this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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US having laws that permit wage theft? Colour me entirely unsurprised.
Vacation time is not the same as hourly wage.
Where I live, failing to give people their legally-mandated annual leave would be no different to failing to pay them their salary. If they resign or are let go, you have to pay out their annual leave (one day of annual leave = one day of extra pay).
They can reasonably instruct you to use your leave if it's building up too much (but what's "reasonable" or "too much" are not specifically legally defined), but they cannot just take it away. Annual leave is literally part of your legal entitlements.
That's cool, and I'd love to see it. "wage" means hourly payment for time worked. Anything else is a benefit or whatever - but not wage. Wage theft is not getting paid wages due.
I'm not going to deny that that might be true in some US states' laws. But it is not true morally or philosophically. From the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on wage theft:
Later in the same paragraph, it includes as an example:
It is pretty uncontroversial that not paying overtime bonus rates is wage theft, and that article goes to great lengths to describe how misclassification (e.g. classing someone as a contractor when they are in fact a direct employee) is wage theft not just philosophically, but at times in the US legally.
Here in Australia, a classic example of wage theft that we hear about companies getting fined for a lot is failure to pay superannuation. A US equivalent to that might be if they failed to pay into a 401k contribution match when their employment contract stated they would. It's not "wage" per se, but it is part of the agreed compensation for work.
Leave entitlements are no different. Whether the law recognises it correctly or not, taking away people's annual leave is wage theft.