Tech Firm Fined For Paying Imported Workers $1.21 Per Hour 286
An anonymous reader sends in news about a company that was fined for flying in "about eight employees" from India to work 120-hour weeks for $1.21 per hour. Electronics for Imaging paid several employees from India as little as $1.21 an hour to help install computer systems at the company's Fremont headquarters, federal labor officials said Wednesday. "We are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior from employers," said Susana Blanco, district director of the U.S. Labor Department's wage and hour division in San Francisco.... An anonymous tip prompted the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate the case, which resulted in more than $40,000 in back wages paid to the eight employees and a fine of $3,500 for Electronics for Imaging.
$3500 fine? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a joke. They should have been fined at least as much as the backwages were.
$3500 fine? (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you expect, they have been doing this for over a decade with illegals.
No one has the balls to go after the companies that make use of slave day labor.
If you started fining companys every month a good chunk of money 5-10 grand, graduating 15,20,40 60 for frequent abusers things would change quick.
Yes yes prices may go up, but as minimum wage advocates say, if you have to pay people more, they have more to spend.
Re:$3500 fine? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes yes prices may go up, but as minimum wage advocates say, if you have to pay people more, they have more to spend.
A more sensible argument in favour of minimum wage is that if there isn't one, government assistance to low income earners are in practice a subsidy to companies that then don't have to pay a living wage.
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You'd be willing to work for free too when the alternative is being beaten to death.
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA was founded to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people - that is, ordinary people. At the time, Europe was governed by a small hereditary ruling class living out lives of frivolous luxury by exploiting everyone else. The founders of the USA wanted something different.
Their goal was not to create a a country where ordinary people were fully employed producing luxury goods for the hereditary ruling class - spurred on by the faint hope that once in a blue moon an ordinary "Cinderella", with the right physical proportions, would be able to become a member of the hereditary ruling class. Their goal was a country where ordinary people could live secure comfortable lives free of exploitation and oppression by a hereditary ruling class.
I've been to countries without an effective social safety net or minimum wage. And, yes, unemployment is lower: you'll see little a girl standing out in the middle of a busy intersection beating a broken drum hoping that a few drivers will pay her for her performance a coin or two so she won't have to go to bed hungry yet again. In a certain sense, a triumph of capitalism - even the young children are employed providing entertainment for the upper class.
Full employment isn't the point. Yes, there's a lot of work that needs doing - and despite their claims of greatness the rich simply aren't capable of doing it all - ordinary people do need jobs. The point is that ordinary people need good jobs - jobs that pay enough to live securely and comfortably. And to the extent that such jobs are not available to everyone who needs one then there's needs to be a strong social safety net.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Where people = well-off white men who own slaves.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where people = well-off white men who own slaves.
The original implementation left a lot to be desired but the underlying ideal is something that Americans should rightly be proud of: government for ordinary people where a person is not artificially limited by the circumstances of their birth.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
But I am sure that when you speak of slavery you only think of the harm done to blacks in the US. Other kinds of slavery were different, Right? Try to remember for a second that those founding fathers created something that was much better than anything that came before it.
They were well off. They had money and power. They risked it all. No one knew if the revolution could be won. The British were all powerful at the time. They risked their wealth, their power, their lives and the lives or their families by becoming Traitors. Had the revolution failed they would have been hung as traitors. Their families would have been lucky to get off with only having all of their lands and possessions taken.
They were brave and they risked much more than you or I can imagine doing. You go ahead though and sit there with your awesome knowledge of all things and point out what pieces of crap they are and how you would have done it soo much better.
Re: $3500 fine? (Score:4, Interesting)
old school apprentices were rarely a "guaranteed job at the end" but more like "a shot at taking over the business at the end" if
you paid your dues, learned well, and did a good job. IT has actually moved that direction a little bit. When I interned for HP
while in college, they made it very clear that interns that they liked moved immediately to the top of the stack of resumes when
applying for a full time position practically guaranteeing you a job if they liked you and your performance. It's alot less risk for
them. Places like microsoft have also started using contractors and temp agencies for that purpose. They try you out for a
while, if you do a good job then they bring you on, if you don't, they don't have to worry about all the steps to fire you. It also
helps with company morale as then very few "official" employees ever need to be fired.
Re:$3500 fine? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to agree. If we have these laws, we need to enforce them.
If that means that the costs of products go up because we aren't using illegal aliens as slave labor, then we need to see that cost and understand why that is the case.
We think this is benefiting businesses primarily, but bear in mind, those who favor government programs and regulations to curry favor with progressives may be able to understate the economic effect of those items on the full economy by conveniently pointing to American productivity, but leaving out how much of that productivity is due to workers and businesses that evade those regulations.
Remember, it is a win-win for regulation and business if you can pretend that you have laws you enforce for higher standard of living, but you collude with businesses to make sure that the economy is not harmed by actually applying OSHA rules, minimum wage and social security to *every worker*.
I point this out, not to take the heat off of businesses. They are the ones who actually employ the illegal labor, and they are the primary people at fault. I'm trying to get to the heart of why the government is not enforcing these rules when it would be relatively simple for them to do so effectively. I think it is because no one wants to be up-front about why illegal workers are required to maintain our standard of living. No one wants to admit that we employ an underclass to maintain our citizens in comfort.
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"We think this is benefiting businesses primarily" ... "I point this out, not to take the heat off of businesses."
This is extra hilarious. Here we go again - just because we've created the construct of a corporation to make business activities easier, folks just can't seem to stop actually thinking of them as real people. They're not, and it's real people making the decisions to pay these wages, real people acting in the interest of the American consumer.
Sorry, but the entire population of the USA is at fault. Businesses are simply social creations to help us conduct activities, and the people within them act in
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You got things confused. Government is supposed to act in the interest of all citizens. Businesses act in the interest of their shareholders, not the typical consumer. Sometimes these interests align, and sometimes they don't.
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Re:$3500 fine? (Score:5, Interesting)
Automation of jobs even professional level jobs such as medical or legal is inevitable. The long term prospect is that humans will be superfluous to work. Therefore, our society needs to rethink the purpose of an economy and evolve.
Perhaps ideas like a Universal Basic Income become relevant in a future society devoid of meaningful work.
Perhaps automation makes economic scarcity of essential needs a thing of the past.
Perhaps people become free to seek their own happiness instead of toiling for sustenance.
But that would be monstrously scary to objectivist who might think that society must exploit and privatize everything.
Re:$3500 fine? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck the Objectivists. Their alleged philosophy is rejected by all but a tiny minority of serious academic thinkers as incomplete, idiotic, and unworkable in the real world.
Hell, even Greenspan, who sat at the feet of the weird Ayn Rand, was forced to admit in front of congress that his philosophy doesn't work in the real world, and that was the end of any intellectual underpinnings for the whole anti-regulation, anti-humane, anti-altruism, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, trickle down crap.
I repeat: Fuck the Objectivists and their amoral "Devil take the hindmost" attitudes.
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. The long term prospect is that humans will be superfluous to work. Therefore, our society needs to rethink the purpose of an economy and evolve.
No, society needs to rethink the purpose of creating so many humans.
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We need to do both.
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The world will *always* need ditch diggers....
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The world will *always* need ditch diggers....
So sure of that, are you?
We are approaching a time when the robots will do all that for us... Even the very basic work...
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No, we are approaching a time when the robots *can* do all that for us.
The question is, will they be *cheaper*, which is really all that matters to those having their ditches dug. For $10 per hour, robots may become competitive, but for $1.21 per hour, pretty sure humans will be cheaper for quite a while...
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Yes yes prices may go up, but as minimum wage advocates say, if you have to pay people more, they have more to spend.
At 120 hours a week you don't have much time to spend any of that windfall, and by the time you do have time to go shopping you're spending it in India.
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At 120 hours a week you don't have much time to spend any of that windfall, and by the time you do have time to go shopping you're spending it in India.
There's not even enough time left to sleep, eat and shower - one ought be skeptical of the claims.
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The sort of people who pay slave wages probably consider 6.8 hours of "free time" a day more than adequate for such self-catering needs as sustinance and rest. Don't wanna be too soft on 'em, ya know.
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Considering the general working conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if they made the migrants sleep on pallets in the basement.
lesson from Milton Friedman (Score:3)
Minimum wage [youtube.com] exists because we don't currently have a free market. I'm assuming that people are too lazy to read the books, but highly recommend them.
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Re:$3500 fine? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not clear to me that it was willful avoidance of paying minimum wage - they had a job to do, they got help from some of their existing employees from overseas, who continued to receive their regular wage (in their regular currency) during the time that they were here. So the company paid the back wages to the employees, and a small fine to the government. Doesn't seem unreasonable to give them a little slap on the wrist; save the big punishments for when there are repeated offenses, or more wanton abuse.
I'm more curious what the legal requirement is for paying the local minimum wage instead of a worker's regular salary, when they are working away from their normal office. I certainly wouldn't want to be paid in rupees if I had to travel to an office in India. But if I were there under the same conditions as those workers were here, would there be any violation of US Labor Laws if they paid me the local wage while I was over there? On the other hand, if I go to a college recruiting event in San Francisco for an afternoon, am I entitled to an increased minimum wage of $10.74 for a few hours? What if I'm a driver, paid by the mile, going through different jurisdictions each with their own minimum wage law?
As I think has already been pointed out (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the damage wasn't limited to the employees. Everyone in tech (which is most of
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I think that's where the determination of willful violation versus accidental can make a difference. Sure, if they knew they were violating the law and did it anyway, then they absolutely deserve a bigger punishment. If it's just a case where they didn't really consider the implications of bringing foreign employees to their US office, a small penalty isn't unreasonable. If they weren't willfully violating the law, they're more likely to follow it for its own sake, rather than due to a financial threat.
Re:$3500 fine? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's almost certainly a violation of immigration law. I assume that these people came to Fremont on visitor visas that don't allow the visa holder to "work". Even if the foreign workers were here on H1s or L1s (which I doubt), they would have been violating the salary requirements for that type of visa.
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It's almost certainly a violation of immigration law. I assume that these people came to Fremont on visitor visas that don't allow the visa holder to "work". Even if the foreign workers were here on H1s or L1s (which I doubt), they would have been violating the salary requirements for that type of visa.
My understanding from someone familiar with the case is that they were in the U.S. on L1-B visas that had been legally applied for; it's common practice for companies like IBM to pay their existing wage plus a per diem when they send someone to India to train people there, or to otherwise resolve issues in the foreign country.
From what I've been told, this is a misunderstanding on the part of EFI with regard to equivalence between the labor laws that apply in the other direction, and the labor laws that app
Re:$3500 fine? (Score:4, Interesting)
Jeez, mods, way too much speculation (much of which is wrong) to be a "+5" post...
First, it was in fact L1 visas for short term inter-company work.
The real problem was that EFI paid their Indian employees their existing wages (plus boarding, per diem, and bonuses) while they were in the US. Since US employment law states otherwise, yes, they screwed up, and it's good that they were forced to pay them more. But it's bullshit to call this "slave labor", etc, because of the wage since these employees went back to India with the same wage they were already getting (and no food/lodging costs during that time).
On the other hand, what *is* disturbing is the claims that they worked 120+ hours a week while in the US. I'm almost skeptical of that number as that is literally less than 7 hours a day off the job which isn't enough time for a good night's sleep - but even more or less forcing 100+ hours for an hourly employee, working in a foreign country with likely little say over their duties or conditions seems borderline criminal to me...
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the answer to you last question is yes. If weed is legal in Colorado and I drive from there the Washington state (which also has legal weed) with weed in my car, can I be arrested in states where it is not legal?
If local laws have no value then they have no meaning. If you are a paid driver going through a jurisdiction that requires a minimum wage you are circumspect to that law. Otherwise you are unfairly competing with local drivers that are compliant with the law.
The same can be said for internati
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Re:$3500 fine? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: $3500 fine? (Score:4, Informative)
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..... . As such, the lesson taught was very much a "just don't get caught next time" one.
Who even cares about getting caught... They still got skilled technical work done at <10% above the local minimum wage. No matter how you spin it, it was still a massive deal.
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So, even that is a slap on the wrist.
It's *entirely* a slap on the wrist.
Their crime was being so over the top that they would inevitably bring scrutiny on the cartel as a whole, forcing the government to make a credible response, and no-one wants that. (Well, no-one except those actually working for their income.)
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The entire $40,156 in back wages was distributed directly to the eight affected workers.
The fine was on top of the back wages.
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...which they would have spent anyway had they chosen not to break the law.
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This is the entire purpose of punitive damages. It is impossible to catch someone ev
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And no more visas of any kind for this company. No H1s, no L1s, no B1/B2s, etc.. In this case, the company appears to have been misusing B1/B2 visas (visitors).
Re:$3500 fine? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's still peanuts.
If you really wanted to send a message, they should be required to pay for an external auditor of the governments choice to come in and perform a top-to-bottom audit on all employee and contractor compensation.
And then get fined for anything fishy.
Not it should have been 10* more (Score:2)
Frankly a fine which is less than 1/10 of the backwage, and no prison.... You can be sure as hell that the lessons taught is "try again folks : if you are not caught , you spare ten of tousands of quids, and if you are caught, Baah, no chip off your shoulder, you only pay 8% fine over the amount you tried to leech". Wh
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That's a joke. They should have been fined at least as much as the backwages were.
Why keep it civil? Seems only fair for whoever came up with this plan to spend some time stamping out license plates for Uncle Sam.
Yup, that was the fine (Score:2)
An anonymous tip prompted the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate the case, which resulted in more than $40,000 in back wages paid to the eight employees and a fine of $3,500 for Electronics for Imaging.
In this case, should not the HR people and management be facing criminal charges for slavery? Forcing people to work 120hr work weeks and paying them an illegally low wage strikes me as something that should be sitting on a prosecutors desk. IANAL, but I'd be interested in hearing from one. A 120hr work week is an 18 hour day 7 days a week.
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You are, of course, a moron.
I simply cannot charge $1.21 per hour for my time as an employee. Indeed, I would have to contract at that rate. But, of course, I still need credentials. How can I pay for post-secondary at that rate? I can't.
I need to immigrate to India. And, go to college in India to make this work. But, I *still* cannot compete, not being Indian (ref Infosys).
So it was worth it for the employer. (Score:5, Insightful)
What 3500$? (Score:5, Insightful)
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this doesn't even qualify as a slap on the wrist; more like a fart in their general direction
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It's not entirely unusual. Many regions have exemptions in their labour laws to deal with workers that are only in the jurisdiction temporarily, usually to perform short-term contract work.
Imagine if the roles were reversed. An American company sends a couple of technicians to India to fix some machinery and tries to pay them minimum wage in Indian Rupees rather than American Dollars.
It's obvious that there was some sort of abusive employer-employee relationship (eight employees working up to 122 hours a we
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It's one thing if you bring someone in for a few days (say 5 or less) but that was stretching things to the breaking point..
Re: What 3500$? (Score:2)
If the same company sends US workers to India, will the workers accept India-level wages? How come this only works one way?
It's run by the wealthy (Score:2)
Re:What 3500$? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's wrong with our system is that corporate shills call anyone who suggests any restraint on corporate behavior a "socialist", and enough people are scared that only bloodless corporate tools can get elected.
We vote like a bunch of pussies, and we get the government we deserve.
Re: What 3500$? (Score:2)
There was the $20BN 'Recovery Fund' - that's just under $2BN/dead worker...
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just need a jury to look the other way.
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Please tell me what the fuck is wrong with you? A guy works in a company in India, he is making a market set wage there, obviously he is not forced to work in the company, he is making the best money he can in his country in that company, otherwise he'd be working somewhere else in his country.
He comes to the USA to do some installation work of the product that was developed by his team in his country. How is this at all a sane idea that he now needs to be paid something entirely different based on the co
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So you think that it's okay for a company to, for example, hire a number of people from an impoverished country with a lower cost of living at a rate acceptable to them while living in that country and bring them to another country with a dramatically higher cost of living while offering them the same (now clearly unlivable) wage while they're here?
Let me guess "no one forced them!" Sure, they didn't have to come here to work for slave wages under horribly abusive conditions. They could have stayed in the
See, they don't need H1-B visas... (Score:5, Interesting)
They can just do this and then they save millions in labor costs and healthcare...
fwd.us! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real reason tech companies want more H1B Visas is clear: So they can exploit foreign workers in a mix between the days of indentured servitude and the company towns of the Industrial Revolution. Too much education and culture has gone into making Americans averse to such exploitation; but companies manage to sponsor employees and get away with paying them a pittance under this system. It's the closest thing to chattel slavery still legally viable.
Then, when it gets found out, the company pays a slap-on-the-wrist order a fine....almost nothing compared to fines for sexual harassment or other torts that might affect Americans.
Maybe we should actually penalize companies (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason companies keep doing this stuff is that they have deemed it cost effective. Let's assume they get caught 90% of the time. That means that would have to pay $31500 in fines for the 9 times they were caught and would save $40000 for the time they didn't. They are coming out ahead so the fine are just a cost of doing business. These tiny little fines are not going to stop things like this from happening. At minimum, the fine should be the same amount they would have "saved"(preferably more). At best, we should start putting people in jail for breaking the law just like we do regular people who break the law.
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That's the thing -- they WERE fined the amount they were "saved" -- if the imported workers were being paid minimum wage. Domestic workers doing the same job would have wanted considerably more for the job. Without any escalating penalty for repeat offenders or changes in the penalty structure, it's going to become a cottage industry to just continue to do this and eat the fines. Worst case, you're paying minimum wage for skilled labor.
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At minimum, the fine should be the same amount they would have "saved"(preferably more). At best, we should start putting people in jail for breaking the law just like we do regular people who break the law.
It is "Justice" "seen" to be done.
In reality the penalty should be so severe that no sane employer would expose them selves to that sort of risk. Currently it is like the "slap" in slap and tickle, a little exciting if you get caught and rewarding if you don't. Unfortunately because unions are unpopular in the tech industry there is no organization powerful enough to lobby the congresscritters for law reform as the tech industry settles more and more into mainstream and sleazier employers enter the market.
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I am not too familiar with US laws and regulations. But I assume that if the same company get caught twice or if DoL start catching one company like that every week, then the fines will become higher.
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Wait let me break with tradition and actually go RTFA
Meh, doesn't say, but it does say they would not be able to legally pay
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You are incorrect.
The workers they brought over were not allowed to work in the US. If they had been on H1Bs, they would have to have been paid competitive rates for skilled workers (you can't bring over H1Bs unless they have skills you can't find enough of in the US) so they must be worth $20 an hour at least. If the workers had had real work visas they could have gotten low skill jobs which paid a bit more than minimum wage and would have gotten overtime, would have had some rights, could have negotiate
Pretty trivial penalty (Score:2)
So the company still got their computers installed by paying minimum wage, and also bought a nice laptop for some U.S government employee.
Sounds like they got a bargain.
Increase fine and throw executives in jail (Score:5, Insightful)
I would make the fine at least triple the back wages owed, 120,000 plus the back wages. We should also throw the executives in jail. If anybody stole $40,000 they would face serious jail time. I do not see this as being different from stealing.
Re:Increase fine and throw executives in jail (Score:4, Interesting)
Jailing the executives would probably be the only effective strategy. Any fines just get passed along to customers - and the companies likely have ways to deduct the amount of the fines on their tax returns.
(No doubt, however, if executives realistically faced jail time for the illegal behavior of the companies they manage, they would demand even higher pay - and probably "hazardous duty" pay for any time spent in jail.)
IBM tries to do this too (Score:5, Interesting)
When I lived in China between '07-'09 I interviewed at the local IBM office to do data warehouse ETL. They wanted to pay me a local wage around $1000/month but send me to the US on an 'L' visa whereby they wouldn't be subject to US wage laws which the manager said "we do it all the time". When I pointed out they couldn't send me to the US on any kind of visa since I'm a citizen, they dropped all contact.
Re:IBM tries to do this too (Score:5, Insightful)
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A former coworker of mine, who is an immigrant from India, used to work for an India-base company. They assigned her to one of their US offices under an 'L' visa, paying her what she would have been paid in India. This was very common practice by her (now former) employer and many others she knew about. I suspect it still is.
FWIW, while in the US, she met and married a US citizen. She asked to have her assignment be permanent. but the company declined. She quit and quickly found a job offering 5x what her p
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Nope, there's no wage requirement on the L's, only for the H's. But there is a requirement that the employee work for the company at least a year before getting an L. Yet the IBM office wanted to send me right away on one.
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Who wants to bet (Score:4, Insightful)
Outsourcing companies are almost the definition of evil.
That's just it (Score:2)
Seems ridiculous to me (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL $3500 (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet that company was glad they ripped off workers rather than the music labels.
If it were the music labels they would have been up for 100 times the amount
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If this lopsided penalty situation is not strong evidence that the USA is slipping into a plutocracy, I don't know what is.
Next week (Score:2)
Charles Manson is in for a stern talking to. They are considering finger shaking.
What would the company that had the work done say? (Score:3)
Cheating Rampant, Reporting Not (Score:5, Interesting)
I've personally worked in a shop where they paid the H1B visa workers once every 6 months. They also didn't pay overtime, just the strait hour rate. (But at least it was the right total amount, overtime aside.)
The visa workers had no intention of complaining because they risked getting booted home if they did. (It was during a recession.)
It was at a big company that contracted through a smaller company so that the big company didn't inherent any legal risk of cheating. From the big co's perspective, they are merely paying the contracting company for hours. Where and how the workers were actually paid was legally the small contracting firm's responsibility. Thus, the big co got the benefits of cheating but not the risk. (And the small co. was probably a reshuffle-able front of some larger outfit.)
Something doesn't add up (Score:2)
Something about this doesn't add up, $40,000 distributed between 8 employees is about $5,000 per employee over about 3.5 Months. Assuming that they all worked the Sept 8 - Dec 21 window that figures out to about 15 weeks, or about $333.33 a week that they weren't paid I'm guessing to get them to minimum wage (all BEFORE taxes). Even figuring an average of 100 hours a week that puts their minimum wage pay in California at about $900, where as at $1.21 it would only have been $121 a $779 difference. Those
122 hours at ca min wage is about 1.5K (Score:2)
and they are to cheap to pay that? ok 1.21HR even with OT pay is less then 40 hours at CA min wage.
What us work wants to work that when MD's pays more. In and out burger pays a minimum of $10.50 HR.
State of CA should fine them as well. (Score:2)
and give the workers full back pay + court costs.
1.21$ per hour (Score:2)
"But hey, it's not theft, because those people choose to work at that wage and if they're not happy, it's not like we're preventing them from flying to where the jobs are, right?"
That's how some people think...
Tech labor (Score:5, Insightful)
How? (Score:4, Interesting)
Where did they find housing in Fremont they could afford at $1.21/hr?
How did they feed themselves?
How did they afford the plane ticket to SF?
Let me guess, the company paid for all the above, and subtracted it from their wages... That's about the only way you can approach $1.21/hr.
Now, about that 121/hr work week - that has them working 5 days straight per week, with Saturday and Sunday off... Or about 17 hours a day, every day of the week.
Let me guess, the folks filing the claim subtracted sleep time and founded every waking hour as a work hour because they are either in company housing or at work...
Bottom line, I think their supporters are working too hard to make their case - like the homeless advocates who redefined homeless to include folks who would be homeless if they list their jobs and only have a few weeks savings to live on...
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I've done weeks like that during plant shutdowns but never for more than five weeks in a row. Possible, but stupid for a wide range of reasons. Medical interns put in those sort of hours too but get sleep here and there during that time when they are on duty. Not just possible, but widespread, and stupid for an even wider range of reasons.
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Want to teach employers not to break the law like this, the employees should have been paid 3x their original earnings.
They were paid more than 3 times their original earnings. They were paid at $1.21 an hour originally and then at $8/hour as backpay. They also got a bonus for travel, and almost certainly got money for room and board.
Re:$3,500... really?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you misunderstood. The concept is called Treble Damages [wikipedia.org]. The GP worded it poorly, so I can see where confusion might have arisen. Essentially, they should have been paid 3x the difference between what they should have made and what they actually did make. So, $8.00-$1.21 = $6.79. Then, multiply that by 3. So, $6.79 * 3 = $20.37/hr for the first 40 hours. Additionally, this doesn't take into account overtime (remember those 120 hour weeks?) which (at least in MA, where I'm from--not CA!) is 1.5x the base rate. However, IIRC, certain states (not sure about CA) have exemptions which allow companies to get away with not paying programmers overtime wages. That figure should also have been tripled (as well as the fine against the company should have been tripled). What it boils down to is that they got screwed left, right, and sideways by both the company they worked for and the courts.
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And that's just for the wage theft. There's also the issue of the immigration violation.
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Please, I came REALLY close to doing that much while I was in Texas constructing a hydroponics building.
And I'm like half-crippled.
And it was 7 days a week, by my choice. Prevailing wage, room and board, plus spending cash for when I wanted to go out and treat myself. Start work at 3AM, done by 7-8PM, hit the town for a couple hours, come home, sleep hard, wake up, pop coffee down gullet, repeat!
I did that almost a full straight month.
Re:tip? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they would have been shipped backed to India and lost the pay they were given. Or are you really ignorant enough to think they had any power in the relationship?
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They have a "Social Wall" -- http://w3.efi.com/about-efi/so... [efi.com]
It's the magic of twitter.
There's only one mention of it on that page.