Last night John Stewart of The Daily Show skewered the show-proclaimed “face” of recent finance company collapse that are the main cause of our economic woes. He accused Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money of knowing how to manipulate stocks and markets and that finance companies were overleveraged using pension fund, 401K and other investments intended to be long-term in nature as casino chips. All this has amounted to gambling with people’s savings and basically turning Wall Street into a casino for the better part of this decade. You remember Jim Cramer; as reported in the New York Times he told a viewer who asked whether he should remove money from Bear [Stearns]: “No, no, no! Bear Stearns is fine. Bear Stearns is not in trouble.” He did this March 11, 2008. Bear Stearns was acquired by JP Morgan Chase “over the weekend” of March 15-16, 2008.
Stewart claims that the CEOs of finance companies engaged in what amounts to massively unethical or even criminal behavior, overleveraging positions as much as 30 times knowing the deals they created weren’t solvent but walking away from the ashes of finance company failures rich. Are finance companies like Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual bank (also acquired by JP Morgan Chase) and the rest that appear to be the “cause” of our financial distress the only criminals? Or has the increasing transparency of Wall Street greed spilled over into other companies’ executives behaviors and decision-making?
Large companies pressured to lower costs have come up with other ways of behaving in near-criminal ways. Wage theft, or the practice of avoiding paying wages by bypassing employee time tracking to squeeze more work out of normally underpaid employees is on the rise and by larger profile organizations. In December 2008, Wal-Mart settled 63 lawsuits over accusations that it committed wage theft brought by “hundreds of thousands of current and former hourly employees.” The workers and their lawyers will receive at least $352 million and payments could double that! Thousands of workers over a period of years accused the company of forcing them to work off the clock or erasing hours from time cards. According to Business Week, wage theft is being called the “new slavery” of the 21st Century claiming that as many as 10 million American workers have suffered it forfeiting an estimated $40 billion to $50 billion annually in wages. On March 9 the bi-weekly magazine America1 reported that wage theft becoming a “significant problem” in the U.S., robbing the government of as much as $18 billion per year in revenue. As reported in the Santa Fe New Mexican, this trend has prompted the House committee to OK a wage-theft measure last February aimed not only at guaranteeing workers get their wages paid, but also providing employees with protection from retaliation if they complain about unpaid hours. Other examples include carwashes making employees work long hours off the clock, farm worker wage theft and dozens more incidents on the rise.
Greed without ethics often leads to criminal behavior and the frequency and severity of criminal acts against moral, hard working people should be of concern to us all. Employee time clocks should be fundamental to protecting not only employers from paying for hours not properly recorded but also in protecting employees from wage theft. Easy and inexpensive employee time tracking software eliminates wage disputes, decreases employee time theft and removes temptation for employers to engage in wage theft.
1. “Wage theft significant problem in U.S.(SIGNS OF THE TIMES)(Brief article).” America 200.8 (March 9, 2009): 8(1).
Tags: employee time clocks, employee time tracking software, time theft, wage theft
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