatory frameworks can be honestly questioned and likely a source of many loopholes, but their pure effort and the subsequent costs they impose on the economic system in their efforts to stop this behaviour can't be downplayed... as if they aren't being pursued compared to 'blue collar' crime. Involving more of the courts and law enforcement to white collar crime could legitimately be a solution here and the lack of real punishment for these actions is a real problem IMO. I'm merely saying the results today are a side effect of how things are done, the automatic political solutions being put in place every time something goes wrong in business, not that things are good as they are.
bb88 8y ago
> We for some reason have a high tolerance for white-collar crimes when we really should be prosecuting them vigorously. It took a social movement for prosecutors to get a fucking backbone when it came to rape and sexual misconduct among the powerful. It should be a lot easier than that for prosecutors to charge white collar criminals. This is just paper
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"We for some reason have a high tolerance for white-collar crimes when we really should be prosecuting them vigorously." Agreed. But read The Chickenshit Club if you want to get some insight as to why we no longer do this.
namlem 8y ago
Agreed. We need to start jailing people for wage theft. The first offense should be a fine that is 5X the amount stolen, after that, prison time.

knuththetruth 8y ago

Given the scale of wage-theft in the US, as documented by this study, your emphasis on a narrow and specific concern related to inspections seems disproportionate. I'm not saying this isn't a difficult burden for those who deal with the inspections, but in terms of priorities, huge numbers of people getting robbed by their employers would seem to deserve more attention?

wpietri 8y ago

I would love to see law enforcement take this more seriously. But we should be honest with ourselves that in this moment in America, government is much more responsive to the needs of the rich. One only need look at the newspaper to suspect that, but studies agree: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi... One of the fundamental problems with employer/employee relations is that employers usually have more workers than employees have jobs. Losing your job is worse than having an employee quit. This fundamental imbalance of power means that we'll always need ways to even things out if we want reasonably fair situations for employees. Labor laws and law enforcement can cover part of that. And we should certainly pursue it. But I think people should also pursue collective action, be that as formal as a union or as casual as Google's workers all pressuring their employers to stop doing military work. Resilient systems always have multiple ways to keep a problem from getting out of control.

dmix 8y ago
It's funny that people blame law enforcement's lack of interest or effort in white collar crime when for the last many decades the automatic response to every economic 'issue' or moral panic of the day has been to set up more and more agencies and more and more economic regulations. Courts and law enforcement has evolved to become the very last resort for dealing with these white collar issues. It's become the cultural automatic solution to everything in American (or should I say western) government systems. Every time something goes wrong we're always told the solution is more new agencies to be formed and more complex - slow changing - laws. And these agencies and law always have little mandate to prove efficacy and ROI. They get put in place and stay that way for years. What matters was 'something had to be done' at the time. So of course law enforcement hasn't been doing a good job at punishing what the rich do. Looking at law enforcement in isolation as the only solution of course is going to look like it's doing a poor job vs enforcing typical criminal laws, which tend to affect middle/lower class people far more. As income is the greatest indicator of standard criminal acts (drug crimes, theft, violence, etc). Wealthy people simply don't get involved in such crimes and are far more likely to be involved in white collar crime, which thousands of US agencies have been set up to punitively enforce. There may be serious issues in the justice system (in terms of sentencing, representation, law enforcement culture, etc) regarding the way the wealthy are treated in terms of standard criminal issues. But applying the same lense to white collar crime while ignoring the larger scope of regulatory frameworks and agency based intervention is to severely misunderstand the issue. These non-law enforcement agencies play a massive role in the US economy. Yes, the efficacy of always turning to agencies and regulatory frameworks can be honestly questioned and likely a source of many loopholes, but their pure effort and the subsequent costs they impose on the economic system in their efforts to stop this behaviour can't be downplayed... as if they aren't being pursued compared to 'blue collar' crime. Involving more of the courts and law enforcement to white collar crime could legitimately be a solution here and the lack of real punishment for these actions is a real problem IMO. I'm merely saying the results today are a side effect of how things are done, the automatic political solutions being put in place every time something goes wrong in business, not that things are good as they are.

bb88 8y ago

> We for some reason have a high tolerance for white-collar crimes when we really should be prosecuting them vigorously. It took a social movement for prosecutors to get a fucking backbone when it came to rape and sexual misconduct among the powerful. It should be a lot easier than that for prosecutors to charge white collar criminals. This is just paper

s73v3r_ 8y ago

"We for some reason have a high tolerance for white-collar crimes when we really should be prosecuting them vigorously." Agreed. But read The Chickenshit Club if you want to get some insight as to why we no longer do this.

namlem 8y ago

Agreed. We need to start jailing people for wage theft. The first offense should be a fine that is 5X the amount stolen, after that, prison time.