The Time Clock

Mere Percentages

Let's begin by confirming something you probably suspected: that wage cheating occurs because the employer can make more money that way.  Having said that, we need to see how much money this entails.  The answer is, usually not much, but then, it doesn't have to be.

You see, most wage cheating occurs on a very small scale, below the radar.  Among the better examples are the shaving of time and shift-stretching.  Imagine you have a machine shop or small grocery, each with ten hourly workers.  The grocery has to open promptly at eight; the machine shop owner requires his workers to be running their mills at the same hour.  The grocery workers show up, don their work clothes, and are ready for the first customers at the appointed hour.  Likewise, the machinists are at their stations right on time.  And in such cases the workers almost always are working unpaid minutes every week.  These minutes turn into hours, and often into overtime hours, that aren't paid, or aren't paid correctly. 

If the grocery workers show up fifteen minutes early five days a week, that means an hour and a quarter every pay period.  Small potatoes?  Perhaps. But as our friend Karl Marx pointed out, moments are the elements of profit.  And profits in the grocery business are on the order of single digits--and usually closer to zero than nine.  Saving a few pennies on wages, which are the most expensive outlay in just about any business, is good strategy.  And the value of this strategy is that it requires neither threats nor coercion: your proprietor simply requires that his crew be running at a particular hour; cease at another, and make the arrangements themselves.  It all seems so natural, so legal.  Integral to these arrangements is the common misunderstanding among workers that they are only to be paid for work as commonly understood, meaning, not beginning until the first turn of the wrench. 

And another problem: if one of these workers decides or is informed that she is due pay for the preparation time and the after-shift work, she will undoubtedly compare the potential trouble from the complaint with the likelihood of benefit--and forget the whole thing.  Disgruntled workers do not complain nearly as often as disgruntled former workers, for just this reason.

And so we have the situation of the small employer, who cadges moments and pay from workers in an almost innocent way, by relying on their sense of responsibility to the work and the firm.  He saves a bit in wages and is that much further ahead.

Your large employer cheats in a different way, but for the same reason.  There is only a difference in scale--but also, and most crucially, in the locus of culpability.

Imagine now a big-box general merchandise store, one of a chain of hundreds spread across the nation.  The owners (and/or stock holders) are miles distant from any particular outlet; certainly they do not make out the payroll or work schedules for the shop in your town.  Where your small-time operator is personally responsible for most every aspect of his firm, the big fish owners aren't.  They just maintain an HR department, a bank of computers and a staff of accountants to accomplish this--all of which might as well be on the moon.

Wage cheating in large chains occurs because of downward pressure exerted from the top: in policies that are carried way down the line, all the way to first-line supervisors whose first and most important responsibility is to do a particular volume of sales beneath a particular amount of wage expense.  That's where the fun starts.  Nobody in Corporate tells, or has ever told, anybody down on the shop floor to cheat anybody: in fact their personnel manuals all carry specific instructions on how to pay in accordance with the law.  The cheating comes about because of the demands on the lowest-level supervisors, who, if they ever want to become higher-level supervisors, or even just keep their jobs, will find a way to run the shop within the projected budget.

And so it is that workers work uncompensated overtime; that hours are not recorded; that you see all these multi-million dollar payouts from agencies and class-action suits for violations of wage standards.  And why it is that the Corporation can honestly deny that it told anybody or would have permitted anything like the cheating that resulted.  In the end, your giant corporate entity pays some back wages, perhaps some penalties and legal fees, and marches forward to the next set of violations. 

 

A Preface to the Work

One of the commonest questions I get asked about wage work is "Why is there so much wage theft these days?"

The answer to this is more complicated than most people could bear to hear so I usually reply, "Hey, how about them Dodgers?" or something similar.  Very few humans other than policy wonks would ever want to hear the book-length response that the question (about wage theft, not the Dodgers) requires. 

But because you're here and can leave whenever you want, I'll try to give a decent answer in condensed form.

But first of all, there is no such thing as "wage theft."  The term is a neat phrase coined by left-liberal troublemakers (like me) to ratchet up the category of wage-deprivation to the status of a criminal act.  This was done so that the public would begin to pay attention to the issue.  Because it didn't seem to matter much to them that jillions of dollars in wages were essentially stolen from people who had worked for that money.  "Wage theft" is also neater and rolls off the tongue better than the collection of terms and acronyms that more accurately describe the various categories of pay deprivation. 

What we (or you) call wage theft is almost always either the failure to pay a statutory minimum hourly rate or the overtime rate required after a certain number of weekly (federal) and/or daily (California) hours.  That's really it: the employer has either paid or not paid these two or not.  It is an easy thing to categorize: either you got paid right or you didn't, in two basic categories.  

Now that we have that established, the question becomes why workers aren't paid minimum wage and/or overtime in accord with the law.  And that has something to do with workers and something to do with their employers.  We'll go over both of these, if you're still awake.

Employers

Some employers cheat on wages.  A few make mistakes regarding payroll requirements that end up cheating workers.  You will note that these mistakes seldom work in favor of the employee, though I have known this to occur. 

Workers

Workers are sometimes cheated out of wages.  The standard concept of this is that the employer has the obligation to pay correctly but has the power to avoid doing so, and is therefore the only responsible party in the relationship.  A short span of work in the field will show anybody but the most deluded lefty that this is not always the case.  While the boss has to pay and is ultimately responsible for nonpayment, the worker quite often takes a role in his/her own nonpayment.  Shocked?  Good.  I was too, but that was three decades ago and I've gotten used to it.  If you read these pages you should prepare yourself for regular doses of ambiguity, stark and unpleasant reality, and above all, frustration.  Because this work is frustrating in the same way that any investigative work can be.  Your perpetrator is occasionally a victim; your victim is often enough a participant in the offense, and those looking for stock heroes and villains will bail out of the field pretty quickly.  The only constant is the law--or would be, if there were only one law, or if the existing laws were simple and unambiguous.  But they're not and that's the real world.

So why all the wage theft?  Because it pays.  And because the risk and penalties are not severe or threatening enough to deter violators.  Briefly put, you make money cheating and you probably won't get pinched. 

And what about enforcement?  That's another problem, and if it wasn't I wouldn't have had a job all these years.  Enforcement of wage laws is rather like that which controls highway speeding, and I don't need to elaborate on that. 

But is wage theft more common now than before?  I would say yes--and no.  Both of my responses will be discussed in detail later in these pages, if you can take the reading.  I'll break down the issues so that we can approach them in the best way.  Because there's a lot of complexity, ambiguity and just plain blank space in this wage theft universe.  If you're shaking your head now we're on the right path.

Starting Out and Finishing Up

If things go as planned and nobody offers me a job in the next few months I will have accomplished a feat that took me the greater part of my life: I will have retired. 

I have tried to be retired before but failed miserably: three times I tried to cash in my chips only to be yanked back to the table by job offers that were either too good to pass up or which promised conditions that were very attractive.  Mind you, I have seldom worked for money except in the sense that I needed some now and then for necessities.  I worked instead for a silly idea, almost comic now in retrospect, that I could make a difference in the world.

I more or less stumbled into wage and hour work while living in New Jersey about thirty years back.  I was a probation officer and enjoyed that job but wanted to get into something more in line with  my Labor Studies degree and personal inclinations.  At the time you could fill out a paper application for federal jobs and I did so one day while waiting in court for one of my darlings to appear on a new charge.  Eventually I got called in to the federal building in Newark where a skeptical old guy listened to a digest of my dreams before telling me that I could quit yammering, that he had to hire me because of veteran's preference.  On the strength of that endorsement I began the work and have been at it more or less ever since.

Essentially, wage and hour work consists of proving that an employer didn't pay correctly, and getting him to do so.  Both halves of this are difficult and experience only means that one can attempt ever more difficult cases, which is to say that it never really gets much easier.  Wage work is criminal investigation on a civil law basis.  Your offenders are thieves but your tools are fewer and weaker than you would get to use against a pickpocket.  But I digress.

For a few years I entertained a pair of fantasies: that wage theft would wither away in time, like Engels' plan for the Capitalist State, and that I could make a significant dent in the problem.  Friedrich and I have since been disabused of our illusions: the State is here to stay and the dent I made over the years has kept filling itself in with a putty of new violators.  Does this mean I failed, or that all the others doing this work have been defeated?  Not really.  What it means is that there is too much money to be made from not paying, and not enough risk to hinder the act.

Retirement is a time for taking stock and I intend to do just that here, along with explanation of the system and enough analysis to bring sense to its arrangements.   See you at the time clock.