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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.)
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
Do you work on fishing radar or just yacht internals? If you don't have family you must stay with, consider relocating to Trinidad. Much greater demand for marine electricians when everyone needs their boats to work, and most boats are fairly advanced.
A human can self sustain on a smallholding, and stay alive. That gives us a reasonable lower bound on how much human labour is worth - you can build a house, farm, eat, and get by.
Lets see what $7.25 an hour (aka $15,000 a year at 40 hours a week) can get you. You can get a 6 pack of ramen for $2.19 at walmart, so that's $400 a year on food if you expect to eat a packet of ramen 3 times a day. Median one bed rent in the US is $1200 a month, so that's $14,400 on rent. To survive, you're going to need water and sewerage, so that's $200 a month to the local government - $2400. You're also going to need electricity to boil water for that kettle to eat your ramen, and basic heating, so call that $100 a month for the electric bill. Another $1200.
That's us at $18,400 *just* to eat ramen day in day out, doing nothing but that, sitting on a bare floor, staring at a wall while you're not out labouring.
In reality, what a human can produce on a smallholding is significantly better than a packet of ramen 3 times a day, so in reality, food will cost significantly more than that.
So we can pretty firmly establish here, no - human labour is *not* ever worth less than $7.25 an hour. Humans, even when doing the ultimate in unskilled labour, just literally doing nothing but scraping by surviving produce more value than $7.25 an hour. If you're trying to get someone to do something that's worth less than that, then you're actively making humanity less efficient, not more so. Minimum wage law preventing you from doing that is preventing you from making humanity worse.
What a ridiculous set of numbers! I live for about half of that much in Seattle. Water and sewage is not $200/month. My bill is $42 and split with a roommate so it's $21. Also, power is nowhere near as expensive as you claim. I have never seen a power bill that huge. Our bill is usually just under $35 per month split two ways is about $17.50 each.
Why does your kind always exaggerate and lie? We all want to make more money, but the idea that we need to be dishonest about it is ridiculous. I get that you hate the truth and constantly spew lies, but please at least try to make them believable. No sane person believes your $200 per month for water lie. Your kind lies.