nienakarmiony kot

Love 1895

Wage theft is when your boss doesn’t pay you what you’ve already earned. When I learned that Massachusetts had “blue laws,” that my bosses weren’t obeying them, and had shorted me around three thousand dollars, it was wage theft. 

This was the law: retail employees were to be paid at a “premium” rate on Sundays and holidays, time-and-a-half, the same as overtime. But none of the booksellers where I worked had ever been paid it. And while not being paid overtime is a textbook example of wage theft, when I tell people, they are happy to qualify it for me with a “Well…” or an “Okay, but…” I don’t know where this instinct comes from. Maybe it’s because “wage theft” makes it sound premeditated, more like a crime. (But it was a crime!) Or maybe it’s because I worked at an independent bookstore, and indie bookstores are beloved pillars of the community. (What would that mean about the community?) Maybe it’s because it doesn’t makes sense that an independent bookstore would do something like this. Everyone knows indiebookstores are thriving! (Which is true—it’s the people who work in them who are struggling.)

I found out when I was trying to see if I could afford to take a sick day. I felt like I was coming down with something, but taking a day off meant losing a not-insubstantial chunk of my monthly take-home pay ($11.50 an hour). Since there were sick hours adding up in a box labeled “time-off accrual” on my pay stubs—and surely they had to amount to something—I went to mass.gov to check the law. But they amounted to literally nothing, as it turned out: Massachusetts businesses only have to provide paid sick leave if they have more than eleven employees, and we had ten. My “sick days” meant I couldn’t be fired for staying home sick (as long as I wasn’t sick more than five days per year).

But I learned something else. There were links to related pages and I clicked the one about “blue laws,” which I didn’t know we had in Massachusetts.

The Model, 0, Jacek Malczewski

Colonial mannequins, Giorgio de Chirico

Death of Virginia, Study, Nikolai Ge

Medium: oil,canvas

Courtyard Scene, Siena, 1898, Maurice Prendergast