this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Wage theft is already a federal crime that the Department of Labor loves to investigate and retrieve up the 3x back pay for impacted employees. Caveat is that you have to report it to the feds. They don't do random inspections; they investigate reports.
Report here: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints
That, and it takes serious work to prove wage theft. You can't just claim that they stole from you, you have to track your own hours, do the deductions that HR should have been doing for taxes and bonus pay for any overtime worked yourself, and then show your paychecks. Add onto that a degree of time where the wage theft is large enough to actually care about (nobody's gonna bother doing this work over 20-100$) and it's a lot more of a pain than one might initially expect.
I don't see how it could ever actually be that small. Anyone making something on the vein of $20-$100 on their paycheck likely works in large groups, which of course means the employer is likely stealing from a large number of them. Any moderate amount of evidence given by just one of those workers should point to a likelihood of theft on the part of the others, totaling a very large amount.
Is the issue that they need to individually prove each and every theft on each employee? I feel like that's similar to a defense claiming "Your honor, the witness saw my client stab the victim the first time, but there's no way to prove he delivered the 2nd through 15th stabs."
On behalf of all workers, thanks for the info and link.