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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...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They can just do this and then they save millions in labor costs and healthcare...
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.
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.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
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.
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.
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.
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
The company where the work was done... not much was said about them in the article. Did they pay top dollar -- and get $1.21; or did "Electronics for Imaging" lowball, and the company knew something was up and just didn't say anything?
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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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.)
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Yeah, I mean slaves were willing to work for free, so it' pretty damn obvious that paying employees at all is stupid.
Minimum wage 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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You'd be willing to work for free too when the alternative is being beaten to death.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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 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...
Ken
Where people = well-off white men who own slaves.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?