Comment by jacobsenscott
8 years ago
Sounds like he's contracting at a huge company. His contracting company isn't going to make waves over this. I would guess the contracting company is making $300+ an hour off this guy, paying him $50 an hour, and they have 200+ other contractors in the building.
So, wage theft.
Now we're not just talking about a lost opportunity to reward a loyal worker. If you're right, somebody ought to be going to jail.
But nobody will. This is a common story in contractor arrangements---the big, unwritten benefit of the process is that all incentives are aligned to sweep small mistakes (1) under the rug. Contracting client doesn't want to jeopardize a good contract, contractee doesn't want to jeopardize their contract, and employee doesn't want to get fired and black-balled. Who cares if it's a little illegal? :(
(1) "Small" in relation to the whole contract deal; what's one employee's salary in a million-dollar agreement between two corporations?
Its not wage theft. Contractors aren’t humans, from a human resource pov.
> Contractors aren’t humans
Real story from one of the (big) french telecom companies I worked for, as a contractor (a few years ago)...
In that company, a regular employee was given a full desk, contractors were only given 2/3 of a desk (meaning 2 desks put side by side for 3 persons).
Also, contractors were NOT allowed to go to ANY conference. Even when it was about technical stuff that was directly for their project. We had to rely 100% on a transmission of information by our managers/team leads. This led to humorous results, to say the least. Things like: a BIG meeting with plenty of people and managers, who then decided a HUGE technical change on the network, without the ONLY expert because he happened to be a contractor. Once given the results of the meeting, the guy was in a "WTF?" shock. He told me that be immediately binned the request: it basically asked him to disable the authentication server! Not the best decision for a BIG ISP, LOL. Seriously, that's almost beyond belief. (But I have other incredible stories similar to this one).
As a contractor, I have really been mistreated A LOT. So much so that I've sworn never to do it again.
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I don't really know if there's wage theft going on. I suppose the client company got some free work out of him, but the company can argue he shouldn't have been in the building. His badge didn't work, etc. But maybe the will let him bill those hours retroactively.
It's not wage theft because you're getting your agreed upon price...
If he's working for a contracting company, why would he lose wages? Wouldn't he still have a contract with that company? I work for a contracting company (in the EU), and if the client lets me go, I still get paid until a new project can be found.
That’s not how it works everywhere.