From: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Organization: The Man With Ten Cats
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 06:44:18 GMT
Reply-To: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)

In article <BETSYS.92Dec11225825@ra.cs.umb.edu> betsys@cs.umb.edu (Elizabeth Schwartz) writes:
>In article <9212102333.26@rmkhome.UUCP> rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>>The Massachusetts State Labor Board is for anyone who is an hourly wage
>>worker.  There isn't any involvement with the courts.  And if there is a
>>legitimate complaint, they will move very quickly.
>
>It's no good for people at small businesses if 
>a) nobody knows about it and
>b) the boss lies. 

State law requires that such info be posted.  Obviously, the state can't
check everybody.

>I've worked a lot of crummy jobs. I've been fired from several crummy
>jobs. I'm sure that if an employee made it to this board, the  board
>would get told the employee was fired for coming in late, being
>sloppy, bad language, or any other sort of lie that would work. 
>I don't beleive this board could get an employee's job back. Even if
>they did manage, the employee would get fired again on some pretext or
>the boss would make their life hell.

It does.  The state doesn't fool around.  They don't want another
candidate for welfare or general relief.

>   You are kidding yourself if you think that low-wage workers are
>protected from ANYthing in this market. Sexual abuse, maybe, because
>it is in the news a lot and an employee *could* get the media to
>listen if they told a dramatic story. 

Lack of knowledge of the laws is the worst problem.

>  I don't beleive that, in practice, small employers NEED a cause to
>fire hourly workers. Maybe they SHOULD, maybe they SHOULDN't but in
>practice you can be fired for anything, without notice. 
> If you think this isn't true, go get any job serving donuts or
>shipping boxes or washing floors  or working an assembly line. I've
>done all these jobs, and the only fight I ever won was getting paid
>time-and-a-half for overtime for one week...

Food service jobs are a different category.  Businesses with less than
20 employees are a different category.

>  You know, the thing that puzzled me the most was when I worked in a
>large-ish factory and the workers BOASTED of how they had discovered,
>and thrown out, two union organizers. This was a factory where, on a
>pretext, the bosses had cut annual raises to 0-to.25 an hour, many
>workers getting an insulting 5-cent raise, and where workers ate lead
>dust and breathed fiberglass and refused to wear safety glasses. It
>took me a long time to understand all this.

I once worked at a place where the employees asked the a union to come
in for a vote.  I couldn't vote because I was a salaried worker.  The
first thing that the union told the workers was that union dues were
75 cents per hour.  And then the union told them that if they were voted
in, the company would have a right to drop all current pay and benefits,
and that the union would have to renegotiate with the company, with the
possibility of a strike.

The workers voted down the union, they didn't want to gamble with what
they already had.

-- 

Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.UUCP	unixland!rmkhome!rmk	rmk@frog.UUCP
Newsgroups: ne.general