5 ms·

People thinking wage theft only affects lower wage workers, let me tell you how tech companies commit wage theft: 1. Having annual components to wages (RSUs, b

• wahnfrieden 3y ago
  These are legalized forms of wage theft, the article is about the illegal forms. But yes the legal ones are just as unpleasant
  • jmclnx 3y ago
    Maybe, but I know of a case where a contractor for a fortune 500 company working in IT had I think some of his salary stolen (in Texas). The company released the contract and he was put on the bench working for the contracting firm on their projects. They would pay him once per month. They fired him after a few months, not pay him is back pay. He filed a claim with Texas, nothing was done. When he told me (a year or 2 later) I said he should file with the Federal Gov, but he did not want to. So it can happen in office work too.
• sneak 3y ago
  Any promises not made in writing and signed by both parties aren’t promises. None of these are theft, just poor business skills on the part of the employees. Get it in writing so you can sue later, or don’t ever count on it. It’s basic business skills.
  • darth_avocado 3y ago
    > It’s basic business skills Job offers are often take it or leave it, because of the inherent power dynamics in the industry. These “basic business skills” will essentially leave you out of a job.
    • lupire 3y ago
      So? Taking the job blocks someone else out of it. Both are good people, so overall it doesn't matter who gets the job. The root of the problem lies elsewhere.
  • fnimick 3y ago
    What a terrible world to live in, where you can lie to your employees and as long as it's not in a contract, they deserve it for not having the "business skills" to know you could get away with lying.
  • lupire 3y ago
    Oral contracts are legally enforceable. Your claim is that any crime where the evidence is destroyed isn't a crime.
    • bongodongobob 3y ago
      Only if you can prove the conversation happened which is almost never the case.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      >Oral contracts are legally enforceable. I once heard a judge say "An oral contract is worth the paper it is printed on". It may be enforceable if there is a bunch of corroborating evidence that multiple people were told this and are willing to testify in court to that case. But you'll find, especially in right to work states, getting people to speak against the company is difficult.
  • Hikikomori 3y ago
    Scams shouldn't be illegal as you're stupid if you get scammed, just get smarter idiots.
• eesmith 3y ago
  Don't forget illegal collusion to lower wages, like the one top Silicon Valley firms carried out 10 year ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  • vundercind 3y ago
    I’m pretty sure a major reason for the current form of big tech interviews is to slow the rate of job-hopping, to suppress wage growth.
• PenguinCoder 3y ago
  The promise of salary work in America is such one sided bullcrap. Get paid the same amount of to get your work done no matter the time it takes. if it takes 6 hours or 12 hours, you'll get the same amount. But if you don't work at least 40hrs a week on salary, we're docking your pay. Oh but also, you don't get paid for any hours over 8 in a day. Salary!
  • danaris 3y ago
    To be fair, it can also work out the other way, if your employer is decent. I'm on salary, and I'm only expected to get the work done that's on my plate, and respond to emails etc within a reasonable time frame (eg, if I get an email at 4pm on a Friday, and I don't respond to it till 11:30am Monday, that's fine so long as it's not an emergency). If I get my work done and there's still time in the day, I'm not expected to invent busywork for myself. But I do recognize that I'm extremely lucky to have the kind of conditions I do here.
  • bongodongobob 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • square_usual 3y ago
      This comes up every time and it's just as stupid every time. I'm sorry you went through a terrible experience being a musician. That doesn't justify other people going through terrible experiences.
      • bongodongobob 3y ago
        I had a great experience as a musician, I made a decent living doing it. I didn't work too many hard or dirty jobs, just boring low skill jobs because I needed the flexibility. Most IT/office jobs are comparatively gravy any way you slice it. I'm just saying I have something to compare to rather than a lot of people here who probably interned at Google or MS and went off to make huge cash immediately.
    • 3y ago
• thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Having no overtime for salaried employees This is just the definition of "salaried employee".
  • darth_avocado 3y ago
    Right, but it’s still wage theft when you make people work twice as much because they’re “salaried”.
    • lupire 3y ago
      How are they "made"? These are highly paid employees earning market rates.
  • Arisaka1 3y ago
    Not saying that I disagree with the definition but most companies aren't happy when I have to leave the office earlier to visit a doctor and will expect me to work until the 40 hours are met. So while the legal definition is true that I get paid a fixed amount "regardless of work hours" the societal expectation is that I'll meet the 40 hours, 40+ makes me a "work hard, play hard", and everything under is me being lazy regardless of whether I hit my productivity goals or not. I once closed my Microsoft Teams off 15 minutes earlier than the expected and my manager was telling me to inform her next time that I'm leaving, and I work from home. Micromanaging at its finest.
  • dopylitty 3y ago
    The whole idea of salary is ridiculous. The FLSA needs to be fixed so that forcing workers to work 24/7 is explicitly banned. This is particularly true for workers whose jobs are computer based. Companies think they can pay one shift of workers to keep the computers running 24/7. It should not be that way. If a company wants its computing infrastructure running 24/7 it should pay for 3 shifts of workers. If not then shut down the systems at 5pm like any normal business. Email/IM should also be disabled for workers who aren't actively on shift. Any expectation of monitoring email/IM/phone should be counted as work that requires payment and for which there is a maximum number of allowed hours a week.
• hackerlight 3y ago
  Verbal promises about a promotion/payrise and then pulling the rug is also common.
  • SantalBlush 3y ago
    "Times are tough" is a refrain I've been hearing from employers since the 2009 recession. Somehow the economy is never good from an employer's point of view--just varying degrees of bad--so they can never afford those raises they promised.
• manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > Having no overtime for salaried employees Or even worse, instating mandatory unpaid overtime. I would love to see Pagerduty stats by job and position. I'm pretty sure the number of devs on 24/7 rotations is way higher than it should.
• tootie 3y ago
  That's not theft. It's not even really unethical. It's well-understood that the value of RSUs is not guaranteed. Nor is bonus pay. For one, this kind of comp only typically applies to people earning a base salary way above the median and that anyone accepting comp in terms of company or personal performance is willingly signing on to accept the risk.
  • darth_avocado 3y ago
    It is theft; it is definitely highly unethical; RSUs are guaranteed pay; doesn’t matter if salary is above median; willingly signing a contract because companies have better bargaining power doesn’t make it right.
    • tootie 3y ago
      The above comment said specifically they are end-of-year grants. That's a bonus and it's never ever guaranteed. Fired or not, they can just say "no bonuses this" and it's 100% the employer's prerogative. Happened to me plenty of times in down years. Not to mention, stock is inherently volatile so 1000 shares can be worth an arbitrary amount.
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Usually equity compensation is in lieu of base salary, so the base salary is often below median for comparable work at a comparable company that doesn’t offer equity. For instance Amazon is famous for offering absurdly low base salaries relative to their talent competitors. Wall Street is famous for this too. However bonus based compensation is outsized, often to account for the risk. The problem comes with laying people off in December prior to bonuses. You’ve taken a year of work under the presence of a bonus compensation and then yanked the rug out after squeezing every last ounce of work from a year. They could of course just not pay a bonus, but often internal compensation guidance requires proving a fireable performance problem while layoffs just require basic reporting to labor departments. Calling this theft is extreme, but it’s definitely ripping employees off and treating them badly. The imprudence mismatch is that the employee is much less able to afford the shenanigans than the employer benefits, and a year of an employees career is a much larger share of total lifetime earnings than the corporations benefit as a percentage of its total lifetime revenues (or compensation expenses as the case may be). This makes it wrong, but not illegal.
• hnburnsy 3y ago
  Add long 410K match vesting schedules to that list.
• wehhhhhh 3y ago
  They do it in more direct ways, too. You might be surprised how long some people will work with only the promise of future payment. You might be surprised how long someone can go on committing wage theft (and other general fraud) without repercussion. I'm self-employed and have made it a standard practice to look up court records on any new client I'm considering to take on. It has been eye opening.