7 ms·

I worked for a restaurant that did this to me. To make sure I hit the "minimum hours" (when you start talking about hours vs tasks or responsibilities you proba

I worked for a restaurant that did this to me. To make sure I hit the "minimum hours" (when you start talking about hours vs tasks or responsibilities you probably aren't getting into a legitimate salary arrangement) they would have me clock in and out, and I'd get pay stubs with 40 hours (less if I worked less) and the overtime hours paid at $0. They withheld my last paycheck when I quit and stopped responding to my calls so I had to file with the PA labor board, I sent in those paystubs and answered questions about the role and what I did there. Couple weeks later they send me a check for 20 grand out of the blue, the business had to pay back overtime becuase I was misclassifed. I was just looking for the $300 or so they owed me, was really surprised with the outcome.

pxue 4y ago
As a small government advocate, i have no issue with labor boards. the alternative is violence or unionization, neither of which are optimal in resolving disputes like these in a civilized and efficient manner.
- hourago 4y ago
  > the alternative is violence or unionization, neither of which are optimal in resolving disputes like these in a civilized and efficient manner. Unionization is a great way of solving disputes. Many big corporations need to be counter-weight with some other big organization. To put violence and unions at the same level seems uncalled for.
  - Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
    > Many big corporations need to be counter-weight with some other big organization. Such as labor boards, or rather the government that gives them power.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    A lot of unions directly block solving disputes, choosing instead to deny all disputes. I know one union that was perfectly happy letting government workers make sox figures while "working" from home, while they produced objectively zero work over a period of months. These were the type of workers that would keep government equipment after retiring, quitting, or rarely being fired, requiring the government to send officers to collect. Any movement towards trying to get the workers to do literally anything or simply rating them low was met with vehement pushback. Like a union representative storming into you're office and yelling. In this case, the union was a giant ball of mud whose only existence was to hold the government hostage. As much as I dislike Thune power corporations can hold, unions are not a fix all and can become the same overlords.
    - hourago 4y ago
      > I know one union that was perfectly happy letting government workers make sox figures while "working" from home, while they produced objectively zero work over a period of months. "Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles" is fraud. If you do not like unions because ONE did something that you do not like , how much do you hate companies were you have thousands of examples of bad behavior? > As much as I dislike Thune power corporations can hold, unions are not a fix all and can become the same overlords. I do not know what concept do you have about unions, but it seems come from anti-union propaganda and not from any reasonable definition of what a union is. Unions gave us the eight hour work week, vacations and many more rights. That is not "overlord" behavior but being able to negotiate with powerful corporations.
      - wobbly_bush 4y ago
        >If you do not like unions because ONE did something that you do not like Not the person you are replying to, but I think discounting the behavior of unions as one-off is not helping. The examples I have are from outside US though - there are entire states where union presence is strong. Those states had a good industrial sector but over several decades the unions made it so problematic for the industries there that majority of businesses moved to states where there were no unions. Public calls for "strikes" and other work-stopping behavior and violence is common occurence in those states. So the risk of a union becoming mafia-like is more than just propaganda - it has plenty of examples worldwide in several countries.
      - JamesBarney 4y ago
        On hackernews most of the complaints I see about unions are people who've had direct experience with unions. My experience with unions was they were shady, jobs were given out based on nepotism, work was given out solely based on seniority and most work you did for them involved kickbacks.
        drewcoo 4y ago
        We must read different HNs. Most of the what I see is anti-union FUD from people raised on horror stories about unions but without any actual contact with them except for possibly being inconvenienced by someone else's strike.
  - HEmanZ 4y ago
    Unionization can have serious problems/risks. I this case, where the business is literally breaking the law, there is no need to get a union involved. Wage theft is illegal. It should be treated as a legal issue where the state gets involved and uses its monopoly on force to enforce the law. That's what the state is there for. [Aside, putting violence at the same level as unions: I've been around a union, while working in a factory in the midwest US, that had "kneebreakers" that "encouraged" members to vote a certain way by threat-of-force, support certain candidates for union leadership, and used the Union to blatantly extort local businesses and politicians. Not every union is like this, but blue-collar unions in the US have a history of going this way. Which, even tho I like unionization in theory and cheer a bit inside when I see union action at e.g Starbucks or Amazon, I have seen a very terrible union and so they scare me.]
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      Labor laws didn't happen because of noble-minded politicians or kind-hearted captains of industry.
    - 93po 4y ago
      Wage theft is overwhelmingly not enforced, and it's the largest form of theft in the country. Until this is not the case, unions are the best option.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - WesternWind 4y ago
    Folks with union jobs tend do better then their same industry non union counterparts, in terms of wages, health care, access to sick days, etc. There is however a third choice, which is government regulation. Unfortunately government regulations can't adapt as quickly as a union can to changes. Maybe the relatively inflexibility of regulation is what is needed to maintain a minimum necessary commitment to living wages and reasonable benefits though.
    - fooker 4y ago
      > Folks with union jobs tend do better Just like planes which survived battles only had bullet marks on their wings.
- pupperino 4y ago
  What really matters is how human institutions and organizations shape each other's incentives and costs [1]. Instead of aiming for abstract, intangible goals like "small" or "big" government, how about developing a sense of institutional design and relating that to a set of moral and political values. That way, it's actually possible to debug disagreements, either reducing them down to moral values and hopefully leaving it out of the public sphere or locating actual policy questions with less room for aesthetics and more for evidence, studies and sensible debate. [1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10481/w10481.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10481/w104...
- fHr 4y ago
  Unionization is amazing. I do not know why especially people in US are so against this. Did they just gave up and are okay with the big corps fucking them over withouth having any leverage?
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    more than a hundred years ago, the USA was not a large world power.. more than half the country was frontier and a lot of raw agriculture that is dependent on labor. When the 'red' social flames burned through Europe at the end of the Great Monarchies, political people here in the USA were seriously worried. So an ugly deal was forged.. the hardcore lefts were jailed and harassed and beaten.. and insider right wing groups that knew how to play for the long term were elevated to power. This is not popular to say, but the history is there for the reading, about ethnic gangsters running unions across the USA. It never was completely cleared up and persisted well into the 1970s and perhaps later.. The public relations campaign by Big Media was very effective at smearing the name of Unions to the public, and the Unions made some dumb moves, too. High tech and Hollywood generated huge money, and Wall Street style money was always anti-Union. It is worth saying that Hollywood movie production is very heavily unionized, and that small system works pretty well.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      Another interpretation is that the New Deal institutionalized labor. Labor got a seat at the table in exchange for removing radical elements.
      - mistrial9 4y ago
        new movie out -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    I do not know why especially people in US are so against this. I think there's some truth to the old adage that there's a class of Americans, especially represented among the HN crowd that "see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." There are many reasons for the decline of organized labor in the US. Some cultural yeah, but just as much, if not more, legal... "Right to work" legislation Employers fighting harder against unionization Decreased enforcement of labor laws Judges (including SCOTUS) who keep striking down labor protections Media portrayal of unions
- realslimjd 4y ago
  What do unions have to do with small government? A union contract is an agreement between two private parties.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pxue 4y ago
    Nothing. Small government is relating to government run labor boards.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    But it’s not. There are tons and tons of “union laws” that treat unions very differently than any other entity. Some of these laws hurt unions, others help. For example, a union contract can’t require an employer to hire only union members. That would create a situation where people would apply to the union first, and if they union accepted them, then they apply for the job. That would give unions too much power, so it’s not allowed. Another law forbids sympathy strikes. Unions can only strike against their own employers, not in sympathy with other strikers. Modern labor law also seeks to discourage strikes by using a war-game like approach to negotiating. Maybe a good idea, maybe not. But certainly not something that happens for non-union orgs. If we adopted a “hands off” approach to unions, we could easily wind up with insanely powerful unions. If 2% of the working population went on strike simultaneously, the economy would stop working quickly. So general strikes are very illegal, even though they are 100% in accord with libertarian ideology.
  - molotovh 4y ago
    My interpretation of that comment was, "I'm not in favor of increasing the size of government, but I'd rather see a government labor board exist than another union."
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
> Couple weeks later they send me a check for 20 grand out of the blue Glad this ended up working out in your favor. Your story makes me wonder how often such a practice doesn't end with the employer forking up the 20 grand they stole. I guess I've heard it said that wage theft is the most common form of theft but this is still rather frustrating to think about. Does this sort of practice come with some other punishment or does the board just tell the employer to pay what's owed?
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Lots of people don't know about labor boards so I think they get away with it most of the time. In ten years across seven restaurants in the restaurant industry that was the only time I was paid time and a half for overtime, lots of places do cash overtime instead. Even the chains have stolen labor from me, did a month at Applebee's and the manager would "save me time" by clocking me out 15 - 20 minutes early at the end of the night (it took seconds to clock out). Illegal immigrants in particular know that they are unlikely to get their last pay in the restaurant industry, they aren't likely to sue or contact the authorities, they also get screwed on workers comp claims when they get injured. We talk a lot about unfairness for waitstaff but that's paradise compared to the back of the house. It's absolutely commonplace and likely happening at any restaurant you go to. In PA they have to pay double whatever is collected, so they wrote a similar check to the labor board, that's how they are funded and I think it's revenue positive.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    > In PA they have to pay double whatever is collected That's exactly the thing I'd hope to see. It's unfortunate that it's such a process, considering how easy it is to simply not know.
  - raincom 4y ago
    Even many body shops run with h1-bs, and by Asians try to not pay the last pay check. ESP if it is corp to corp, these staffing companies try to not pay the last invoice. I think in California, even illegals are eligible for workers compensation.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
When I was an 11 year old, I got a job working for a local swim club. I'd go to the property, open the gate, and clean the grounds and take out the trash. They figured since I wasn't technically old enough to work, they could pay me $2.30 an hour when $4.25 was the minimum wage at the time. I adjusted my recorded hours versus worked hours accordingly. Given that there were no cameras on premises, the timesheets were manual, and I was always there alone, I never had an issue.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Reminds me of a lifeguarding job I had at a private lake club when I was a teen. They let me report and set my own hours. I never abused that trust, but it was pretty strange when my boss explained that they'd pay me for however much I chose to work during daylight hours (the lake was "closed" after dark.) I did end up working a few very long days on holidays for the extra cash.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    I do wonder how many of these are honeypots to see which workers they'd like to invite back next year. It's pretty well-known that the point of an internship isn't to actually accomplish any useful work, it's to determine which students you would like to extend an offer to for full-time employment. Not a large leap to assume that a lot of adolescent employment follows this pattern. The wages you'd pay a teen are chump change for most businesses, but responsible, intelligent, trustworthy employees basically disappear from the job market after their first job (because everybody wants to keep them), and so it can be a great investment to identify, vet, and introduce yourself to them before they're on the open market.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay." -- Soviet Russia
ihatepython 4y ago
All they had to do was give you your last paycheck, they would have saved 20k and gotten away with it
BonoboIO 4y ago
20 Grand ... like 20.000$ WOW. That’s a nice surprise.
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  Why the downvotes?
FrontierPsych 4y ago
I've said this before, but if you steal $300 from the store, you go to jail. If a company steals $300 from the employee, the people in charge - the CEO - should have the same fate. It would solve the problem pretty quickly.

pxue 4y ago

As a small government advocate, i have no issue with labor boards. the alternative is violence or unionization, neither of which are optimal in resolving disputes like these in a civilized and efficient manner.

hourago 4y ago
> the alternative is violence or unionization, neither of which are optimal in resolving disputes like these in a civilized and efficient manner. Unionization is a great way of solving disputes. Many big corporations need to be counter-weight with some other big organization. To put violence and unions at the same level seems uncalled for.
- Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
  > Many big corporations need to be counter-weight with some other big organization. Such as labor boards, or rather the government that gives them power.
- bmitc 4y ago
  A lot of unions directly block solving disputes, choosing instead to deny all disputes. I know one union that was perfectly happy letting government workers make sox figures while "working" from home, while they produced objectively zero work over a period of months. These were the type of workers that would keep government equipment after retiring, quitting, or rarely being fired, requiring the government to send officers to collect. Any movement towards trying to get the workers to do literally anything or simply rating them low was met with vehement pushback. Like a union representative storming into you're office and yelling. In this case, the union was a giant ball of mud whose only existence was to hold the government hostage. As much as I dislike Thune power corporations can hold, unions are not a fix all and can become the same overlords.
  - hourago 4y ago
    > I know one union that was perfectly happy letting government workers make sox figures while "working" from home, while they produced objectively zero work over a period of months. "Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles" is fraud. If you do not like unions because ONE did something that you do not like , how much do you hate companies were you have thousands of examples of bad behavior? > As much as I dislike Thune power corporations can hold, unions are not a fix all and can become the same overlords. I do not know what concept do you have about unions, but it seems come from anti-union propaganda and not from any reasonable definition of what a union is. Unions gave us the eight hour work week, vacations and many more rights. That is not "overlord" behavior but being able to negotiate with powerful corporations.
    - wobbly_bush 4y ago
      >If you do not like unions because ONE did something that you do not like Not the person you are replying to, but I think discounting the behavior of unions as one-off is not helping. The examples I have are from outside US though - there are entire states where union presence is strong. Those states had a good industrial sector but over several decades the unions made it so problematic for the industries there that majority of businesses moved to states where there were no unions. Public calls for "strikes" and other work-stopping behavior and violence is common occurence in those states. So the risk of a union becoming mafia-like is more than just propaganda - it has plenty of examples worldwide in several countries.
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      On hackernews most of the complaints I see about unions are people who've had direct experience with unions. My experience with unions was they were shady, jobs were given out based on nepotism, work was given out solely based on seniority and most work you did for them involved kickbacks.
      - drewcoo 4y ago
        We must read different HNs. Most of the what I see is anti-union FUD from people raised on horror stories about unions but without any actual contact with them except for possibly being inconvenienced by someone else's strike.
- HEmanZ 4y ago
  Unionization can have serious problems/risks. I this case, where the business is literally breaking the law, there is no need to get a union involved. Wage theft is illegal. It should be treated as a legal issue where the state gets involved and uses its monopoly on force to enforce the law. That's what the state is there for. [Aside, putting violence at the same level as unions: I've been around a union, while working in a factory in the midwest US, that had "kneebreakers" that "encouraged" members to vote a certain way by threat-of-force, support certain candidates for union leadership, and used the Union to blatantly extort local businesses and politicians. Not every union is like this, but blue-collar unions in the US have a history of going this way. Which, even tho I like unionization in theory and cheer a bit inside when I see union action at e.g Starbucks or Amazon, I have seen a very terrible union and so they scare me.]
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    Labor laws didn't happen because of noble-minded politicians or kind-hearted captains of industry.
  - 93po 4y ago
    Wage theft is overwhelmingly not enforced, and it's the largest form of theft in the country. Until this is not the case, unions are the best option.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- WesternWind 4y ago
  Folks with union jobs tend do better then their same industry non union counterparts, in terms of wages, health care, access to sick days, etc. There is however a third choice, which is government regulation. Unfortunately government regulations can't adapt as quickly as a union can to changes. Maybe the relatively inflexibility of regulation is what is needed to maintain a minimum necessary commitment to living wages and reasonable benefits though.
  - fooker 4y ago
    > Folks with union jobs tend do better Just like planes which survived battles only had bullet marks on their wings.
pupperino 4y ago
What really matters is how human institutions and organizations shape each other's incentives and costs [1]. Instead of aiming for abstract, intangible goals like "small" or "big" government, how about developing a sense of institutional design and relating that to a set of moral and political values. That way, it's actually possible to debug disagreements, either reducing them down to moral values and hopefully leaving it out of the public sphere or locating actual policy questions with less room for aesthetics and more for evidence, studies and sensible debate. [1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10481/w10481.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10481/w104...
fHr 4y ago
Unionization is amazing. I do not know why especially people in US are so against this. Did they just gave up and are okay with the big corps fucking them over withouth having any leverage?
- mistrial9 4y ago
  more than a hundred years ago, the USA was not a large world power.. more than half the country was frontier and a lot of raw agriculture that is dependent on labor. When the 'red' social flames burned through Europe at the end of the Great Monarchies, political people here in the USA were seriously worried. So an ugly deal was forged.. the hardcore lefts were jailed and harassed and beaten.. and insider right wing groups that knew how to play for the long term were elevated to power. This is not popular to say, but the history is there for the reading, about ethnic gangsters running unions across the USA. It never was completely cleared up and persisted well into the 1970s and perhaps later.. The public relations campaign by Big Media was very effective at smearing the name of Unions to the public, and the Unions made some dumb moves, too. High tech and Hollywood generated huge money, and Wall Street style money was always anti-Union. It is worth saying that Hollywood movie production is very heavily unionized, and that small system works pretty well.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Another interpretation is that the New Deal institutionalized labor. Labor got a seat at the table in exchange for removing radical elements.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      new movie out -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman
- dfxm12 4y ago
  I do not know why especially people in US are so against this. I think there's some truth to the old adage that there's a class of Americans, especially represented among the HN crowd that "see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." There are many reasons for the decline of organized labor in the US. Some cultural yeah, but just as much, if not more, legal... "Right to work" legislation Employers fighting harder against unionization Decreased enforcement of labor laws Judges (including SCOTUS) who keep striking down labor protections Media portrayal of unions
realslimjd 4y ago
What do unions have to do with small government? A union contract is an agreement between two private parties.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pxue 4y ago
  Nothing. Small government is relating to government run labor boards.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  But it’s not. There are tons and tons of “union laws” that treat unions very differently than any other entity. Some of these laws hurt unions, others help. For example, a union contract can’t require an employer to hire only union members. That would create a situation where people would apply to the union first, and if they union accepted them, then they apply for the job. That would give unions too much power, so it’s not allowed. Another law forbids sympathy strikes. Unions can only strike against their own employers, not in sympathy with other strikers. Modern labor law also seeks to discourage strikes by using a war-game like approach to negotiating. Maybe a good idea, maybe not. But certainly not something that happens for non-union orgs. If we adopted a “hands off” approach to unions, we could easily wind up with insanely powerful unions. If 2% of the working population went on strike simultaneously, the economy would stop working quickly. So general strikes are very illegal, even though they are 100% in accord with libertarian ideology.
- molotovh 4y ago
  My interpretation of that comment was, "I'm not in favor of increasing the size of government, but I'd rather see a government labor board exist than another union."

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago

> Couple weeks later they send me a check for 20 grand out of the blue Glad this ended up working out in your favor. Your story makes me wonder how often such a practice doesn't end with the employer forking up the 20 grand they stole. I guess I've heard it said that wage theft is the most common form of theft but this is still rather frustrating to think about. Does this sort of practice come with some other punishment or does the board just tell the employer to pay what's owed?

willcipriano 4y ago
Lots of people don't know about labor boards so I think they get away with it most of the time. In ten years across seven restaurants in the restaurant industry that was the only time I was paid time and a half for overtime, lots of places do cash overtime instead. Even the chains have stolen labor from me, did a month at Applebee's and the manager would "save me time" by clocking me out 15 - 20 minutes early at the end of the night (it took seconds to clock out). Illegal immigrants in particular know that they are unlikely to get their last pay in the restaurant industry, they aren't likely to sue or contact the authorities, they also get screwed on workers comp claims when they get injured. We talk a lot about unfairness for waitstaff but that's paradise compared to the back of the house. It's absolutely commonplace and likely happening at any restaurant you go to. In PA they have to pay double whatever is collected, so they wrote a similar check to the labor board, that's how they are funded and I think it's revenue positive.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  > In PA they have to pay double whatever is collected That's exactly the thing I'd hope to see. It's unfortunate that it's such a process, considering how easy it is to simply not know.
- raincom 4y ago
  Even many body shops run with h1-bs, and by Asians try to not pay the last pay check. ESP if it is corp to corp, these staffing companies try to not pay the last invoice. I think in California, even illegals are eligible for workers compensation.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

When I was an 11 year old, I got a job working for a local swim club. I'd go to the property, open the gate, and clean the grounds and take out the trash. They figured since I wasn't technically old enough to work, they could pay me $2.30 an hour when $4.25 was the minimum wage at the time. I adjusted my recorded hours versus worked hours accordingly. Given that there were no cameras on premises, the timesheets were manual, and I was always there alone, I never had an issue.

LarryMullins 4y ago
Reminds me of a lifeguarding job I had at a private lake club when I was a teen. They let me report and set my own hours. I never abused that trust, but it was pretty strange when my boss explained that they'd pay me for however much I chose to work during daylight hours (the lake was "closed" after dark.) I did end up working a few very long days on holidays for the extra cash.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  I do wonder how many of these are honeypots to see which workers they'd like to invite back next year. It's pretty well-known that the point of an internship isn't to actually accomplish any useful work, it's to determine which students you would like to extend an offer to for full-time employment. Not a large leap to assume that a lot of adolescent employment follows this pattern. The wages you'd pay a teen are chump change for most businesses, but responsible, intelligent, trustworthy employees basically disappear from the job market after their first job (because everybody wants to keep them), and so it can be a great investment to identify, vet, and introduce yourself to them before they're on the open market.
nostrademons 4y ago
"We pretend to work and they pretend to pay." -- Soviet Russia

ihatepython 4y ago

All they had to do was give you your last paycheck, they would have saved 20k and gotten away with it

BonoboIO 4y ago

20 Grand ... like 20.000$ WOW. That’s a nice surprise.

BonoboIO 4y ago
Why the downvotes?

FrontierPsych 4y ago

I've said this before, but if you steal $300 from the store, you go to jail. If a company steals $300 from the employee, the people in charge - the CEO - should have the same fate. It would solve the problem pretty quickly.