A new study shows that firms of all types are giving workers phony managerial titles in order to avoid paying them overtime a new study shows that firms of all types and sizes are giving workers phony managerial titles in order to avoid paying them overtime in what researchers see as an exploitation of federal labor laws. “If you are a manager and you're paid over a certain amount, in fact, that lifts the burden of firms having to pay you overtime,” said Lauren Cohen, a professor at Harvard Business School and one of the paper’s authors.

The logic at the time of the law’s creation was that managers are a special class of employee with a particular stake in the company’s future success. But today, many such workers are managers in name only, and the national threshold is only $455 a week, or under $24,000 a year. Cohen and his fellow researchers scoured job listings in the 2010s and discovered that right above that weekly $455 threshold, there was a 485 percent increase in the number of salaried positions with fancy-sounding managerial titles. Companies, it seemed, were often doling out fancy-sounding titles to salaried employees and then paying them just enough to legally shirk overtime rules. “We find widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a federal law,” the researchers state in their paper, which was recently published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30826 On average, the strategy appears to save companies significant amounts of money (and costs workers just as much). The researchers estimate that firms pocket 13.5 percent in overtime payments for each bullshit manager title they hand out.

The overtime-evasion trick held across industries and around the country, according to the data, but was most obvious within industries and states where workers had fewer rights and less bargaining power, as well as in low-wage industries that are more often dinged for overtime violations, like retail and food and drink services.

The lawsuit filed on Thursday alleges their employer has engaged in widespread wage theft resulting from repeated and ongoing problems with payroll. Through an online form, the union has received more than 1,000 reports from members describing problems ranging from missed and incomplete paychecks to improperly deducted taxes and health care premiums, among other issues.

The union has filed class action grievances against the company for violations of its collective bargaining agreement, and in December, the union filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against Kroger through the National Labor Relations Board. “As our case will show, Kroger has engaged in a persistent pattern of wage theft through its failure to correct ongoing and systemic payroll problems resulting from its new ‘MyTime’ software,�? said Matthew Handley, whose firm Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC filed the suit. “The company’s failure to correct these problems is in clear violation of federal and state law, and we intend to seek every remedy available on behalf of these workers. “What we once thought was an isolated local glitch has since revealed itself to be a national problem, said Mr. Federici. “We have spoken to several other UFCW local unions around the country and they’ve all reported widespread and egregious payroll errors. It is outrageous that we should have to bring a lawsuit like this to ensure our members are paid properly and promptly.

The company’s sole director Ayang Sony had arranged for him to travel from China to work for her company under her direction and supervision - but that required a $16,500 premium. While Song claimed the money was a refundable deposit, it was not returned when Sun’s employment ended - something the Employment Relations Authority has now found to have been a breach of the Wages Protection Act 1983. Sun signed an employment contract to work 40 hours a week over five days at $22 an hour when he got the job. But, once he started in the job he was forced to work longer hours for less money. Some fortnights he wasn’t paid at all and others he was underpaid which reduced his hourly rate to below the minimum wage of $15.75 for the next 18 months. A thorough investigation concluded the company had breached minimum employment standards by failing to pay Sun the minimum wage for all hours worked, not paying time-and-a-half and providing alternative holidays for working public holidays, failing to keep full holiday and leave records, not paying for unworked public holidays, not keeping full wage and time records and not providing compliant employment agreements. The company also breached the act by taking the illegal premium payment from Sun to secure the job. The inspector found Sun was entitled to $65,503.78 for underpayment of wages, holiday pay, other allowances and required the company to pay that money to him.

The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fundraising arm of the National Restaurant Association — the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses. The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters. For years, the restaurant association and its affiliates have used ServSafe to create an arrangement with few parallels in Washington, where labor unwittingly helps to pay for management’s lobbying. First, in 2007, the restaurant owners took control of a training business. Then they helped lobby states to mandate the kind of training they already provided — producing a flood of paying customers. The president of the National Restaurant Association, Michelle Korsmo, declined to be interviewed. In a written statement, she said the group had sought to protect both public health and the financial health of the industry. As money flowed in from the National Restaurant Association’s training programs, its overall spending on politics and lobbying more than doubled from 2007 to 2021, tax filings show. The national association donated to Democrats, Republicans and conservative-leaning think tanks, and sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to state restaurant associations to beef up their lobbying.

During the Clinton and Obama administrations, the association was a major force in limiting employer-provided health care benefits. And though pressure from liberal groups has grown and workers’ wages have fallen for decades when adjusted for inflation, the group helped assemble enough bipartisan opposition to scuttle a bill in 2021 to raise the federal minimum wage for all workers to $15 per hour over five years.

The association had also won a series of battles over state-level wage minimums, though its fortunes reversed last year. Both the District of Columbia and Michigan moved to eliminate the “tip credit” system — where restaurants are allowed to pay waiters a salary below the minimum wage, on the expectation that tips from customers will make up the rest. That was the first time any state had eliminated the tip-credit system in more than 10 years.

Legally, the National Restaurant Association and its state-level affiliates are a species of nonprofit called a “business league,” with more freedom to lobby than a traditional charity.

Since the 1960s, their lobbying has focused heavily on the minimum wage — arguing that labor-intensive operations like restaurants, which employ more workers at or near the minimum wage than any other industry, could be put out of business by any significant increase in employee costs.

Fifteen years ago, they had just lost a battle in that fight.

Over the association’s objections, Congress had raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Former board members said they were searching for a new source of revenue — without asking members to pay more in dues.

“That’s when the decision was contemplated, of buying the ServSafe program,” said Burton “Skip” Sack, a former chair of the association’s board. “Because it was profitable.”

At the time, the ServSafe program was run by a charity affiliated with the restaurant association. The association bought the operation, transforming it into an indirect fundraising vehicle.

After that, state restaurant associations in California, Texas and Illinois lobbied for changes in state law.

Previously, those states had required food-safety training for restaurant managers, which typically was paid for by restaurants themselves. After the association’s takeover of ServSafe, lobbying records show, the state affiliates pushed for a broader and less-common type of mandate, covering all food “handlers” like cooks, waiters, bartenders and those who bus tables.

The three state legislatures agreed, in lopsided votes. “This law was happening with or without our participation in the process,” said the president of the California Restaurant Association, Jot Condie. California legislative records show his association was the sponsor of the bill that imposed the mandate.

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Shankar Mishra, the former Wells Fargo executive fired by the bank after he urinated on an elderly woman while intoxicated during an Air India flight in late November, was arrested in New Delhi, according to Indian media reports. “He unzipped his pants and urinated on me and kept standing there until the person sitting next to me tapped him and told him to go back to his seat, at which point he staggered back to his seat,” the woman wrote.

After her clothes were soaked in urine, she was offered “airline pajamas and socks.” She then changed out of her urine-tainted clothes during a trip to the bathroom. She criticized the way in which Air India staff handled her complaint. She wrote that they refused her request to switch seats, even though there was an open spot available in first class.she wrote that airline crew had asked her to return to the urine-soaked seat, which by this time was covered with a sheet, but she refused. the man had sobered up by then and approached her, breaking down in tears and apologizing. He then begged her not to file a complaint so as to spare his family, she wrote. “In my already distraught state, I was further disoriented by being made to confront and negotiate with the perpetrator of the horrific incident in close quarters,” she wrote.

“I told him that his actions were inexcusable, but in the face of his pleading and begging in front of me, and my own shock and trauma, I found it difficult to insist on his arrest or to press charges against him.”

The woman blasted the airline for initially refusing to reimburse her ticket. She wrote that airline staff also refused her request to have the carrier foot the bill for cleaning her pee-stained clothing. He faces charges of committing an obscene act in a public place; assault or criminal force to a woman with intent to outrage her modesty; and misconduct in public by a drunken person.

There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. There are no federal laws governing the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.

Every year, a few hundred customers report to the authorities that valuable items — art, memorabilia, diamonds, jewelry, rare coins, stacks of cash — have disappeared from their safe deposit boxes.

But even when a bank is clearly at fault, customers rarely recover more than a small fraction of what they’ve lost — if they recover anything at all. The combination of lax regulations and customers not paying attention to the fine print of their box-leasing agreements allows many banks to deflect responsibility when valuables are damaged or go missing.

“The big banks fight tooth and nail, and prolong and delay — whatever it takes to wear people down,” said David P. McGuinn, the founder of Safe Deposit Specialists, an industry consulting firm. “The larger the claim, the more likely they are to battle it for years.”

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After paying about $1,500 for home office equipment: a computer, two headsets and a phone line dedicated to Arise; after paying Arise to run a check on her background; after passing Arise’s voice-assessment test and signing Arise’s nondisclosure form; after paying for and passing Arise’s introductory training, to which she devoted three days, unpaid; after paying for and passing a certification course to provide customer service for Arise client AT&T, to which she devoted 44 unpaid days; after then being informed she had to get more training yet — an additional 10 days, for which she was told she would be paid, but wasn’t; and then, after finally getting a chance to sign up for hours and do work for which she would be paid (except for her time spent waiting for technical support, or researching customer issues, or huddling with supervisors), Tami Pendergraft spent three weeks fielding telephone calls from AT&T customers, after which she received a single paycheck.

For $96.12.

More than 105,000 people are on the U.S. waiting list for an organ transplant. Thousands will die before it’s their turn. Thousands more never even get put on the list, considered too much of a long shot.

“The number of organs we have available are never going to be able to meet the demand,” said Dr. Amit Tevar, a transplant surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “This is our frustration.”

That’s why scientists are looking to animals as another source of organs. A Maryland man lived two months after receiving the world’s first heart transplant from a pig last January — an animal genetically modified so its organs didn’t trigger an immediate attack from the human immune system. The FDA is considering whether to allow additional xenotransplantation experiments using kidneys or hearts from gene-edited pigs.

If the Food and Drug Administration agrees, the initial experiment will be outside a patient’s body. Researchers would place a pig-turned-humanlike liver next to a hospital bed to temporarily filter the blood of someone whose own liver suddenly failed. And if that novel “liver assist” works, it would be a critical step toward eventually attempting a bioengineered organ transplant — probably a kidney.

More complex is getting human cells to take over.

“We can’t take billions of cells and push them into the organ at once,” Ross said. When slowly infused, “the cells crawl around and when they see the right environment, they stick.”