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writing for godot

US, the book for all of US, installment, Wage Theft Measures the Country and each of US

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Written by Tom Cantlon   
Friday, 21 May 2021 00:49

This is a section of the book:

US

Everything is Done By US

We Can Make it For US

by Tom Cantlon

 

The list of links to chapters can be found at:

http://tomcantlon.com/us_on_rsn

 

This time: Wage theft. It's bigger than you think and reaches up to higher level jobs than you think. It's a great measure of how much leverage we've lost, and of how much progress we've made if we start regaining leverage. But it's also a measure of how much you really care about everyone in the economy or whether you just want to improve things for people like yourself. That in turn is a measure of whether we can make any progress.

 

Wage Theft is Like a Thermometer

Wage theft is a problem in itself, but it's also an indicator of our loss of power. The fact that there is virtually no enforcement is a measure of just how far our position in the priority of things has fallen.

It can also be an indicator of how we, that is the rest of US, how united we are. That's why this issue has it's own section. It's an indicator of whether we really want to be united as US or whether we'd rather just go along as is, as is described further down.

 

Size and scope

Wage theft is a much bigger problem than most people are aware and reaches to much higher job levels than most think. It results in many billions of dollars of lost wages in the country each year. (References are in the notes at the end of this book.) It affects low-level jobs but also much better jobs. Some very big businesses that are usually considered to be places for good white-collar jobs have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in court settlements for shorting workers' pay. That's right, many of the companies thought to offer many of the best jobs have had to pay, not just millions, but hundreds of millions in fines, and that's just the cases that were successfully brought and settled. Many top name high-tech companies, the biggest banks, the top parcel delivery services, insurance companies, and others have paid many tens of millions. Each. For some companies it's up into the hundreds of millions. Worse, it's safe to assume that those settlements were a comprise and that the employees actually lost much more than that.

There are many ways employers can steal from you. From the crude, for instance, just shorting the paycheck or paying less than minimum wage or bullying employees into working extra hours off the clock, to the more subtle. If you're a skilled tech worker, you should be able to sell your skills to the highest bidder, but a bunch of high-tech companies agreed not to hire each other's workers, effectively blocking you from finding your highest pay. Companies that fill government contracts are sometimes required by those contracts to pay certain wages for certain job levels, but the employer can simply require you to do the higher-skilled work but keep you labeled as being in a lower-skilled category.

For the most part there is zero enforcement of wage theft. When there are a lot of employees losing a lot of money in a single company, then it can be enough to be worthwhile for a legal team to pursue it, which is how some of those big settlements came about. But if you're, say, a thirty-five-year-old single mom raising your kids on what you make waitressing at a nice restaurant, but they require you to spend an hour before your shift, off the clock, preparing salads, or they refuse to pay the extra that should come with overtime hours, and you want to get some help to get what's coming to you? Good luck.

It varies by state, but typically help is either hard to find or nonexistent. The police would just tell you that even though someone has stolen what's yours, you have to find help through regulators or courts or anything but them. If the employer steals that same cash out of your wallet, call the police. But if they steal it out of your paycheck, police want nothing to do with it. Is there a labor enforcement regulator? In some states there literally is none. In that case your problem has to rise to a much higher level to trigger federal enforcement into action, and if it's less than that, there is no government body that cares. In states where there is some labor department, it's often a sub-department under the corporate department whose main focus is promoting business growth, not helping workers.

You can take your case to small claims court but only to claim very small amounts, and you have to know what you're doing, and there's no one to enforce payment even if you win. If it's more than that, it goes to civil court, which means it has to be big enough for lawyers to feel they can get your money back plus enough for their fees, which isn't likely. So you're not likely to find a lawyer who will take it on a pay-if-you-win contingency arrangement.

So for many people in many situations the reality is that you did the work, you had your wages stolen, and there ain't nothin' you can do about it.

What compounds it is that even if you win, nobody cares. If an employee wins a civil court case for stolen wages, it's very likely the employer is stealing from others. Maybe the employer just didn't like that one employee, but it's much more likely that employer is stealing just as much from as many as possible. But there is no agency that is likely to take note of that and follow up. Other kinds of crimes do get follow up. If the police learned that some store was slipping counterfeit money in with the good when giving change or some restaurant was finding a way to trick the credit card machine into charging more than what it shows or some convenience store was selling drugs under the counter, they'd recognize that for what it is, a crime, and be all over investigating them for the proof that it's a pattern of their business and shut it down. But if an individual employee wins a case against wage theft, no one notices, and the employer can just keep right on stealing from the rest.

There is perhaps no clearer indicator that the government officials we have elected, and the decisions we have allowed them to implement are not properly focused on achieving our best interests the way they are supposed to.

There isn't much in our national philosophy that's more sacred than work. Yet to an amazingly common degree, and a hugely expensive degree, people simply don't get paid for work they did. Yet despite that huge problem there is so little effort put into dealing with it that it remains huge and expensive. What clearer indication could there be that what is important to US is not important in the way things are run.

Powerful interests have warped the focus into being on other priorities. A re-creation of the proper balance of power needs to happen.

 

But what if wage theft doesn't affect you?

The issue of wage theft is also a test of you, the reader. You may be a white, middle-income person or at least financially secure enough that wage theft seems unlikely to affect you and yours. You may imagine that it only happens to undocumented workers or workers in very low-wage and low-status jobs, like kitchen help, landscape workers, food delivery people, and low-end temp jobs. You might think the only time it happens to anyone in your world is if it's kids who are high-school students at their first fast-food job. You'd be wrong, but that's not the point. The point is, does this seem like something that doesn't affect your world and therefore is not important to you?

Of the issues described in this book, are you mostly focused on getting better wages for middle-income people, while if the lowest-income people in the lowest-status jobs continue as is with little improvement that just doesn't seem like much of a problem? Then look at your priorities carefully because you are looking at the problem. What happens to the lowest-status members of US, what happens to the ones furthest removed from you, who seem to have the least to do with your world, what happens to them is like a mirror. You're looking at a mirror, and in it you see the problem.

The way that we lost our leverage has, yes, a lot to do with powerful interests warping things and, yes, a lot to do with those politicians who have claimed to be for the little guy but then have been wimps about fighting for US, but it also has to do with US. When white people aren't just as concerned about minority people gaining improvements too, when middle-income people aren't just as concerned about the lowest getting a much better and fairer deal too, then we are not united. And a united front is the only significant power we have. If we're mostly concerned about improvements for people like ourselves and not so committed to demanding as much change for others, then we are not US. And without the power of US, there will be no change for US.

Have a clear image in your mind that US is all of US, or don't bother hoping for change.

 

Next

All of the preceding sections have been about what is wrong. So what to do about it? That's what's next, in two sections. First, what to fix. Then, how to do that.

 

 

Tom Cantlon is a business owner and writer in a small western town. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it


This is a section of the book:
US
Everything is Done By US
We Can Make it For US
by Tom Cantlon
The list of links to chapters can be found at:
http://tomcantlon.com/us_on_rsn
This time: Wage theft. It's bigger than you think and reaches up to higher level jobs that you think. It's a great measure of how much leverage we've lost, and of how much progress we've made if we start regaining leverage. But it's also a measure of how much you really care about everyone in the economy or whether you just want to improve things for people like yourself. That in turn is a measure of whether we can make any progress.
Wage Theft is Like a Thermometer
Wage theft is a problem in itself, but it's also an indicator of our loss of power. The fact that there is virtually no enforcement is a measure of just how far our position in the priority of things has fallen.
It can also be an indicator of how we, that is the rest of US, how united we are. That's why this issue has it's own section. It's an indicator of whether we really want to be united as US or whether we'd rather just go along as is, as is described further down.
Size and scope
Wage theft is a much bigger problem than most people are aware and reaches to much higher job levels than most think. It results in many billions of dollars of lost wages in the country each year. (References are in the notes at the end of this book.) It affects low-level jobs but also much better jobs. Some very big businesses that are usually considered to be places for good white-collar jobs have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in court settlements for shorting workers' pay. That's right, many of the companies thought to offer many of the best jobs have had to pay, not just millions, but hundreds of millions in fines, and that's just the cases that were successfully brought and settled. Many top name high-tech companies, the biggest banks, the top parcel delivery services, insurance companies, and others have paid many tens of millions. Each. For some companies it's up into the hundreds of millions. Worse, it's safe to assume that those settlements were a comprise and that the employees actually lost much more than that.
There are many ways employers can steal from you. From the crude, for instance, just shorting the paycheck or paying less than minimum wage or bullying employees into working extra hours off the clock, to the more subtle. If you're a skilled tech worker, you should be able to sell your skills to the highest bidder, but a bunch of high-tech companies agreed not to hire each other's workers, effectively blocking you from finding your highest pay. Companies that fill government contracts are sometimes required by those contracts to pay certain wages for certain job levels, but the employer can simply require you to do the higher-skilled work but keep you labeled as being in a lower-skilled category.
For the most part there is zero enforcement of wage theft. When there are a lot of employees losing a lot of money in a single company, then it can be enough to be worthwhile for a legal team to pursue it, which is how some of those big settlements came about. But if you're, say, a thirty-five-year-old single mom raising your kids on what you make waitressing at a nice restaurant, but they require you to spend an hour before your shift, off the clock, preparing salads, or they refuse to pay the extra that should come with overtime hours, and you want to get some help to get what's coming to you? Good luck.
It varies by state, but typically help is either hard to find or nonexistent. The police would just tell you that even though someone has stolen what's yours, you have to find help through regulators or courts or anything but them. If the employer steals that same cash out of your wallet, call the police. But if they steal it out of your paycheck, police want nothing to do with it. Is there a labor enforcement regulator? In some states there literally is none. In that case your problem has to rise to a much higher level to trigger federal enforcement into action, and if it's less than that, there is no government body that cares. In states where there is some labor department, it's often a sub-department under the corporate department whose main focus is promoting business growth, not helping workers.
You can take your case to small claims court but only to claim very small amounts, and you have to know what you're doing, and there's no one to enforce payment even if you win. If it's more than that, it goes to civil court, which means it has to be big enough for lawyers to feel they can get your money back plus enough for their fees, which isn't likely. So you're not likely to find a lawyer who will take it on a pay-if-you-win contingency arrangement.
So for many people in many situations the reality is that you did the work, you had your wages stolen, and there ain't nothin' you can do about it.
What compounds it is that even if you win, nobody cares. If an employee wins a civil court case for stolen wages, it's very likely the employer is stealing from others. Maybe the employer just didn't like that one employee, but it's much more likely that employer is stealing just as much from as many as possible. But there is no agency that is likely to take note of that and follow up. Other kinds of crimes do get follow up. If the police learned that some store was slipping counterfeit money in with the good when giving change or some restaurant was finding a way to trick the credit card machine into charging more than what it shows or some convenience store was selling drugs under the counter, they'd recognize that for what it is, a crime, and be all over investigating them for the proof that it's a pattern of their business and shut it down. But if an individual employee wins a case against wage theft, no one notices, and the employer can just keep right on stealing from the rest.
There is perhaps no clearer indicator that the government officials we have elected, and the decisions we have allowed them to implement are not properly focused on achieving our best interests the way they are supposed to.
There isn't much in our national philosophy that's more sacred than work. Yet to an amazingly common degree, and a hugely expensive degree, people simply don't get paid for work they did. Yet despite that huge problem there is so little effort put into dealing with it that it remains huge and expensive. What clearer indication could there be that what is important to US is not important in the way things are run.
Powerful interests have warped the focus into being on other priorities. A re-creation of the proper balance of power needs to happen.
But what if wage theft doesn't affect you?
The issue of wage theft is also a test of you, the reader. You may be a white, middle-income person or at least financially secure enough that wage theft seems unlikely to affect you and yours. You may imagine that it only happens to undocumented workers or workers in very low-wage and low-status jobs, like kitchen help, landscape workers, food delivery people, and low-end temp jobs. You might think the only time it happens to anyone in your world is if it's kids who are high-school students at their first fast-food job. You'd be wrong, but that's not the point. The point is, does this seem like something that doesn't affect your world and therefore is not important to you?
Of the issues described in this book, are you mostly focused on getting better wages for middle-income people, while if the lowest-income people in the lowest-status jobs continue as is with little improvement that just doesn't seem like much of a problem? Then look at your priorities carefully because you are looking at the problem. What happens to the lowest-status members of US, what happens to the ones furthest removed from you, who seem to have the least to do with your world, what happens to them is like a mirror. You're looking at a mirror, and in it you see the problem.
The way that we lost our leverage has, yes, a lot to do with powerful interests warping things and, yes, a lot to do with those politicians who have claimed to be for the little guy but then have been wimps about fighting for US, but it also has to do with US. When white people aren't just as concerned about minority people gaining improvements too, when middle-income people aren't just as concerned about the lowest getting a much better and fairer deal too, then we are not united. And a united front is the only significant power we have. If we're mostly concerned about improvements for people like ourselves and not so committed to demanding as much change for others, then we are not US. And without the power of US, there will be no change for US.
Have a clear image in your mind that US is all of US, or don't bother hoping for change.
Next
All of the preceding sections have been about what is wrong. So what to do about it? That's what's next, in two sections. First, what to fix. Then, how to do that.
Tom Cantlon is a business owner and writer in a small western town. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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