shouldn’t the federal minimum wage apply to everyone who is doing work in the US? This seems like fraud
how would you distinguish this from regular outsourcing
Outsourcing is the problem.
The owners take advantage of our commons, tear up our roads, and succeeded because of domestic infrastructure, only to refuse to pay full price for labor and allowing even those wages, in lieu of the taxes they bribe our government to enact loopholes to dodge, to “trickle down” domestically as their always bullshit yay market capitalism talking points lied?
It’s absolutely clownshoes that outsourcing labor/manufacturing is allowed, not because of domestic shortages for a skill, but to explicitly pay pennies on the dollar for the employees you need and screw the country you don’t want to pay taxes to despite record profits even harder.
It’s insane. But we let the owner class dictate whatever they want here, and our well bribed government will even sell it for them by calling it “something something freedom” while never mentioning social consequences, accountability, or responsibility. We aren’t so much a country as a piggy bank and cudgel for the global owner class.
Something something candlemaker’s petition
For those in WTF.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/candle-makers-petition.asp
Borders are violence
I agree, and I’m for dismantling them.
But capitalism has to go with them. Because as it is, the owner class already enjoys a borderlees world, while manipulating those borders against everyone else.
Borders exist solely to maintain and enhance the power of a nation state’s elite. If a people allow an elite class to rise without check, borders will always be inevitable.
That the neat thing, you don’t.
Here, for certain industries (might be all but I don’t have first hand accounts of that), the contractors must make sure that the companies/freelancers they employ pay their taxes, otherwise, they are on the hook for it.
Do the same. If a company outsource work, they should prove that they pay the same as they would in their region, and if it not, be hit hard by fines and/or jail time.
But one can only dream I guess
Should apply to that as well if they’re interacting with the US market. All the way through subcontractors to the end employee. No hiding behind contracting local companies.
i don’t like outsourcing either, but realistically the machine of capitalism isn’t going to allow you to be rid of it in its entirety
honestly i don’t even know if getting rid of multinational organisations is on the whole a good thing, and that’s the only way i can see of getting rid of outsourcing
Outsourcing entirely being gone isn’t realistic… But there’s a huge difference between moving an entire team of say developers to India and having a worker teleconference in to be a cashier. Anyone directly interacting with a customer or end user in any capacity should be paid the same as a local employee in the location they’re “working”.
A Telecashier is fucking stupid and ridiculous.
Remember when we learned that Amazon’s “just put it in your cart to buy” algorithm was really just a bunch of people in India watching you shop on the store surveillance system? That was, like 3 months ago maybe??
yesssssss, but i don’t know how you’d make a legal distinction between those two
then again i’m not a law talking guy so what do i know
but realistically the machine of capitalism isn’t going to allow you to be rid of it in its entirety
Who said anything about that? We’re just talking about putting tariffs on outsourced labor to correct for negative externalities.
$3 is loads more than the Philippines minimum wage. I think it’s $8-$10 per day.
Also, y’all are thinking of what $3 buys in the US. The purchasing power is far different. $3 buys a lot over there.
I’ll ask my wife when she gets home, but I bet $3 is equivalent to $10-$12 in the US.
Also, y’all are thinking of what $3 buys in the US. The purchasing power is far different. $3 buys a lot over there.
You misunderstand. We aren’t unaware or ignoring the purchasing power difference, that’s obvious, everyone knows currency differs. The issue is and always has been the outsourcing to increase profit in general, regardless of country or purchasing disparity. There is no reason to use a teleconferenced cashier for a retail location other than minimizing employee pay, not just by paying the minimum required here but literally taking a local job and shipping it overseas so you can instead pay what would be a clear poverty wage here, while undoubtedly having record profits like all these companies end up with.
So, there actually is a reason to do this beyond pay, but clearly pay is the actual reason they do it.
A restaurant has a set amount of staff. What happens if a few are sick and they have trouble finding someone to fill in?
A remote agent like this could be from a larger organization being contracted out and you’d never have to worry about not having someone to be available.
Edit: 1 person could even be managing multiple stores where they queue the person to assist you as it detects you approaching. Less ideal would be ‘someone will be available in 45 seconds’ type queuing.
Or they just hire enough staff to run the business in the first place. Something that used to just be how you operated a business. If the business wants to gamble on regularly operating without enough employees to cover multiple sick calls then they need to deal with the results of that decision.
Pull from other locations to cover, or God forbid, a manager actually covers a shift, or just close the location for a day if they cannot cover it. You know, what every business that operates with employees deals with.
You’re making excuses and trying to find a justification for a fucking disgraceful, greedy choice by the owner of this business.
No I’m not, you’re just jumping to conclusions. I clearly said it’s obviously about the pay.
The actual idea has potential merit like it or not. It doesn’t have to be scummy. It could be a US based corporation that pays US employees the same or more than what they’d get paid to be there in person.
The employee as I said could be managing more than 1 store, thus be providing more valuable work, and thus earning even more than they’d be earning at the restaurant, or 711, or wherever.
And they could be doing it from the comfort of their home making for a happier employee.
It just turns out that the way this has been implemented has been terrible and exploitative.
Edit: it could even be numerous ipad based kiosks around a mall where you could talk to someone and ask questions about the mall, without having to find and go to the info booth that’s in a single spot (that could also have an actual person there for those that want that). There’d always be someone available since there’d be multiple people for multiple malls all trained on each mall.
Everyone complains about small businesses being driven out, especially in NYC. Their two biggest costs are rent and labor, so of course they try to minimize both of them.
You know what’s cheaper than hiring a cashier and teleconferencing them from the Philippines?
The owner running the cash register. You know, like nearly every non-chain restaurant in the country.
Owner could be the chef, it you know, might not want to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week
Then don’t open a restaurant if you can’t even afford the minimal staff to run it.
They found a way to make it work.
I mean, yeah probably. That’s not the point. The point is that it’s a race to the bottom for people living in higher cost-of-living places.
I really don’t care how much buying power they have over there. A fair days work here in the US should be paid in turn.
And flood the islands with US currency? Seems that would lead to massive inflation and hurt the people not working “in” the US.
So what your saying is they should be paid less because their currency is trash? That’s a logical fallacy.
Okay. Imagine the purchasing power of someone who made the NYC minimum wage of $16/hr.
Maybe pay people for their time, not what the exchange rate “might” be.
Depends on the region, lowest is about 350 php or 6 usd per day. Most of the call centers are in the big cities however where wages are a bit higher and they well enough to be thought of as a decent job.
This practice is rampant across industries and only getting worse. We must demand an end to it through legislation.
We may not agree with it, but this is exactly the same thing as an overseas call center. They’re not physically located in the US and are not subject to any laws here.
They aren’t doing work in the US though.
That is naive. I hope you don’t have any employees
I would just unplug the camera and computer. Every day. Even if I wasn’t buying anything.
Fuck this business.
I’d presume they have a few cashiers from the Philippines but at least one person managing the store.
Boo for OP who didn’t name and shame
https://nypost.com/2024/04/09/us-news/nyc-restaurants-use-zoom-cashiers-from-philippines/
adding that she splits tips with her manager and kitchen staff at the restaurant.
They don’t even let her keep her entire tips. The whole situation is fucked. Somebody mentioned in the article also brought up a great point…
“Today, this is a Filipino woman behind a screen, controlling a POS system — but it’s not crazy to believe that probably in the next six to twelve months, this could be an AI avatar doing all the same things,” he said.
What a shitty future we have.
From the article, Sansan Chicken, Sansan Ramen, and Yaso Kitchen, all in NY. (Since nobody has said it yet)
Zoom ID and pass are in the image tho 😄
Was about to say the same. Up vote instead.
this should be straight up illegal.
It’s not only legal it’s effectively encouraged. Capitalism is a race to the bottom, regardless of consequences.
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Resulted in community silence instead
Why does it seem that the ones who have everything have nothing inside, nothing inside?
People should just not go there. But it’s america and they probably have 1dollar chicken nuggets or something.
I would probably just turn around if I saw and understood what I was looking at. Definitely wouldn’t go back a second time.
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They are not physically in the US, and probably work listed as some sort of overseas contractor. Whatever wages they earn are from their employer who contracts for the restaurant.
That’s probably how it works.
Good thing they build a wall so these mean immigrants are not stealing jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
Oops! All Plantations now!
Guess it wasn’t much of a land for the free. Unless people start pushing back, I gotta question if it’s the home of the brave, either.
Can’t wait to hear how Trump says Philippines
This shit has got to be outlawed. Companies are doing this across the board. Literally skirting labor laws, outsourcing jobs that should be going to us citizens, all to just continue pouring more money into the tops pockets. When will we have all had enough?
Not with this fucking compromised supreme court. Nothing was capitalized on purpose.
I would not shop here. If I saw this, I would turn around and walk out. Go somewhere that they value work.
BuT nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe
BuT nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe
:D
Obligatory -
How about this one from about 2000 years ago:
37 Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few;
Matthew 9:37
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+9%3A37&version=KJV
That was awesome. Deep cut!
Everyone in the US takes advantage of cheap overseas labor. It’s just usually not directly in your face.
It’s usually impossible not to, because we have no visibility into the supply chain or there’s no other options. In this case, it’s impossible to ignore.
This feels cyberpunk. Some netrunner will hack the system and give free meals away because fuck the corpos, right?
I don’t think you need a netrunner to plug a mouse into the pc behind the monitor and hit “Leave” on the (I assume) Zoom call.
Even easier, unplug the ethernet cable.
Whoa, slow down there, Einstein, I don’t understand your hacker jargon!
Or turn off the monitor and bounce lol. If you don’t have employees to fix things, systems are hilariously easy to break.
Fuck corpo shit
Are there movements in the US or globally to force all business into worker coops? Unions are good but I think this is their ultimate limitation, that employers can just offshore their jobs
Argentina has somewhat of a history of workers seizing their factories. I think it would be extremely hard in the U.S. due to the well-funded police. Generally, I guess the movement would be “anarcho-syndicalism.”
Edit: misremembered worker factory takeovers in the past as occurring in Venezuela instead of Argentina.
Thanks. I didn’t know about Venezuela’s history at all. But I meant not more on a policy level to mandate that all companies must be owned equally by employees instead of shareholders
They’ll send in the national guard
Got some sources on that? I was born and raised there and all I can find is the government seizing factories, not the workers
Edit: some sources of my own
Oh shit. Mixed it up with Argentina.
Thanks! First time hearing of this.
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Having no actual person guarding your business is a recipe for theft. If this catches on it will be so much easier to steal from places. I’m ok with this
You shouldnt ever try to protect the cash register at your place of work. They give 0 fucks about you and will have a job posting up before your body is cold.
I remember working in a store and a guy walked through the scanner at the door and it went off, the other employee looked at me and was like “that guy stole something, hey?” And I was just like “yep” and we went back to whatever we were doing lol
This is the way. Ive seen the “security” do the same shit, they don’t get paid enough to throw down over a can of doritos either lol
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Can confirm, if they give any appearance of being human, even for years on end, it’s a lie, they are complete psychopaths and will throw you into the fire not even to save themselves, just to feel slightly less insecure.
Retail jobs will tell you this too as they want as little liability as possible.
Plus the registers only usually have a couple hundred bucks max at one time.
Having no actual person guarding your business is a recipe for theft.
Privatize the profits, socialize the costs
gestures broadly at the entire us pharmaceutical industry
The recommended course of action in a robbery is to follow instructions and hand over anything they ask for. If they grab product and walk out of the store, don’t try to stop them. This is actually less of an insurance liability than having an actual person there.
Yes but in general people are less likely to steal if there is a person standing in front of them watching. I’m not even talking about robbery just people stealing a candy bar or whatever. If it’s just sitting out with no one around people will take it.
Stealing and robbery are different
I’m sure there’s a technical difference but I really don’t care about it.
A 17 year old kid paid minimum wage who gives zero fucks about the company isn’t a huge deterrent either. As long as you don’t put them in risk steal from corpos all the time
Japanese Fried Chicken? JFC
Looks like this is “Japang”. Terrible reviews online and described as actually a “ghost kitchen”.
Ghost kitchens for those who don’t know are basically “restaurants” for online takeout orders. They don’t do in person service.
It’s more they use spray existing kitchens to do so.
The Denny’s around here is a ghost for like 3 different places
Yes sorry you are correct, forgot that critical piece. They often service multiple “places”
Unplug the display & camera, get meals for free?
… and walk into the back to make your own food?
I’d be tempted to do it just for the chaos factor.
Why not just have a kiosk at this point
The monthly subscription to the kiosk software still costs more I bet.
Right, Corpomerica will corpomerica
Working as a graphic designer in the US since the early 2000’s, every employer I ever worked for eventually used Fiverr to pay someone overseas a fraction of what they paid me to do the same work. This doesn’t seem meaningfully different.
Not saying this is okay, just that it’s not even remotely (no pun intended) a new problem.