WHat are some of the crulest things US employers can do to employees and get away with it?

[cornopean]

@Vaevictis

Get away with it is defined in two ways:

1. The actions must be de facto legal in the sense that the employer has no reasonable expectation that his/her actions will result in imprisonment or fines of an amount sufficient to make the business not profitable.

2. The actions must not cause the business to implode by making it impossible to hire employees. Off the cuff, I’d imagine, for example, that the cruelest treatment would be possible in a business which has a constant supply of replacement workers available.

Martin Feldstein wrote in a recent article that some employers are cutting their employee’s pay by the amount of the fine they have to pay to avoid providing their employees health care.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

No he didn’t.

[The_Tooth]

@lawoot

I worked for a McDonalds franchise in the 80’s that made employees get into the dumpster and stomp down the trash. Does that count?

I doubt it. Did many kids put up a fight? Sounds like fun to me. Cruel would be to hold employees in the dumpster upside-down and tamp the garbage down with their heads.

Don’t know if they’d get away with that, though. I’m not really familiar with work-at-will laws.

[Mrmanface]

@Translucent_Daydream

In Texas, you aren’t required to carry Worker’s Compensation to cover your employees.

About two years ago, I was a service technician installing security and fire alarm systems (still am today.) For whatever reason, my boss decides he wants to go hang out and the field and be helpful. So I am on top of a ladder with my hand in a hole in the ceiling we just cut out, and he wants me to “tap on that wall header there, I wanna make sure I am thinking this is the top where I think it is, just keep tapping on it while I go over there.”

I started tapping, and was tapping for about 10 seconds.

Then a 3/8" flexible bit drives through the wall, up inside of my right wrist, deflects off of the bones right by the major arteries, and about two inches inside of my palm. Gets ripped down in a different location. I start to bleed out. I tell the boss he drilled me, he says, “Oh, shit. Can you finish the job?”

So like a moron, I bandage my hand with paper towels and electrical tape, and, after I pass out for a little while, get enough of my bearings together to help pick up some tools, and then fall over. While I was passed out, the property owner tried to call 911 but was asked not to by my boss because “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

So I have to drive us back to the shop, because my boss was too shaken up to drive. Somehow we make it. He wants me to complete the day, to which I tell him no because I needed to go to the hospital. I get to the hospital and discover that since my injury happened at work my health insurance wouldn’t cover it, it needed to go through my employer’s non existent Worker’s Compensation Insurance. I leave the hospital with new gauze on my 3/8" hole and head to a clinic to try to get stitches.

So I go to my doctor, bleed everywhere there, she makes 5 phone calls and finds a clinic that will let me do some insurance fraud to cover the 29 stitches I need, but I have shitty insurance through my employer so I had to fork over the entirety of my checking account to start a payment plan to pay off my $3000 deductible. Meanwhile, back at the office, there is a fight that erupts because the company plan was to fire me. The office manager threatens to quit and my cousin, the other technician on staff, threatens to walk out leaving a government contract unfinished. So they call me and tell me that, against their better judgement, they are going to keep me as an employee, even through “I am raping their insurance premium and I had better not use it again for the rest of the year.”

My doctor told me that this is a common occurrence and I should expect to get fired. Standard operating procedures in this circumstance involve me paying for the entirety of the medical bills up front and out of pocket, and suing the employer to get the funds compensated. Turn around time to be expected was up to two years. I called two of my lawyer friends, they offered to take the case up for free, but warned me that going after the funds will cause me to get fired and probably black balled out of my industry.

Recovery time was 4 weeks, which I got way behind on my rent, utility bills, and insurance payments. Oh, and I didn’t get paid a dime for the time I had to take off of work.

And keep in mind, I single-handedly brought in 4 million dollars revenue for a company of 7 for that fiscal year. Cost of business for that 4 million was something like $800,000. To say I was a drag on the company that relied on my efforts to stay open would be false.

And I got septicemia and almost died.

I also used to work for a gas station in college that was broken into “two separate businesses” so that you would clock into two different time clocks, each four hours apart. They did this so you would never get over 40 hours with one “business” so when you were required to work 72 hours a week because of the creative business arrangements.

Gotta love Texas.

The story is just too sad for words.

I can’t stop laughing at that story. My God friend. You’d be better off in shit hole ex soviet Eastern European country. I can’t stop laughing. That is just too funny.

My advice to you. Spend all of your efforts. I mean all of them. To get the hell out of the good ole US of A. Learn french, learn German but get the hell out.

[clairobscur]

@Translucent_Daydream

It happened in April 2012.

Just to add : I hope you’ll be able to sue them for every dollar they have and that you will keep us updated.

[Nava]

There’s a gypsy curse which says “may you have suits and win them”. In this case since you already got the suit, I hope you win enough to justify victory laps around the courthouse.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Translucent_Daydream

I have two friends that are lawyers, one actually specializes in Workers Compensation Cases. The problem with taking the company on is that when I get fired, its essentially black balling me with everyone else I would try to get a job with in the area…

<snip>

It happened in April 2012.

Make sure you stay on top of it, then. Keep your medical bills and the like, and check with your friend about the statute of limitations for tort actions in Texas. As a not-yet-lawyer I can’t get in trouble for saying that it sounds like an open and shut case, assuming all the facts are as you describe.

[bubba001]

@seal_cleaner

I read about a plant where the bathroom stall was in the middle of the work floor, with the partition reaching only chest high, so supervisors could make sure there was no ulterior motive for the break.

That was pretty common in auto factories until WW2. With the war, women started working in the plants, and more “cover” was required.

[Doug_K]

@Karrius

DarkDungeon, while I sympatize, I think you’re making useless attacks here. Sure, the sort of work-study you’re talking about can be great for students. But a lot of these “internships” aren’t for students. I have a 25 year old friend who’s working at a “internship” for no payment, producing usable work, and isn’t being paid because they were told “This is a start-up, and investors don’t like it when employees get paid before a profit is made”. That shit is starting to be really, really common, and needs to stop. It’s exploitive and pretty much slavery, because people can’t find jobs, and are told “if you work as our slave long enough, we might pay you” - and when those people are fed up with waiting, and want to do something unreasonable like be able to afford food, they’re just replaced.

I would think investors would like it even less if the companies they invested in went belly up because fines imposed by the DOL. That violates at least 4 of the tests for unpaid interns.

[Mama_Zappa]

@CrazyCatLady

Happened to me every night when I was waiting tables at Cracker Barrel. As soon as the last customer left, the regular doors were chained and padlocked until all the drawers were counted out and reconciled and the bank deposit put together. You either left before the last customer, if you got cut early or they lingered for ages and you had your sidework finished, or else you finished while they were doing the money and then sat there twiddling your thumbs till they were bloody well through, usually half an hour or so. And you were expected to clock out while twiddling your thumbs, because that extra dollar or so a head was apparently just going to bust them the fuck up.

The fire exits were left alone, but using one of them sent an alarm to the fire department and would have resulted in all kinds of fines.

There were no locked doors (well, the doors the customers came in were locked) but when I worked at a Wendy’s in high school we were allowed 1 hour to do all the closing tasks. If we weren’t done in 1 hour, we still had to clock out.

We didn’t know any better - I’m sure that’s why they instituted that policy.