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This phenomena is pretty widespread in the service industry and I would venture to say that a significant minority of businesses participate in some version of

This phenomena is pretty widespread in the service industry and I would venture to say that a significant minority of businesses participate in some version of wage theft. For example, one of my jobs right out of high school was waiting tables at a local restaurant. If you were opening, the expectation from owners and management was you'd get in early to help open but would wait 15 minutes before service started before clocking in. So on those days you'd do 30-45 minutes of fully unpaid labor. There was well understood that if you complained about this not only would they fire you but they'd call up all their industry buddies and you'd basically be on every other restaurants no-hire list. At the time I was pretty naive and didn't think much of it, just figured that's the way the world worked. Doing the math, because I always made more than the tipped minimum wage, I think it only ended up costing me $7/week in wages - but if I stole $7 out of the till each week for a year in a half I'd be charged with a felony.

antisthenes 3y ago
Amazing pettiness from the owners for what is essentially $10 worth of labor (or less)
- spacecadet 3y ago
  This sums up much of american rural small business... I started working at 12 and had many random jobs between 12-18 that were run by awful people. Our family has a small farm, my parents didn't think we did enough of that and put me in a white van full of migrant workers at 12 years old (hey the 80s!) to go pick produce in a field all day... It was grueling work but I got a first hand account of migrant farm workers and the way they are treated.
  - vdaea 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      This is a really shitty take. I don't think you're a decent person if that's how you truly feel.
      - brvsft 3y ago
        [flagged]
        Cheer2171 3y ago
        What about the topic of this thread: wage theft? Should migrants have less rights to the product of their own labor not being stolen than citizens, just because they are not citizens?
        brvsft 3y ago
        What is your point? Wage theft occurs regardless of migrant status. Why are you asking me to be responsible for the tangential discussion, that I did not start, on migrant status? Or are you going to post this exact same question to everyone up the chain including people you already agree with?
        kjkjadksj 3y ago
        The conditions are very unsafe. Commercial farming has terrible air quality. Farmers have significantly higher rates of cancers including lung cancer. There is no one inspecting workplace conditions when you are hiring undocumented workers. Every bad heatwave in the southwest you hear sad stories of people in fields dying of heat exhaustion because their supervisors provide no shade for breaks or water stations. There are no standards federally even for what might be sufficient despite the massive rates of heat related deaths experienced by farm workers relative to the general population.
        2024throwaway 3y ago
        Sounds a lot like an abuser saying “as long as there are no visible bruises, they’re fine”. Except way worse because you’re fine with bruises apparently. Death is where you draw the line. Disgusting.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  I think some managers use petty potential conflicts to filter out people that are not naive, have a backbone or are not desperate enough to succumb. A worker that does not put up with petty BS is surely less likely to put up with major BS (like wrongful termination when getting pregnant or whatever).
- sneak 3y ago
  $10/week/employee adds up over decades.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    But is it worth the resentment from said employees? Having to deal with the revolving door of naive new staff that needs to be trained, get up to speed, then leaves again when they realize they're being stiffed or they can do better? It just doesn't feel sustainable. Not to mention the chance that you'll be found out by the authorities; I want to believe the punishment for wage theft is much more than the savings. Of course, that depends on how many people report it and how much evidence can be retrieved I suppose.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      It's worth it to the tune of $50 billion per year with only $3 billion recovered
      - antisthenes 3y ago
        It sounds like a lot, until you realize it's only roughly $30 per year per employee in the US (roughly). There's no justification in being shitty to your fellow citizen over this paltry sum of money. None.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    It really doesn't. Can't buy your way out moral bankruptcy with $10,400 over 2 decades.
- admissionsguy 3y ago
  It adds up. Multiply by the number of employees by the number of weeks in a year by the number of restaurants owned by the total number of ways in which the employees are deprived of small amounts at a time.
Workaccount2 3y ago
I working in restaurants for years. They purposely go for high school kids because they know they don't know the law, and know that they will think walking out with $50 is awesome, even if they worked 6 hours.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  And then they get mad that the teenagers they made a point of hiring are irresponsible, unreliable, and have limited experience working. You know, teenagers.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    I started working at 16, at a walmart. I only called sick a handful of times, never was late, and did my job to the best of my ability. it is called work ethic. I started at $0.25 above minimum wage, as we given several raises, and position changes by the time I left at age 18, why because I was one of the most reliable teens they had, and they did not want me to go to another employer. Some parents instill work ethic in their children even teens, sadly we do not have many good parents these days it seems like and for the record, walmart never asked me and I never did work a single second off the clock...
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      > Some parents instill work ethic in their children even teens, sadly we do not have many good parents these days it seems like It turns out that there is a lot more to what makes a person than just the behaviour of their parents.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      I think it's actually developmentally inappropriate for teenagers to have that level of work ethic. A teenager has far too many things on their plate at school to dedicate that much of their energy and motivation to Walmart, even ignoring the cost to their social and cognitive development.
MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
I had a manual labor job when I was 16 that my parents wanted me to get to build some character. A night a week or so and one shift on the weekend. The need for labor was dependent on customer demand on a given day and weather and fluctuated greatly. Practice was so show up and wait around in the break room until it was busy enough that you were needed, and then people would be called in order of arrival. So some people would wait around hours to even find out if they might work that day. I did it a couple times and found it so demoralizing I quit. Later I found out that practice is very illegal.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  You think the construction industry is illegal. Wait till you hear about academia!! :) This is the life today for zero-hours, at-will employment in the university sector. As a visiting professor I've had universities ask me to deliver a semester course a year in advance, and call the week before to say they're not running it. At the very minimum a 12 week course takes 40 hours of preparation even if you're just refreshing the notes and practicals from last time. I've had Russell group universities not pay me for two years. They've flat out "lost" my invoices, three times! Two major league universities tried to stiff me out of over £2000 and had to be threatened with legal action. One London uni asked me to prepare a DSP course, then instead of hiring me to deliver it plagiarised my slides, took my name off them and got a junior lecturer to deliver the course instead. The last university I worked at were so careless with my payments that my accountant advised me to "extricate immediately" because there so many "anomalies" she couldn't keep track of them all. Universities are absolute f*king gangsters.
  - Cheer2171 3y ago
    US academia has its problems, but UK academia is a whole different nightmare.
    - iinnPP 3y ago
      Canada would like a word. When 35% of a test is easily verified as incorrect and nobody is willing to fix it. Rain days.... Too cold days(-5°c)...
alkonaut 3y ago
An anonymous tip and a few inspections of staff logs and payrolls would make it pretty easy to make this disappear. The problem is that these sort of things (what regulations exist, whether authorities prioritize enforcing them) seems to always be answered with "no, because it's a poor people problem". It's unfair competition though, so it's really important that this doesn't happen. A restaurant that wants do to the right thing shouldn't have to worry about a few % worse competitiveness on wages because the asshat across the street has his staff work for free. If something like this earned you a $10k fee the first time and a 5 year ban from running any kind of business in the state if you repeat it, I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  > An anonymous tip and a few inspections of staff logs and payrolls would make it pretty easy to make this disappear. And culturally treating it like any other theft: a crime that should subject the thief, in a practical sense, to the risk of imprisonment.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Property crimes are rarely enforced against the ownership class. Law enforcement in the US exists to enforce the social order and class structure; they have no legal obligation to investigate or prosecute crimes. The system is working as intended.
    - marcus0x62 3y ago
      That's why I described it as a cultural, not a legal problem.
    - baq 3y ago
      Always has been. Government is quite literally a criminal organization except it was decided by someone (people, representatives, a monarch, whatever) that this particular one is not criminal and any others like it are, within self-described boundaries. It might or might not be doing criminal things (as in, things we associate with criminal), but it wants and needs a monopoly on those things, otherwise it risks dissolution by internal and/or external forces. It’s thus obvious it’ll prioritize protecting the mafia bosses/sovereigns/elites and thugs/enforcers.
Chris2048 3y ago
> not only would they fire you If they did so could you not bring up the suspicious timing with the labour board?
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  Obviously every state is different, and all state labor departments do surely go after wage theft to some extent. But as an example, my state does not have a "department of labor" - too commie! Instead it's the Department of Economic Opportunity. So one might imagine how much effort they put into small-time wage disputes.
avgcorrection 3y ago
> not only would they fire you but they'd call up all their industry buddies and you'd basically be on every other restaurants no-hire list. So like a much-dreaded union for employers except it’s underhanded and illegal.
- Lalabadie 3y ago
  But with enough lobbying, it _could_ be legal! (This to point out that most lobbies are to employers what unions are to employees)
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    They’re just voting with their (fat) wallets!
- ncallaway 3y ago
  Yes, exactly. And it’s underhanded and illegal when employers do it, because there’s an imbalance of power between employee and employee. Unions exist to even out that balance of power. When employers engage in that kind of activity it further increases the imbalance of power. For example, in this case, they were using that tactic to support their ability to steal from employees.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    To clarify this further: The employer is already a collective, "A business", and the hiring manager is operating with the full power of that collective in hiring/firing negotations. A union is a collective to balance power against the business (collective). A cartel is a collective of collectives (ie., a group of businesses) operating to defeat free market competition regulation, in this sense the cartel is balancing power against the state -- which is the only permitted "collective of collectives". Cartels challenge states (power to create free markets), whereas unions challenge businesses (power to hire/fire). This is why unions are permissible and cartels are not.
    - 3y ago
andrewoneone 3y ago
I worked at Texas Roadhouse as a kid and this was the norm even for a chain.
lupire 3y ago
The "industry buddies" but seems like a Boogeyman meant to scare people.
- eterm 3y ago
  That's exactly what it is, but the kids they employ don't know better. The idea that there's a cabal of restaurant owners who get together to discuss in detail how they're breaking the law and maintain a blacklist is absurd when you stop to think about it. But they're more than happy to let those kind of rumours keep doing the rounds to scare the naive young people into not sticking up for themselves.
  - tomatotomato37 3y ago
    Yeah the closest your going to get to a restaurant cabal are owners gossiping at the local wholesaler while waiting for their purchase to be processed, and even then there's a 50/50 chance a member of them is lying in order to bait a competitor into making a bad hire
  - notdang 3y ago
    It might be funny, but in Mexico it's done differently. There are Whatsapp groups of HRs working in a particular group (tech, construction, etc.) where they communicate. Obviously they don't discuss the names openly but they do ask if someone is willing to give feedback on a candidate that worked at XY.
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    I think there’s one way this might work. To get hired at the next place they might want you to have experience. So you put your prior employer on the application, the new restaurant checks your references and mysteriously decides to pass on you.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Are you willing to risk extended unemployment and potentially homelessness in order to call that bluff?
- 3y ago
bena 3y ago
This is tangential, but part of the reason why I dislike talking to servers about the tipped minimum wage. Because it seems they deliberately don't want to understand the full context of the law. Or fully the type of work they are in. What you are describing is typically called "side work". Basically work that is not directly related to waiting a table. Folding napkins, putting up chairs, moving tables, etc. Even in cases where the restaurant clocks in their workers for every minute they are doing work, servers complain about doing side work because "it costs them money". And they want the federal minimum wage during that time. Which naively makes sense. But that's not at all how tipped wages work under the law. The formula is basically: (([hours worked] * [tipped minimum wage]) + [tips earned in pay period]) / [hours worked] = [hourly wage over pay period] So if you work 10 hours in a pay period, that's $21.30. If you collected $51.20 in tips during that time, you made $72.50 or $7.25/hr (based on current federal minimum wage, obviously numbers are different for different areas where the minimum wage is different from the federal). The restaurant is in the clear. Even if you worked 5 hours doing "side work" and 5 hours waiting tables where you got $51.20 in tips. Servers want to essentially prorate every minute they are not physically collecting a tip it seems. Worked an hour and every table stiffed you? They want $7.25 for that hour. Regardless of the fact that the previous hour they took in $20 in tips. Serving is more akin to being an independent contractor. You need to make hay while the sun is shining. The fat sustains you through the lean. You look at your per hour over the aggregate, not counting every hour. It's why contractors charge the rates they charge. If you are only billing half the year, those billings need to support you through the other half. Now, in your case, the reason they don't want you to clock in isn't to save $7 over a week. It's to up your average. Which is still wrong. Let's say at your current rate of collecting tips, you totaled $225 over 30 hours. That's $7.50. Restaurant doesn't owe you anything. Now, $225 over 32.5 hours (your low end over 5 days), that's only $6.92 / hour. The restaurant is short, not $7, but $41.28 And true, If you instead made $300 over those 30 hours, the extra 2.5 hours don't even matter to you. Your check wouldn't have been that different. But, it's money that's not coming from their pockets and it's really to push people near the bubble over their limit.
- jpalawaga 3y ago
  In the state of California, tips are a gratuity paid on top of minimum wage. This is also how it works in many other states, in Canada, and in many countries around the world. So you earn $16/hr for all time you’re at work, plus tips. Which is how it should be. You’re being employed. Those tips are for the employee, not a gratuity for the owner to offset their costs. “Tipped wages” are just another form of theft, bought by the restaurant lobby.
CalRobert 3y ago
Maybe it's every industry. My wife was told she needed to be sitting at her desk ten minutes before clocking in when she worked at Accenture "so the computer could warm up"
madsbuch 3y ago
A danish labor union is currently suing for this. They have already settles on ~25.000 USD being paid out to one worker who was paid for 37 hours a week but according to his clocking in and out of the building area had worked up to 60 hours per week. This is exactly one of the key responsibilities for labour unions to manage this interest on behalf of their members.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
I also experienced wage theft while waiting tables, and also thought 'thats just how it works' As a server, aside from taking orders and carrying food, we had 'sidework' before and after our shift- stuff like cutting lemons into wedges for water, rolling silverware in napkins, refilling condiments, etc. That all needed to be done before/after clocking in. Additionally, if diners stayed late, our timecards were edited to reflect the hours we 'should have' been working. And the last thing that bugs me the most, is that we were required to give 10% of our tips to share with the back-of-house employees like bus boys. The manager collected this money directly and there was no accounting or way to see how much of it actually made its way to the other employees. That pisses me off the most because it was so arbitrary and so completely in the control of someone who was already stealing from us.
- RHSeeger 3y ago
  > we were required to give 10% of our tips to share with the back-of-house employees like bus boys The places I worked - busboys were not back-of-house employees; they were out on the floor helping take care of tables (bussing them, refilling coffee, making deserts, etc). - the wait staff gave the 10% (or whatever it was) directly to the busboys. And some to the hostess, and some to the bartender; basically all the client facing staff. I have no memory of the owners doing anything dishonest to the staff (at any of the places I worked), so either I was blind to things, or there _are_ (were) some good ones out there.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Right after I finished tech school, and I was waiting for my first technician job, I worked for a friend's home remodeling contractor company for a few weeks. I was the "helper," so, naturally, I got all the shit work. The wages were minimum wage. He kept jerking me around, paying fractions of what he owed me, then "forgetting" how much was left, etc. I probably ended up getting about a quarter or what I was owed. This was a "friend" (note the quotes). I can only imagine what happens with the contractors that hire laborers from the side of the street, in the local hispanic district. Those chaps don't have any recourse (Unless you count the local MS-13 chapter). I hear a lot of people tell me about the "wait to clock in" gig. Many of them "help themselves" to their employers' assets. I don't condone that, but I also don't condone their getting ripped off. Large-scale, white-collar employers probably reap billions from stolen wages. My first job was hourly, and I made a lot of money over my standard wages (it was actually an honest employer -defense contractor, so they were audited with a proctoscope). During my exempt career, I encountered all kinds of nickel-and-dime behavior. Those nickels and dimes add up to new Porsches in the driveways of senior managers.
- hobotime 3y ago
  Laborers on the side are paid daily, unless a lot of trust has been built up. The most they'll be screwed is one day's labor. They're in demand because they work very hard, and they'll quickly find work.
havblue 3y ago
This is more of a shade of gray, but I think over-assigning side work is also a form of unpaid labor that managers allow to happen to their front house staff as well.
stevespang 3y ago
[dead]
mcv 3y ago
I honestly think managers responsible for this sort of thing should go to prison for it. That would end these sort of practices really quick. But somehow companies seem to have more rights than people.
empyrrhicist 3y ago
Similarly, I worked for a restaurant in high school that abused tips to pay wages for non-servers. When I was hired I asked about tips, and was told "yep, you get tip share". It turns out "tip share" meant "you get a flat wage, and we pay for it using tips from the servers". I turned down a job at a nice Italian place to work there because of that lie and a $1 difference per hour in the base wage.
charcircuit 3y ago
>I think it only ended up costing me $7/week in wages - but if I stole $7 out of the till each week for a year in a half I'd be charged with a felony. These are not comparable as working an extra 15 minutes is a consensual tranaction where getting $7 stolen from the business was an unconsensual transaction. A better comparison would be along for a $7 per week raise.
- riversflow 3y ago
  It's not really consent if you are being coerced by your employer.
awo34oaw4u 3y ago
And in academia. The University of Texas at Austin still owes me $14K in unpaid wages from 2017 where I was never paid for the classes I taught as a grad student. Unfortunately Texas has pathetically weak worker protections and the length of time you have to complain about wage theft is shorter than the length of time it takes the university to set up some payments, so by the time you realize you're not getting paid it's already too late to do anything about it.
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
i think you are underestimating how competitive businesses are - someone knowing that a competitor is exploiting an illegal advantage , has all the incentive in the world to report that illegal business practice and shame that competitor. You have to be operating in a very narrow niche or a very small community for illegal behavior to be the norm. what most employees don't know is that this type of theft is often a smokescreen for theft by a manager or someone below ownership. mention to owner anonymously, if no action, report the business that does this to you, put it on yelp, and move on.

antisthenes 3y ago

Amazing pettiness from the owners for what is essentially $10 worth of labor (or less)

spacecadet 3y ago
This sums up much of american rural small business... I started working at 12 and had many random jobs between 12-18 that were run by awful people. Our family has a small farm, my parents didn't think we did enough of that and put me in a white van full of migrant workers at 12 years old (hey the 80s!) to go pick produce in a field all day... It was grueling work but I got a first hand account of migrant farm workers and the way they are treated.
- vdaea 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    This is a really shitty take. I don't think you're a decent person if that's how you truly feel.
    - brvsft 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Cheer2171 3y ago
        What about the topic of this thread: wage theft? Should migrants have less rights to the product of their own labor not being stolen than citizens, just because they are not citizens?
        brvsft 3y ago
        What is your point? Wage theft occurs regardless of migrant status. Why are you asking me to be responsible for the tangential discussion, that I did not start, on migrant status? Or are you going to post this exact same question to everyone up the chain including people you already agree with?
      - kjkjadksj 3y ago
        The conditions are very unsafe. Commercial farming has terrible air quality. Farmers have significantly higher rates of cancers including lung cancer. There is no one inspecting workplace conditions when you are hiring undocumented workers. Every bad heatwave in the southwest you hear sad stories of people in fields dying of heat exhaustion because their supervisors provide no shade for breaks or water stations. There are no standards federally even for what might be sufficient despite the massive rates of heat related deaths experienced by farm workers relative to the general population.
      - 2024throwaway 3y ago
        Sounds a lot like an abuser saying “as long as there are no visible bruises, they’re fine”. Except way worse because you’re fine with bruises apparently. Death is where you draw the line. Disgusting.
rightbyte 3y ago
I think some managers use petty potential conflicts to filter out people that are not naive, have a backbone or are not desperate enough to succumb. A worker that does not put up with petty BS is surely less likely to put up with major BS (like wrongful termination when getting pregnant or whatever).
sneak 3y ago
$10/week/employee adds up over decades.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  But is it worth the resentment from said employees? Having to deal with the revolving door of naive new staff that needs to be trained, get up to speed, then leaves again when they realize they're being stiffed or they can do better? It just doesn't feel sustainable. Not to mention the chance that you'll be found out by the authorities; I want to believe the punishment for wage theft is much more than the savings. Of course, that depends on how many people report it and how much evidence can be retrieved I suppose.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    It's worth it to the tune of $50 billion per year with only $3 billion recovered
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      It sounds like a lot, until you realize it's only roughly $30 per year per employee in the US (roughly). There's no justification in being shitty to your fellow citizen over this paltry sum of money. None.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  It really doesn't. Can't buy your way out moral bankruptcy with $10,400 over 2 decades.
admissionsguy 3y ago
It adds up. Multiply by the number of employees by the number of weeks in a year by the number of restaurants owned by the total number of ways in which the employees are deprived of small amounts at a time.

Workaccount2 3y ago

I working in restaurants for years. They purposely go for high school kids because they know they don't know the law, and know that they will think walking out with $50 is awesome, even if they worked 6 hours.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
And then they get mad that the teenagers they made a point of hiring are irresponsible, unreliable, and have limited experience working. You know, teenagers.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  I started working at 16, at a walmart. I only called sick a handful of times, never was late, and did my job to the best of my ability. it is called work ethic. I started at $0.25 above minimum wage, as we given several raises, and position changes by the time I left at age 18, why because I was one of the most reliable teens they had, and they did not want me to go to another employer. Some parents instill work ethic in their children even teens, sadly we do not have many good parents these days it seems like and for the record, walmart never asked me and I never did work a single second off the clock...
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > Some parents instill work ethic in their children even teens, sadly we do not have many good parents these days it seems like It turns out that there is a lot more to what makes a person than just the behaviour of their parents.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    I think it's actually developmentally inappropriate for teenagers to have that level of work ethic. A teenager has far too many things on their plate at school to dedicate that much of their energy and motivation to Walmart, even ignoring the cost to their social and cognitive development.

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago

I had a manual labor job when I was 16 that my parents wanted me to get to build some character. A night a week or so and one shift on the weekend. The need for labor was dependent on customer demand on a given day and weather and fluctuated greatly. Practice was so show up and wait around in the break room until it was busy enough that you were needed, and then people would be called in order of arrival. So some people would wait around hours to even find out if they might work that day. I did it a couple times and found it so demoralizing I quit. Later I found out that practice is very illegal.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
You think the construction industry is illegal. Wait till you hear about academia!! :) This is the life today for zero-hours, at-will employment in the university sector. As a visiting professor I've had universities ask me to deliver a semester course a year in advance, and call the week before to say they're not running it. At the very minimum a 12 week course takes 40 hours of preparation even if you're just refreshing the notes and practicals from last time. I've had Russell group universities not pay me for two years. They've flat out "lost" my invoices, three times! Two major league universities tried to stiff me out of over £2000 and had to be threatened with legal action. One London uni asked me to prepare a DSP course, then instead of hiring me to deliver it plagiarised my slides, took my name off them and got a junior lecturer to deliver the course instead. The last university I worked at were so careless with my payments that my accountant advised me to "extricate immediately" because there so many "anomalies" she couldn't keep track of them all. Universities are absolute f*king gangsters.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  US academia has its problems, but UK academia is a whole different nightmare.
  - iinnPP 3y ago
    Canada would like a word. When 35% of a test is easily verified as incorrect and nobody is willing to fix it. Rain days.... Too cold days(-5°c)...

alkonaut 3y ago

An anonymous tip and a few inspections of staff logs and payrolls would make it pretty easy to make this disappear. The problem is that these sort of things (what regulations exist, whether authorities prioritize enforcing them) seems to always be answered with "no, because it's a poor people problem". It's unfair competition though, so it's really important that this doesn't happen. A restaurant that wants do to the right thing shouldn't have to worry about a few % worse competitiveness on wages because the asshat across the street has his staff work for free. If something like this earned you a $10k fee the first time and a 5 year ban from running any kind of business in the state if you repeat it, I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem.

marcus0x62 3y ago
> An anonymous tip and a few inspections of staff logs and payrolls would make it pretty easy to make this disappear. And culturally treating it like any other theft: a crime that should subject the thief, in a practical sense, to the risk of imprisonment.
- sneak 3y ago
  Property crimes are rarely enforced against the ownership class. Law enforcement in the US exists to enforce the social order and class structure; they have no legal obligation to investigate or prosecute crimes. The system is working as intended.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    That's why I described it as a cultural, not a legal problem.
  - baq 3y ago
    Always has been. Government is quite literally a criminal organization except it was decided by someone (people, representatives, a monarch, whatever) that this particular one is not criminal and any others like it are, within self-described boundaries. It might or might not be doing criminal things (as in, things we associate with criminal), but it wants and needs a monopoly on those things, otherwise it risks dissolution by internal and/or external forces. It’s thus obvious it’ll prioritize protecting the mafia bosses/sovereigns/elites and thugs/enforcers.

Chris2048 3y ago

> not only would they fire you If they did so could you not bring up the suspicious timing with the labour board?

cool_dude85 3y ago
Obviously every state is different, and all state labor departments do surely go after wage theft to some extent. But as an example, my state does not have a "department of labor" - too commie! Instead it's the Department of Economic Opportunity. So one might imagine how much effort they put into small-time wage disputes.

avgcorrection 3y ago

> not only would they fire you but they'd call up all their industry buddies and you'd basically be on every other restaurants no-hire list. So like a much-dreaded union for employers except it’s underhanded and illegal.

Lalabadie 3y ago
But with enough lobbying, it _could_ be legal! (This to point out that most lobbies are to employers what unions are to employees)
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  They’re just voting with their (fat) wallets!
ncallaway 3y ago
Yes, exactly. And it’s underhanded and illegal when employers do it, because there’s an imbalance of power between employee and employee. Unions exist to even out that balance of power. When employers engage in that kind of activity it further increases the imbalance of power. For example, in this case, they were using that tactic to support their ability to steal from employees.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  To clarify this further: The employer is already a collective, "A business", and the hiring manager is operating with the full power of that collective in hiring/firing negotations. A union is a collective to balance power against the business (collective). A cartel is a collective of collectives (ie., a group of businesses) operating to defeat free market competition regulation, in this sense the cartel is balancing power against the state -- which is the only permitted "collective of collectives". Cartels challenge states (power to create free markets), whereas unions challenge businesses (power to hire/fire). This is why unions are permissible and cartels are not.
  - 3y ago

andrewoneone 3y ago

I worked at Texas Roadhouse as a kid and this was the norm even for a chain.

lupire 3y ago

The "industry buddies" but seems like a Boogeyman meant to scare people.

eterm 3y ago
That's exactly what it is, but the kids they employ don't know better. The idea that there's a cabal of restaurant owners who get together to discuss in detail how they're breaking the law and maintain a blacklist is absurd when you stop to think about it. But they're more than happy to let those kind of rumours keep doing the rounds to scare the naive young people into not sticking up for themselves.
- tomatotomato37 3y ago
  Yeah the closest your going to get to a restaurant cabal are owners gossiping at the local wholesaler while waiting for their purchase to be processed, and even then there's a 50/50 chance a member of them is lying in order to bait a competitor into making a bad hire
- notdang 3y ago
  It might be funny, but in Mexico it's done differently. There are Whatsapp groups of HRs working in a particular group (tech, construction, etc.) where they communicate. Obviously they don't discuss the names openly but they do ask if someone is willing to give feedback on a candidate that worked at XY.
- TheCleric 3y ago
  I think there’s one way this might work. To get hired at the next place they might want you to have experience. So you put your prior employer on the application, the new restaurant checks your references and mysteriously decides to pass on you.
phone8675309 3y ago
Are you willing to risk extended unemployment and potentially homelessness in order to call that bluff?
3y ago

bena 3y ago

This is tangential, but part of the reason why I dislike talking to servers about the tipped minimum wage. Because it seems they deliberately don't want to understand the full context of the law. Or fully the type of work they are in. What you are describing is typically called "side work". Basically work that is not directly related to waiting a table. Folding napkins, putting up chairs, moving tables, etc. Even in cases where the restaurant clocks in their workers for every minute they are doing work, servers complain about doing side work because "it costs them money". And they want the federal minimum wage during that time. Which naively makes sense. But that's not at all how tipped wages work under the law. The formula is basically: (([hours worked] * [tipped minimum wage]) + [tips earned in pay period]) / [hours worked] = [hourly wage over pay period] So if you work 10 hours in a pay period, that's $21.30. If you collected $51.20 in tips during that time, you made $72.50 or $7.25/hr (based on current federal minimum wage, obviously numbers are different for different areas where the minimum wage is different from the federal). The restaurant is in the clear. Even if you worked 5 hours doing "side work" and 5 hours waiting tables where you got $51.20 in tips. Servers want to essentially prorate every minute they are not physically collecting a tip it seems. Worked an hour and every table stiffed you? They want $7.25 for that hour. Regardless of the fact that the previous hour they took in $20 in tips. Serving is more akin to being an independent contractor. You need to make hay while the sun is shining. The fat sustains you through the lean. You look at your per hour over the aggregate, not counting every hour. It's why contractors charge the rates they charge. If you are only billing half the year, those billings need to support you through the other half. Now, in your case, the reason they don't want you to clock in isn't to save $7 over a week. It's to up your average. Which is still wrong. Let's say at your current rate of collecting tips, you totaled $225 over 30 hours. That's $7.50. Restaurant doesn't owe you anything. Now, $225 over 32.5 hours (your low end over 5 days), that's only $6.92 / hour. The restaurant is short, not $7, but $41.28 And true, If you instead made $300 over those 30 hours, the extra 2.5 hours don't even matter to you. Your check wouldn't have been that different. But, it's money that's not coming from their pockets and it's really to push people near the bubble over their limit.

jpalawaga 3y ago
In the state of California, tips are a gratuity paid on top of minimum wage. This is also how it works in many other states, in Canada, and in many countries around the world. So you earn $16/hr for all time you’re at work, plus tips. Which is how it should be. You’re being employed. Those tips are for the employee, not a gratuity for the owner to offset their costs. “Tipped wages” are just another form of theft, bought by the restaurant lobby.

CalRobert 3y ago

Maybe it's every industry. My wife was told she needed to be sitting at her desk ten minutes before clocking in when she worked at Accenture "so the computer could warm up"

madsbuch 3y ago

A danish labor union is currently suing for this. They have already settles on ~25.000 USD being paid out to one worker who was paid for 37 hours a week but according to his clocking in and out of the building area had worked up to 60 hours per week. This is exactly one of the key responsibilities for labour unions to manage this interest on behalf of their members.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

I also experienced wage theft while waiting tables, and also thought 'thats just how it works' As a server, aside from taking orders and carrying food, we had 'sidework' before and after our shift- stuff like cutting lemons into wedges for water, rolling silverware in napkins, refilling condiments, etc. That all needed to be done before/after clocking in. Additionally, if diners stayed late, our timecards were edited to reflect the hours we 'should have' been working. And the last thing that bugs me the most, is that we were required to give 10% of our tips to share with the back-of-house employees like bus boys. The manager collected this money directly and there was no accounting or way to see how much of it actually made its way to the other employees. That pisses me off the most because it was so arbitrary and so completely in the control of someone who was already stealing from us.

RHSeeger 3y ago
> we were required to give 10% of our tips to share with the back-of-house employees like bus boys The places I worked - busboys were not back-of-house employees; they were out on the floor helping take care of tables (bussing them, refilling coffee, making deserts, etc). - the wait staff gave the 10% (or whatever it was) directly to the busboys. And some to the hostess, and some to the bartender; basically all the client facing staff. I have no memory of the owners doing anything dishonest to the staff (at any of the places I worked), so either I was blind to things, or there _are_ (were) some good ones out there.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

Right after I finished tech school, and I was waiting for my first technician job, I worked for a friend's home remodeling contractor company for a few weeks. I was the "helper," so, naturally, I got all the shit work. The wages were minimum wage. He kept jerking me around, paying fractions of what he owed me, then "forgetting" how much was left, etc. I probably ended up getting about a quarter or what I was owed. This was a "friend" (note the quotes). I can only imagine what happens with the contractors that hire laborers from the side of the street, in the local hispanic district. Those chaps don't have any recourse (Unless you count the local MS-13 chapter). I hear a lot of people tell me about the "wait to clock in" gig. Many of them "help themselves" to their employers' assets. I don't condone that, but I also don't condone their getting ripped off. Large-scale, white-collar employers probably reap billions from stolen wages. My first job was hourly, and I made a lot of money over my standard wages (it was actually an honest employer -defense contractor, so they were audited with a proctoscope). During my exempt career, I encountered all kinds of nickel-and-dime behavior. Those nickels and dimes add up to new Porsches in the driveways of senior managers.

hobotime 3y ago
Laborers on the side are paid daily, unless a lot of trust has been built up. The most they'll be screwed is one day's labor. They're in demand because they work very hard, and they'll quickly find work.

havblue 3y ago

This is more of a shade of gray, but I think over-assigning side work is also a form of unpaid labor that managers allow to happen to their front house staff as well.

stevespang 3y ago

[dead]

mcv 3y ago

I honestly think managers responsible for this sort of thing should go to prison for it. That would end these sort of practices really quick. But somehow companies seem to have more rights than people.

empyrrhicist 3y ago

Similarly, I worked for a restaurant in high school that abused tips to pay wages for non-servers. When I was hired I asked about tips, and was told "yep, you get tip share". It turns out "tip share" meant "you get a flat wage, and we pay for it using tips from the servers". I turned down a job at a nice Italian place to work there because of that lie and a $1 difference per hour in the base wage.

charcircuit 3y ago

>I think it only ended up costing me $7/week in wages - but if I stole $7 out of the till each week for a year in a half I'd be charged with a felony. These are not comparable as working an extra 15 minutes is a consensual tranaction where getting $7 stolen from the business was an unconsensual transaction. A better comparison would be along for a $7 per week raise.

riversflow 3y ago
It's not really consent if you are being coerced by your employer.

awo34oaw4u 3y ago

And in academia. The University of Texas at Austin still owes me $14K in unpaid wages from 2017 where I was never paid for the classes I taught as a grad student. Unfortunately Texas has pathetically weak worker protections and the length of time you have to complain about wage theft is shorter than the length of time it takes the university to set up some payments, so by the time you realize you're not getting paid it's already too late to do anything about it.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago

i think you are underestimating how competitive businesses are - someone knowing that a competitor is exploiting an illegal advantage , has all the incentive in the world to report that illegal business practice and shame that competitor. You have to be operating in a very narrow niche or a very small community for illegal behavior to be the norm. what most employees don't know is that this type of theft is often a smokescreen for theft by a manager or someone below ownership. mention to owner anonymously, if no action, report the business that does this to you, put it on yelp, and move on.