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A Phone App Helps Day Laborers Attack Wage Theft (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes with this story from the New York Times, excerpting "After three years of planning, an immigrant rights group in Jackson Heights is set to start a smartphone app for day laborers, a new digital tool with many uses: Workers will be able to rate employers (think Yelp or Uber), log their hours and wages, take pictures of job sites and help identify, down to the color and make of a car, employers with a history of withholding wages. They will also be able to send instant alerts to other workers. The advocacy group will safeguard the information and work with lawyers to negotiate payment."
Adds the submitter: "Although I completely support the app, personally, I see this encountering some significant legal challenges. Hope they've lawyered up." Though the use case is different, this is similar in spirit to "cop watch" apps, like Cell411 and the ACLU's Mobile Justice. (And of course there's Periscope.)
Early reports show Donald Trump is in the lead for the most number of reports from this app.
https://myaccount.nytimes.com/...
Seems to link to someones personal NYT sub.
"Adds the submitter...(And of course there's Periscope)"
Which is a tool 100% unlike either the app the NY Times is writing about or the other two apps the submitter referenced. So while yes, there is Periscope, it is not germane to this discussion.
Sounds good to me. I've recently started logging my hours after a number of suspiciously low pay checks and frequently being "forgotten" on payday.
Being an independent contractor sucks. Especially when the boss is always several states away and never answers his phone.
Yeah, I should quit, I know, but it's either marine electrician or unemployment.
I can see the unintended consequence
IRS
They better be current on all their reporting to the IRS before making any claims for or against anyone. Day labors tend to not be so vigilant in this area
it would be a shame if.....
The advocacy group will safeguard the information and work with lawyers to negotiate payment.
And work with marketers.
Well, maybe not initially as the target group has been looking for something like this and decided it develop it. However, I expect a few sting operations in the near future:
Previously, when workers were robbed of their wages, Mr. Trinidad said, they were unable to respond; because of their immigration status, they were often afraid to report the theft or did not know how.
This won't change their immigration status.
Those damn takers are at it again. The Job creators need your wages. Goddamned socialists!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
but when are we going to start enforcing minimum wage law? Yeah, I know a lot of these are illegals and they're screwed either way, but I know some guys that are ex-cons treated the same way. These guys hurt us all. Shit runs down hill and their low wages serve to depress wages everywhere...
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What about night shift workers?
Apple Inc. did not make it. But it feeds there desires to aid ISIS.
How will the data be verified? There is so much potential for abuse here.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03...
seriously, have you no decency slashdot editors?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So the day laborers want an app of who hires them? Dear IRS... here is a database of people that don't pay taxes.. and a database of small business that hire workers and don't pay tax on them as well...
Seems like a loose loose App... Idiots.
Dear IRS... here is a database of people that don't pay taxes.
Some of those people do pay taxes. I had to file for unemployment benefits a few years ago and discovered that someone used my social security number for employment purposes. The only thing in between my name and the other person's name was the first and last initials. I had to contact the unemployment office to get my benefits readjusted, notified social security that extra funds were credited to my account, and get a PIN from the IRS for filing taxes. As a precaution, I requested new debit and credit cards.
How many day laborers actually make enough to afford a smart phone and its subscription?
There was a rash of people submitting jobs to Mechanical Turk and then not paying anyone. The person paying can rate work as unacceptable and not pay, and there's no real oversight if they just do that all the time (and Amazon doesn't police this at all, or even provide a reputation mechanism). So some academics put together a third-party site, Turkopticon, that people use to rate jobs, payers, etc., which has made it a lot easier to avoid the people on the site who won't pay. Seems like a good idea to extend it to "the real world".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You can only have anything approaching a Free Market[1] with good information flow. This will help the labor market immensely.
[1] Whether it can ever truly exist is a matter of debate and I am dubious on the matter [2]
[2] By the way, do not confuse a Free Market with an unregulated market. Often well regulated markets can approach Free Market conditions. Unregulated markets often become captured markets, e.g. monopolies.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Then you simply don't employ them and don't support those who do. At the very least, illegal immigrant or not, you don't abuse them. We can be humane about shipping them back across the boarder. There's no reason to be hostile and there are zero reasons to be abusive.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Point conceded. If I may, I amend my statement to there are no socially acceptable reasons.
I was initially going to type "good reasons" but then I realized that's entirely too subjective. But, yeah... I mean, some folks might find it emotionally satisfying to plink at them with .22LR rounds but I'm pretty sure that's not really considered socially acceptable. That and we're the US of A and that means we're supposed to hold the moral high ground. Well, it does... It doesn't mean we actually do it. We are supposed to do so.
We're supposed to be the greatest nation on the planet. I'm pretty sure that means we're supposed to avoid abusing illegal immigrants. I'm also sure that we're not supposed to be spying on our own citizens, stripping away liberties as fast as the populace can be convinced to give them up, torturing people, and that sort of thing.
Actually? Come to think of it, we've already gone this far down the rabbit hole. We might just as well put barbed wire and land mines along the border. Then, when we catch 'em, we can make 'em run back through it. We can air it on prime time television and turn it into a game show. Hell, we can force them to run back across at gun point and sell tickets to people who want to wield the guns. Varied ticket prices mean that they get bigger and better weapons.
Where's Trump at? He'd probably sponsor that television show. He might even host it. They could have chutes that they run out of before they have to dart across the border. Anyone who doesn't cross quickly enough gets shot at with a variety of weapons. Each contestant gets their own "zone." The highest scoring contestant gets to come back the following night and participate for free. Non-winning contestants are allowed to take home a trophy so long as they go retrieve it themselves. It could happen.
Seriously, we're supposed to be the example of what people should aspire to become in their own nations. Abusing people who do illegal things (instead of handing down justice) isn't something that normal people aspire to. I don't have any particular love (or even sympathy) for the illegal immigrants. What I do have is a love for my country and I'd like it to be better than it is.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Couldn't this have been done via a website decades ago? What makes apps so special?
I used to do the accounting at a company which used day laborers. I did my job honestly and paid exactly what each employee's time card said they worked. The biggest problem we had was actually people getting their friend to punch in their time card for them before they'd actually arrived for work, and people hanging around before clocking out to pad the amount of time they'd worked.
We let the latter abuse slide because it was usually done to round off 7.98 hours worked to 8 hours (the employees we knew didn't do this just got bigger end of year bonuses instead). The former abuse got serious enough we actually considered switching to a fingerprint-based time card. In the end we decided doing so would send a "we don't trust you" message to all our employees, when it was only a few employees who did it. Instead we opted to put the time clock in a more public location, and have the managers sit down with any of their employees we knew did this and give them a talk stressing that having a friend punch in for them was not allowed.
Huh? I'm not sure I follow what you are saying here.
Good, we can hack their database and then identify the effing illegals using it and send them back from 15,000 feet with a Chinese-made parachute. This app will help us do that.... and the SJW morons who are developing it, well, send them back too.
If I may, I amend my statement to there are no socially acceptable reasons.
Depends on who you socialize with, I could, with relatively little trouble, find a number of people who would find it abhorrent to even suggest they not be as nasty as they could to the illegal immigrants. Or others they disdain.
At most, they'll conceal their viciousness under a layer of concern.
But this kind of thinking is not new, and it's always been easy to bring out. It's not a matter of aspiration, so much as it is the base level, while higher functions take a bit more work.
Then again I saw a bit of a TV show the other day, where a man had his brain function disrupted by a stroke, so he was excessively kind and generous. They could do nothing to deal with it. Then he had another stroke, and he became fearful enough that he wouldn't let someone have his empty cup to refill it with water.
Which brings to mind a David Brin short story where a virus infects people causing them to donate blood more.
The geotagged photos will help President Trump round up both the undocumented aliens and their employers!
The businesses and people which hire day labour probably can't afford to challenge the app creator legally. What they could do is hire unscrupulous hacker groups to DDOS the app's servers, making the app very hard to use. This is the more likely scenario IMHO.
The Feds can use this as a list of business owners that need to be arrested for breaking the law.