"You'll need expedited courts and a speedier process to dissuade this kind of thing. It needs to be as straightforward as child support law."

All courts are backlogged, many for years. Even "simple" issues can easily take 6+ months.

Child support law isn't that straightforward. It generally isn't even tied to the actual costs to raise the child. It's also rife with abuse for things like unreported income, misusing the money, etc.

My wife took a former employer to small claims court. It was as straight forward as it gets.

Unfortunately, not enough people know about small claims court. I agree.. It's very easy. My dad had several cases in it when some contractors really messed up our house. Very quick resolution.

> “The process for filing a wage-theft complaint form is very onerous and cumbersome, so there’s an immediate obstacle in the process itself. But once that form is filed, it takes months if not years for the department of labor to even investigate it.”

The department of labor doesn't make you whole. It investigates failure to adhere to regulations.

If you are owned money, go to small claims court. If a thousand employees are owed money, the time spent for the company becomes painful indeed, and these court cases will raise the notoriety of the company in the department of labor's view.

Even so, the department of labor has it's own procedures it has to follow to make a fair investigation.

It's different if you're just trying to get what you're obviously owed (especially if small-claims covers it) vs trying to stop the employer from pulling the same shit over and over.

So we have here an anecdote vs. a biased narrative hmmm

I actually think this is a great idea (though very hard to implement). We have special courts and systems for different things, it would be a great idea to have courts dedicated to just resolving employer-employee disputes.

There's no voting solution to gaining that unfortunately

Well, not today.

But if this year you vote for candidates who are more favorable to labor than the other candidates, and then you continue making that (part of) your strategy over the course of several elections, you can start to shift things. Especially if you can get other people on board with the movement.

It's not like the current situation came about by chance or some cosmic inevitability: the right wing in America has been consistently showing up and voting in larger numbers for decades to get where we are.

You would have happily voted for Hindenburg?

Labor wins that we have today have come from coordinated labor movements across partisan lines, not from voting and waiting on service from politicians

I'm afraid I don't know offhand who Hindenburg is, nor even what country he was running in, but:

In the US, due to the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post voting system, if Hindenburg was running against a candidate in the general election who was even one step worse than he was, then yes, I would have voted for him. Even if his platform included kicking puppies and stealing candy from babies. (Because, remember, in this hypothetical, his opponent's platform includes, say, setting fire to puppies and kicking babies.) Any other choice, under the system we have here, is mathematically certain to increase the chance of the candidate I like least winning.

Voting is not saying "I like this person and agree with everything they say." It is saying "I think that, of the two choices on offer, this person is the most likely to move the county/state/country toward the situation I prefer."

It's not about whether the vote makes me happy. It's about whether it makes the world a marginally better place than the realistic alternatives.

Hindenburg was voted as the ideologically safe choice in the opposite direction of hitler but he then in turn granted takeover powers to Hitler anyway some interesting period of history to learn more about/analyze

Ah, gotcha. If I ever learned that level of detail about Hitler's rise to power, I'm afraid I've since forgotten it.

Well, in the case where the choices are Hindenburg (who, at that point in time, may or may not choose to give power to Hitler), or Hitler...Hindenburg is objectively the correct choice.

It's also a great demonstration that the time to be trying to get yourself better options is before it gets to that point.

A point of a demonstration of an extreme like that is a reflection on how fragile and disenfranchising a tactic voting can be. It's argued voting tames people from increasingly illegal alternative action which has historically been found necessary toward labor conditions improvements that we enjoy today (such as through wildcat strikes) or tames them into highly hierarchical and process bound forms of group coordination. Where the sum is a shapeshifting ruling class that largely works toward its own interests regardless of flavor or how often they bow to the power of popular or private interest movements.

I find those arguments unpersuasive.

Voting and other forms of activism are not mutually exclusive, and removing voting from the equation does not particularly make those other forms more attractive, particularly given the likely reasons for people not to engage in other forms of activism today.

It should be as easy as going to the police.

Going to the police is dangerous. Cops hurt people, both intentionally and unintentionally. Never ever talk to cops unless you are legally compelled to do so, and only then with a lawyer.

Getting the cops involved is like showing up with an assault rifle. Even if you intend that no one gets hurt, it's a a dangerous escalation.

It is, it's a state-level thing, and that serves as a check on companies that scale to be national or international.

Makes lobbying over 50x more complicated.

The fact that a UK publication is on about it should be a clear signal that the authors are being influenced by an international interest would like to simplify the process.

Probably chipotle

Here's a page that lists like, a third of the state agencies, I guess, hope this helps! : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Labour

> The fact that a UK publication is on about it should be a clear signal that the authors are being influenced by an international interest would like to simplify the process.

The Guardian has had an office in the US to produce local content for over a decade, now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US

Guardian is an Anglo left-wing activist journalism org. They aren't a corporate front. They report things the captured US media avoids.

In America, going to the police isn’t that easy. They will issue you a police report number for your insurance claim, but they are under zero obligation to investigate or prevent any crime.

They’ve been quiet quitting across the country since the George Floyd protests and they are working less than ever. Police interventions have been going down, crime has been going up, but staffing and funding has been mostly flat. They’re just not doing their jobs because they know if they hold out, funding will increase.

Also sometimes they just kill you.

Even if I were a victim of a major crime I wouldn’t contact the police in the USA unless I needed a police report number for my insurance claim. They’re probably not going to do anything and they might make things a million times worse.

This predates the BLM movement and such.

I’m aware of maybe ten or so property crimes committed against friends, family, and employers, with damage and theft ranging from low-thousands (2024 dollars—some of these were decades ago) to $20k or so. I’ve never once known the police to do anything but scoff at the notion and treat you like an idiot if you go in thinking they’re going to investigate anything at all, no matter how much evidence is available.

And all the people concerned were/are white and middle class, for the record. Even then, nothing.

It’s one of the reasons I tepidly support the more extreme end of “defund”. Let fucking wal-mart or whoever’s getting actual value from the cops pay for them. Me and mine surely aren’t getting our money’s worth.

Indeed, "the cops won't do anything if you get robbed" is a meme among even the most conservative average people. Yet the "back the blue" support persists. Can you imagine if firefighters took your emergency call, never showed up, and still had half the country support giving them MORE funding and less accountability?

Hell, the clearance rate on murders is %50, and that includes a substantial chunk of people incorrectly found guilty despite the cops having DNA evidence that would exonerate them.

According to FBI data, crime is actually decreasing year on year in almost every metric despite police dereliction of duty. Ironically this is creating a stronger case for further police budget cuts and moving that money towards non-traditional policing alternatives. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/us/crime-data-fbi-homicid...