Yes, we think he has a fabulous PR system, but how can you stay cynical when this guy is prosecuting more crooks in one afternoon than you and I would in a lifetime, mostly because we’re not the Attorney General, and the school guidance counselor told us with our grades we shouldn’t try law school, but still: NY AG Eric Schneiderman has become the defender of the little guy, bar none.
Like yesterday’s NY Daily News story on how Domino’s Pizza workers “will soon be rolling in dough, ” on account of a case won by Schneiderman against four franchise owners of 29 Domino’s Pizza stores who were ordered to pay $1.5 million for a bunch of labor violations:
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“In the past two years, the owners of over fifty New York Domino’s franchise locations have admitted to violations of some of the most basic labor law protections— an appalling record of ongoing disregard for workers’ rights, ” Attorney General Schneiderman said in a statement.
The violations included paying delivery workers below minimum wage; failing to pay overtime or under-paying overtime; not reimbursing delivery workers who used their own cars; not reimbursing delivery workers who used their own bicycles to work; violating a state requirement for an additional hour of overtime for workers whose daily shifts exceed 10 hours; violating a state requirement that a worker sent home early get paid for at least three hours; and, our personal favorite: taking “tip credits” without tracking gratuities and assigning tipped workers to kitchen shifts for more time than legally permitted at the tipped hourly wage.
And now the AG is going after the big box crowd: Schneiderman has sent letters to 13 national retailers, including Gap Inc, Target Corp and JC Penney Co Inc, about “on-call shifts, ” telling employees to report or not report to work less than a day before their scheduled shift.
Sent last Friday, Schneiderman’s letters warn the big companies they give workers “too little time to make arrangements for family needs, let alone to find an alternative source of income to compensate for the lost pay” when they’re told their shifts were canceled.
Several bib box stores in New York order employees to check in by phone, text or email to see if they’re actually needed to work a scheduled shift, according to Schneiderman.
See, that’s one of the contributions of the Internet revolution to business efficiency: you can save on labor costs when you own a herd of indentured employees with nowhere else top go. So, some weeks they’ll eat every day, some weeks they’ll have to choose between eating and taking their medicine, or paying rent — a huge savings to the company!
Give ’em hell, Eric!
