Just following on from this: https://lemmy.nz/post/1134134
Ex-Tesla employee reveals shocking details on worker conditions: ‘You get fired on the spot.’
I’m curious about how far this goes.
You can’t get fired on the spot in NZ, unless you like, shot someone or set the building on fire or something really bad.
But it seems that in the US, there’s little to no protections for employees when their bosses are dickheads?
Also, any personal stories of getting fired on the spot?
It’s not that there aren’t any, it’s that the protections for workers are abysmal compared to protections for businesses.
For example, if I stole money from my employer, they could have me arrested and press charges for theft.
On the other hand, if I am able to prove that my employer hasn’t been paying me fairly and has been shorting my paychecks, I can spend a lot of money to take them to court, and in most cases, all that will happen is the business will have to… pay you back exactly what they already owed you. They won’t pay fines, no one will go to jail, and it’s an “oops” and then slap on the wrist kind of deal.
Worker protections exist, but the deck is stacked against us.
Doesn’t even have to be directly stealing money, “time theft” can be prosecuted.
The Netherlands had a recent court ruling that established that if the employer is satisfied with your performance, then it doesn’t matter how much time you spent doing your job. This was in a case recarding a man secretly working multiple jobs.
Or you could file a complaint with the DOL and let them take care of it – they do not fuck around.
Basically the case, yes. It varies state by state and there are some federal laws but, the enforcement is lacking to say the least and funding tends to be gutted to make it worse. Effectively, since Reagan, there’s been an unending attack on labor rights and regulations. Currently, multiple states are passing laws to bring back child labor and workers who try to unionize are getting axed with no real repercussions.
Oh, yes I heard about the child labour thing. That’s so fucked.
Got a source on the child labour thing? Not doubting you, but as a non-American I’m confused as to how the hell youse aren’t in open revolt.
EDIT: Responding individually later. In short, fuck. In long, thanks all for sending me those links, I’m gonna go wash my eyes out with bleach and attempt to un-know all that I now know
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labor_laws_in_the_United_States
By 2023, states such as New Jersey and Arkansas had loosened child labor restrictions following the lessening of the COVID-19 pandemic severity, with violations increasing nationwide as a tight labor market increased worker demand. Modifications included lowering the age in which children could work certain jobs, expanding the number of and timing of hours they could be required to work, often to include school time, and shielding businesses from civil liability for work-related injuries, illnesses, or deaths sustained by such workers.
Why there are no revolt? Brainwashing. Child labor is part of glorious capitalism, worker’s rights is hideous communism.
Copied from the last link: “As of June, legislators have proposed at least 19 child labor rollbacks over the past two years. Of those, seven have been signed into law in five states (Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, and New Jersey). Most of the legislation has been authored and advanced by Republican lawmakers. However, Democrats in New Jersey played an integral role in passing a 2022 law that increases the number of hours children can work, and Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declined to veto a pair of laws enacted in 2022—one to lower the minimum age for working at a liquor store and another the age to serve alcohol.”
https://abc7chicago.com/child-labor-laws-work-permit-wisconsin/13673003/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/mississippi-poultry-plant-teen-dies
Yeah… Others really beat me to it. It’s pretty fucked up.
What was it like before Regan?
It was still a constant fight but, union membership was at 23.3%, annual strikes and work stoppages were measured in hundreds, wages increased proportionally to productivity gained through technology, and executive salaries were 5-10x average workers’.
Reagan, who had benefitted from membership in the Screen Actors Guild, launched a political war against unions and labor rights, starting with the firing of 11k striking air traffic controllers who he banned from working for the Federal government (a ban only lifted in 1993) and dissolved their union (a fun sidenote to this being that PATCO were the only union that endorsed Reagan and a final “fuck you” cherry on top was the renaming of the DC airport to Reagan National). This showed business that, at least under a GOP government, strikebreaking was again allowed.
All that precipitated rapid decline in union membership for workers in the US, leading to a cycle of increased share of wealth to the top, which was used to buy more legislation to erode labor’s power and roll back protections, which increased the share of wealth to the top…ad infinitum. Now, union membership is 11.3%, exec pay is 400x that of workers, and compensation has completely decoupled from productivity and stagnated.
Uhh that hurts to read. Because I imagine the unions must have otherwise made up for the lack of a legal safety net
“Firing on the spot” is just one item on a long list. No maternity leave, health insurance bound to the job, reliance on tips to pay workers, lack of whistleblower protection, laughable PTO, limited paid time off for health reasons. All of that has been solved in civilized countries, except for the US.
This is crazy to me. Especially tip culture. They tried to start that here for a while but it got shut down.
I’m surprised that they manage to find people who are willing to work for tips. Surely wouldn’t the unreliability be off putting?
In my experience, most chain restaurants back of house line cooks get paid fairly low. So let’s say the highest paid linecook gets 18 an hour. They work 8 hours and make $144 that day before taxes and it is added to their check. Most of the servers in the front of house would make around $150 as well but they worked less hours. (Usually 5-6 hours). They also walk with the tip money at the end of the night. Then they claim what they wish to because the government can’t prove how much you made in tips. Many claim they made far less, others claim what they made for other reasons.
It is common to see servers make twice what cooks do. Which creates an atmosphere where front/back of house don’t get along all the time either.
Ironically, jobs that rely on tips are some of the most inflation resistant besides CEOs, since tips are usually a percentage of the price. It’s unreliable, but very well paying. Employers are also required by law to make up the difference in pay if the tipped worker does not make minimum wage with tips, though many times the employees won’t do this since its incredibly common for tipped workers to not declare tips for taxes
It depends on the restaurant to the degree, but tipped positions are almost always the highest paid position.
- Health insurance bound to the job*
- Laughable PTO*
- Limited paid time of for health reasons*
*If the employer is nice enough to provide any of these things in the first place. Many don’t! For anyone outside the United States, I am not kidding. You can be a full-time worker in the US, working 40+ hours a week, and not get any health insurance, vacation, or paid sick leave. Any!
FWIW, I haven’t had a job that didn’t have all those things since I was 16. I am in the US.
It’s not hard to find jobs that have all those things. But you have to be choosey.
There are also jobs where you work 12 weeks a year and get paid $40 Million, but we’re talking about protections for everyone.
If you leave your job you get to keep your health insurance?
In many US states have what’s referred to as “at-will” employment. When you accept the terms of your employment, there’s a small disclaimer that states that you can be fired for anything at anytime for any reason and without notice.
This is also why we have so many lawsuits here.
So, while there’s no full protection, there are laws available that say you can’t be fired for certain things, and if you can prove that you were fired due to simply being of a “protected class” or in retaliation for reporting a workplace violation, you can sue and can likely win through settlement or decision.
The thing is, few employers will maintain records that indicate that they fired Anita because she was black or Howard because he was gay. It’s usually “Anita had 4 errors in the last year” if pressed for detail. That’s why if you feel any sense of discrimination or other unfairness on the job here, it’s a good idea to keep records of the incidents and dates in a CYA file (Cover Your Ass), just in case.
Wow that sounds exhausting.
Correct. And if you get sick, just hope youve saved enough money or you’ll probably just die.
That’s fucked. There’s a lot I can complain about being in NZ, but dam I can’t imagine not being able to afford healthcare and not having paid sick leave and no accident coverage.
I started adulthood in poverty because I was hit by a negligent driver when I was in college. It takes 7 years for negative reports to fall off of your credit report here, so I spent the first 7 years of my independent adult life in poverty because somebody else was a bad driver and our healthcare is too expensive.
Edit: For those who aren’t familiar with the American system of credit, if you have bad credit, most apartments will not accept you regardless of your income and many jobs will turn you down. It also makes it more expensive to do things like rent or lease anything (or buy a car, which is required in the US) because you will have a higher interest rate. It’s a cycle designed to keep you spiraling downward.
what??? why do you lose credit by getting hit by a car? that’s insane
Nah, I imagine you lose credit by going bankrupt trying to pay for medical bills.
That’s fucking obscene. It’s no wonder things are falling apart. It’s comparable to China in some ways. They just call it ‘social credit score’ instead.
Yep, but the social credit score thing AFAIK is not really implemented that thoroughly or at all. This thing is pervasive in the US and people keep defending it for some reason.
Constitutionally, after a little scuffle in the mid 1800’s, a person or business can’t own an employee. Other than that not really, we usually got to strike and revolt if we want anything, but they keep us so poor that it makes it an untenable option.
But they can still be rented from the government which can still own people as long as they had some drugs planted on them, right? I mean you just went into Slavery-as-a-Service instead of a proper ownership model.
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Private prisons and the loophole created in the amendment allow for the new (horrible) Saas model you’ve been waiting for!
This is true. And in true capitalist nature, the overhead of owning people (paying for room and board etc) can be socialized, while the fruit of their Labor is privatized and made available to well-connected corporations.
You guys get employee protections? What are those like?
I work because I need medical insurance to live. I cannot afford medical insurance on my own without a job. I make 6 figures and live paycheck to paycheck. If I lose my job, I will probably be homeless.
I would love to live in a world with employee protections. I’m not sure what those protections would be but anything better than what we’ve got seems good.
Dam dude.
I mean, for us it’s normal so hard to describe. I guess no one has a constant fear of being laid off out of the blue? And even when a business goes under, they have to pay severance, or in some cases redundancy pay.
Businesses get in real big shit and it’s front page news if they are found to not be paying their employees properly. Like massive fines on top of having to cover the missing pay, and potentially even jail time.
There’s a certain amount of annual leave time that is accrued which can only either be taken as leave days or paid out. Apparently in the US they can just reset your annual leave.
Medical insurance isn’t very common here because we have public healthcare. We also get 10 paid sick days per year (it was 5 before covid).
With all of these burdens on businesses, they still seem to be doing just fine.
Yes, sure but… let’s take a look at CEO pay. Are your CEOs paid 100x more than the highest paid (underling) employee at that company? If not, that’s not the american way! Your businesses are still in business likely because CEOs there consider workers to be a valuable asset. In america, CEOs consider themselves to be the most valuable asset. We would need to decrease their pay to something more reasonable like 10x the highest paid (underling) employee at the company. Until then, we’re all easily replacable.
Severence is nice but in most cases you have to sign an NDA saying that you won’t discuss your severence or your time at the company, and that you won’t paint them in a bad light.
The vast majority of the US has “at will employment”. It means you can be fired any time for whatever reason…or even for no reason.
However, there are a few reasons you cannot be fired. You can’t be fired because of your race, gender, sexuality, age, whether or not you are pregnant.
HOWEVER, because an employer does not have to give a reason for firing you, they could theoretically do something like fire you for something like being gay and pretend it was for some other reason. If you can prove that they fired you for being gay, you can go to court, but that’s exceptionally difficult to impossible to do. So really they can fire you for anything.
Some jobs are unionized, making it harder for employers to fire you willy nilly though. Most jobs are not unionized in the US.
Goddam that sucks. I see why unions are such a big deal.
Is this widely practiced or do you get nice employers who set themselves extra rules?
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Others have covered the details of labor laws in the US, so I won’t touch on that, but your question does make me think about why those kinds of labor protection laws are even seen as a necessity. And I think the answer to that is we (most people, not just Americans) view jobs as equal to livelihood.
But it makes you wonder what the world could be like if we had a universal basic income, where getting fired wasn’t actually the worst thing that could happen to you. It might still suck, but you’d still be able to have a roof over your head and food on your table while you searched for new work. This, critically, would give you more negotiating power when finding new jobs, as you’d likely be less desperate for a job, meaning you could credibly insist upon better pay and better conditions.
But we could take this one step further. In economics, there’s this concept called an externality, which is when you do something that affects someone else as a side effect. When you do something that harms someone else as a side effect (e.g., pollution), that’s called a negative externality. Negative externalities are actually a major problem in completely unregulated economies, because they cause the “invisible hand” of the free market to fail to achieve optimal distribution of goods, i.e., a market failure. The classic example of this is carbon emissions – the true cost to society of carbon emissions (from climate change) is not reflected in the cost of providing carbon-intensive goods, thus we have a tendency to over-produce and over-consume carbon-intensive goods and services. That is, the economy would be better off in the long-run if we emitted less carbon than we currently are, despite the short-term profits of polluting. Anyhoo, this mismatch between sticker price and true cost to society is why carbon tax is almost universally regarded to be the single best climate policy: by accounting for the costs of the negative externality, you can fix the market failure, and the invisible hand can once again work as it’s supposed to.
But where this relates to where I was going is there are also positive externalities, where you have a positive impact on someone else as a side effect of your activities. An example might be doing regenerative agriculture or rewilding a patch of land – the pollinator habitat you provide or the carbon you sequester has positive impacts on other people. And like how negative externalities tend to lead to overconsumption, positive externalities tend to lead to underconsumption. I.e., the economy would be net better off of more people did rewilding and regenerative agriculture, despite the short-term immediate costs they incur. And much like taxing negative externalities (e.g., carbon emissions) is a good way to correct those issues, subsidizing positive externalities is a good way to fix the issues of insufficient good activities.
So imagine if we not only had a UBI, but if the government also would pay you to plant trees or develop/maintain open-source software or any number of other activities that produce positive externalities. If we had these alternative means of maintaining a basic level of livelihood, then maybe we could decouple existing from jobs, and we wouldn’t feel a strong need to coerce businesses into holding onto people, nor would we need to coerce them into paying people enough or giving good enough working conditions – companies would have to pay well and offer good conditions and not fire for unfair reasons, else they’d struggle to fill vacancies.
We all saw how companies begrudgingly had to pay more during the “great resignation”. Or look how the professional class (e.g., doctors, engineers) get good pay and good conditions, precisely because they’re hard to replace. Give workers more options, make them less desperate, and they’ll be empowered to negotiate better pay and better conditions for themselves. Sure, some regulations would still be necessary, but I think there’s a lot of elegance in a bottom-up approach to labor relations.
You are making this too complicated. The “classic example” of a negative externality isn’t carbon emissions, it’s the “tragedy of the commons”. People would overuse public land to graze their animals. Nobody took care of the public land or refrained from grazing to allow the grass to grow back, so it sucked.
A better example of a positive externality is a nice cafe that provides a nice environment for a town. The cafe doesn’t just provide sandwiches and coffee. It improves the area around it and nearby businesses benefit.
Thanks for your essay! I hadn’t looked at carbon taxes like that before, it makes sense now.
Carbon credits though still sounds like meth credits in a rehab facility.
I’m an atheist when it comes to ‘the invisible hand.’ I think regulation is absolutely necessary.
Best argument for a UBI I’ve heard so far.
We have quite a lot of employee protections (not as much as Europe but a lot more than people realize), it’s the enforcement that is the issue. While you can be fired without notice for any legal reason, if you are fired for an illegal reason or an illegal reason played a role in their decision to fire you, you can get quite a nice settlement from that. However, if you are fired without a good reason, the employer has to pay for your unemployment, so the majority of employers will only fire an employee if it falls under a reason that makes you ineligible for unemployment like poor performance or attendance (and labor attorneys can often sniff out when an employer is lying about it to screw you out of unemployment). Contrary to several other countries, employees can just quit without notice or even informing their employer, as at will employment goes both ways
Edit: Lots of other replies mention this, so I’m just repeating things…
“At-will” employment is actually a state-level law, and at least one state (Montana) isn’t an at-will state. That doesn’t invalidate your general points, just think it’s an interesting tidbit.
We have a lot of laws, enforcement is the thing we lack.
Enforcement AND more laws. You can’t enforce PTO and parental leave laws if you don’t pass them first.
THAT’S FREEDOM BAYBAY!
sobs
Not American, so i wanted to know whether a customer can really complain and get a worker fired. I read a lot of posts on reddit where people used to brag about getting workers fired for some silly mistakes. Reading that was weird. Do employers really fire employees just because someone complained on the phone due to some silly reason? Do companies believe the customer story more than the employee story? Why the need to fire anyone? Just tell the customer it’s none of their business.
Theoretically it can happen. In practical terms, 99% of those cases are out of three things:
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A charade to get an angry customer to go away (pretending to fire an employee)
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The last straw in a series of incidents that add up to justify firing the employee (i.e. the employee has repeatedly made a mistake with no improvement over a long period of time)
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Misconduct egregious enough to warrant firing them on the spot (for example, the employee punches a customer, or shows up to a job site blackout drunk)
The remaining 1% of cases are truly shitty managers that are a nightmare to work for.
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I was fired once because I thought it was bullshit that the company’s paychecks kept bouncing, and that we had a employee in the hospital without medical insurance because the CEO didn’t pay the health insurance premiums.
Each paycheck was a race to the bank to see if yours would get cached first. If you deposited the paycheck in your bank account directly, normally no money would enter your bank account because employer didn’t have enough funds to pay everyone. I was a programer making $9 an hour.
So, this is a question with a cultural and legal element. Legally speaking, it is possible in many U.S. states to be fired for no reason – the employer does not need to explain themselves when asked for a cause[1]. This is to say that it’s perfectly legally possible in (many) U.S. states to be fired for a reason so petty as a customer complaint – whether or not that was the official cause notwithstanding[2].
With that being said, employers aren’t compelled to fire their own employees in response to a customer complaint. From a management perspective, it’s generally very inefficient to fire someone because you’ll then have to cover their hours and find/train a replacement. For that reason alone, it’s already rare in most industries for truly petty firings to happen. Unfortunately, this rule of thumb gets totally flipped in low-training industries whenever there’s a surplus of bodies in the labor pool. As a manager, if you’re able to replace a burnt-out and/or below-average worker by the end of the week, why wouldn’t you roll those dice?
Even then, it’s not exactly a daily occurance even in settings where these conditions are common… with one big exception. When it comes to businesses which serve “regulars” (e.g.: hotels, restaurants, grocery stores) there exists a certain type of individual who expects that their complaints will have the power to get people fired. This variety of power-starved person tends to exclusively patronize establishments where they feel taken seriously. Such establishments deliberately choose to indulge these sleazebags because they’re potential “whales” – people who, if handled correctly, will be worth much more money than the replacement cost of the staff they cause to be fired. These firings are basically performative in nature and have nothing at all to do with something the employee could have controlled.
Protected classes are a whole other can of worms. For the purposes of this explainer, please just trust me when I say that the legal system is still able to protect protected classes without directly requiring paperwork from the employers themselves. The system would be significantly better at this job with a papertrail requirement, but the fact that it manages to work at all when employers can basically ghost employees is something worth noting. ↩︎
Another can of worms! As you may imagine, when giving a reason is optional, it is often (but not always) legally advantageous for employers to report petty firings as no-cause firings. It’s all about CYA. For example, if they’re doing something dicey like racial discrimination or retaliation against union organizers, an employer might go in the opposite direction and meticulously document dozens of petty reasons in excrutiating detail. This is usually what’s happening when a service-worker employee is “written up” – that information goes in a file to be used against them if they ever sue. ↩︎
It’s bad management if they do that. That employee is going to file for unemployment and will probably get it, which companies have to pay a premium for. The company also has to hire and train a new employee to replace the one they sacked, costing the company even more. I know of times that sort of situation has happened, but in my experience working for various companies most managers aren’t that incompetent to take every Karen’s word at face value and immediately fire their staff over a random person’s word about petty BS, even if they humor said Karen on the phone pretending that they will to get them to shut up
So what they’re referring to in that instance “you can be fired on the spot” there are states that have laws that say employees are basically working “at will” and can be fired without explanation or cause unless the employee is apart of a protected class and is fired for being in a protected class, an example of this is a member of the LGBTQ+ community being fired for their sexual orientation. There are states that protect against this but it’s a state by state basis.
There’s actually quite a few at the federal level – not enough, but they exist. There’s a decent overview of the federal labor laws available here. Individual states also have additional laws, and shockingly “liberal” (in the American sense) states tend to have stronger worker protections than “conservative” ones.
Of course scumbag employers count on most people not knowing those laws or how to report violations and will actively push misinformation about them.
Edit:
As a bonus, have a Walmart
anti-union propagandatraining video, because Walmart cares about you..Wow, that made me feel icky to watch. And not just because of the 10p resolution.
Yes, we do have federal labor laws, which you can find summarized here: https://www.usa.gov/labor-laws. They just kind of suck compared to peer nations. Here is the section most relevant to the Tesla employee story:
All states, except Montana, allow “at will” employment. This means that an employer or employee can end the employment at any time, for any reason. However, the reason for termination cannot be illegal. This includes:
- Discrimination based on race, sex, age (40 and over), nation of origin, disability, or genetic information
- Retaliation for reporting illegal or unsafe workplace practices
- Refusing to conduct illegal activities
Like others have said, enforcement is spotty, and what state you live in / whether the job is unionized plays a huge role as well in terms of what you actually experience.
