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Tech Firm Fined For Paying Imported Workers $1.21 Per Hour
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 $3,500 for Electronics for Imaging.
That's a joke. They should have been fined at least as much as the backwages were.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Assuming they get caught half the time this is a huge cost savings and they continue.
3500$ per hour of stolen wages? per week? per employee? what the hell is wrong with our system? This is a slap in the wrist, and a clear permission to employers to violate all labor standards. They CEO's lunch tab could be more than this...
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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.
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.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
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.
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.
There will be about 40,000 dollars in unpaid overtime being worked in India over the next few months to make this all back. At this point the workers are back in India where the US Department of Labor can't do anything about it...
Outsourcing companies are almost the definition of evil.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
It's amazing that $1.21/hr is all that stands between an employment dispute and human slave trafficking. The company and involved employees should be punished much more severely, imho.
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
You should have just said yes, and see if you could get something in writing from them. Having that would have earned you more than the job would have paid, and made interesting reading for us.
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I think you misunderstood. The concept is called Treble Damages. 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.
in other parts of the thread, if you don't fine someone several times the profit made from the illegal activity and you don't put them in jail then they will continue to do the activity. I doubt they lost money on the deal, so why stop?
/.) lost wages when the prevailing wage for tech workers was depressed as a result of this behavior.
Also, the damage wasn't limited to the employees. Everyone in tech (which is most of
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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?
So... if they can get away with doing this for tech labor, that means my company can bring 10-20 engineers from our China site to work in the U.S. We can pay them their current wage (no adjustments necessary) and only risk a trivial slap on the wrist if we get caught. This is a win-win. What a great precedent they've set here.
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.
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.
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.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?