"ImmoralMinority" (araimondo)
07/26/2017 at 09:56 • Filed to: None
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"ImmoralMinority" (araimondo)
07/26/2017 at 09:56 • Filed to: None | 4
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Today I get to go to Hilmar, CA, one of the prime dairy areas of the state, home of the Hilmar Cheese Company. Super nice people up there, some of whom helped make my career.
I am doing a presentation there to a bunch of dairy farmers about areas of risk associated with labor, and what we can do about them. All they want is to not get sued. Not so easy these days.
Unfortunately, all they can do is mitigate risk. In California, the greatest risk a business can take is to hire people. Having employees in this state is like playing Russian Roulette every day.
It has made what I do lucrative, but often depressing. I have multiple cases right now about whether employees are getting cheated when they are told to be in their station at 7 am, but punch in between 6:55 and 6:59. They say the clock rounding to 7 am is illegal and cheats the workers. We are fighting about nothing, but the stakes are high if the courts agree with them.
These are the same courts that recently decided that if a mall security guard takes a rest break and leaves his radio on, then he did not get a rest break.
So my EMS clients are breaking the law by having paramedics leave their radios on while, say, sleeping at their station, because we are denying them a rest break. We would not want an emergency to disturb their 10 minute, duty free rest break. It is insane.
I have farming and food processing clients who employ hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. In a class action, with various penalties included, the numbers spiral out of control. There is no insurance for it.
But in the end, I have never seen one of these cases really help workers. They get a few hundred or a thousand dollars out of a class fund, but their attorneys take home six figure fee awards. It is a form of legalized extortion that benefits no one but lawyers, and hurts businesses badly.
I don’t know what the answer is, because workers do need protection, but this landscape of attorney profiteering is not the way.
As much as I am in favor of small government, I think wage and hour regulation should be through a specialized agency like OSHA. The courts declare rules that affect everyone and have wide reaching unintended consequences far beyond the facts before them. The regulatory process allows all sides to have input into the rules that govern their industry. OSHA has general rules for everyone, and then specific rules for different industries and activities. Wage and hour should be the same way. Instead, agriculture gets blindsided by a court decison out of the auto repair business.
OSHA enforcement is far from perfect, but it is not driven by greed and profit the way litigation is. Wage and hour enforcement needs to be the same way.
Sorry for the long post.
RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> ImmoralMinority
07/26/2017 at 10:02 |
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This post is satisfying to both my adult mind and child mind. Adult mind is interested by legal ramifications, child mind is all “HAPPY COWS COME FROM CALIFORNIA, HURR HURR”
haveacarortwoorthree2
> ImmoralMinority
07/26/2017 at 10:18 |
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Everyone knows the best dairy comes from Wisconsin. :)
Highlander-Datsuns are Forever
> ImmoralMinority
07/26/2017 at 10:57 |
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This is actually very interesting. Since I am a “professional” I am exempt form most labor laws so I get to work as much as I want and sometimes I get paid for it.
My X-type is too a real Jaguar
> ImmoralMinority
07/26/2017 at 11:56 |
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Thank for this insight into California Labor laws, I work from home for a California Company training new hires and this explains so much. It never made sense to me why I had to write people up for signing into their tools before they clocked in.