Are you fucking kidding me? Sounds like it's worth the risk in case you don't get caught. Cost of doing business, baby!
Per the story, there were 8 technicians and some worked up to 122 hours a week. Let's assume they worked an average of 60 hours a week (extremely generous to the employer). Let's also assume that their work was minimally technically demanding, just requiring reasonable care to break down, transport and set up computers from one location to another; I think $15/hour would be a cheap wage for that sort of work in the Bay Area.
8 staff x $15/hour x 60 hrs/week (no overtime) x 14 weeks is still around $100,000, far more than what the firm has had to pay out. If one were to include all applicable taxes and follow laws on overtime etc., I guess a realistic bill for that amount of work would be double that amount. So far it has cost them maybe $50-60,000 including legal fees - a bargain >:-(
I think the "triviality" of paying the back wages and the "triviality" of the fine are directly related to each other. $40K / (7.25-1.21) = 662 underpaid hours [1], or put into probably an even better unit for comprehension, 16.5 man-weeks or 4.25 man-months.
This is bad, and in particularly bad in a very revealing way. However, it's not like this was a sweatshop employing hundreds for months without detection, which I suspect the mental model people are reading into this story. While I suspect 3.5K is a bit low, the millions upon millions that I suspect many people are emotionally calling for would also be inappropriate.
[1] Forgive me if I don't fully spell out the units here.
Second, I hope you're wrong since a hearty income for the law firm would not benefit the underpaid employees, who I think still got a shitty deal even including the back wages.
It's IMO dangerous to think about this sort of thing as being only possible by a certain "type" of person. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and human beings are very, very good at rationalizing their own behavior, particularly when the descent is gradual.
"If I don't pay them [unfair wage] they'd be out of work anyways. I'm the least of the evils."
"They're earning they would be at home with this bonus, this is good for them."
etc etc. The number of rationalizations is practically infinite.
All of us are susceptible to it. I've seen people better than me fall to frog-boiling rationalizations and I'm not insane enough to think I'm immune. There's a lot to be said for reality checking yourself frequently.
Or do you just assume that works itself out?
Beverly Rubin, vice president of HR Shared Services with Electronics for Imaging [said:] "During this process we unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local U.S. standards."
That's a bit like your VP of accounting expressing surprise at discovering a requirement to file annual tax returns.
The company said it cooperated fully with the U.S. Labor Department once it became aware of the problem, and paid the back wages of the employees.
And why wouldn't they when the costs of noncompliance are so low? Despite being caught, they still only paid CA minimum wage of $8/hour to make up the difference - good luck finding anyone competent to install computers at that price on the open market.
Hopefully the firm will be held to account for immigration fraud as well as labor violations, because there is no way they applied for work visas for these employees - doing so requires making declarations about wage/salary equivalence. Most likely they told their Indian employees to apply for tourist visas and say they were staying with relatives.
then
resulted in more than $40,000 in back wages paid to the eight employees and a fine of $3,500
Show no mercy!
Just goes to show that exploitation, not (jewish) "genius", is behind most of what we mistake for success. So much for the Israeli "startup nation" and its offshoots.
For someone at the senior management level (directly responsible for cross-border staffing, no less) to say that they "overlooked" such laws is either a sign that they are either utterly incompetent -- or plainly lying.
With that said the fines should be MUCH higher.
Also, this is a dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8498341
EDIT: If you don't want me to be referring to you, then I'm not.
