Me, I'd like to know who to report it to in each state if it happens to someone I know. Sounds like a much more blatantly illegal version of something I've heard of a company with a lot of local jobs doing.
It sounds to me like a violation of a federal law regarding hours. Also, since companies like Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, etc., operate in just about every state, and are usually incorporated in Delaware, interstate commerce laws probably apply.
Incidentally, by slugging my original post, "Welcome to life in George W. Bush's America", I did not mean to imply that Bush himself bears any responsibility for what is happening. My point was, for the past 3+ years, we've been ruled by an administration that has shown next to no concern for corporate malfeasance of any kind and has attempted to eliminate most regulations concerning corporate behavior. Last year, for example, the New York Times ran a massive series showing how certain corporations have literally been getting away with murder by running obscenely unsafe operations leading to numerous employee on-the-job fatalities, and OSHA and the Labor Dept. have been gutted of resources to even track let alone stop them. Bush judicial appointees, Bush regulatory appointees, Bush advisory commissions, etc., are stocked with right wingers who think there should be little or no governmental oversight of corporate behavior. Bush and Ashcroft have said little and done less about corporate scandals such as Enron. The Justice Department has pursued cases on its own, basically, while Bush pretends to be preoccupied with Iraq (although he's not so preoccupied that he can't spend days and weeks on the road at campaign fundraisers raking in a record amount of money from the same wealthy people he's showered with tax deductions).
Do I blame Bush for corporations killing their employees and stealing from them? Not directly. But his administration has done very little, if anything, to discourage such malfeasance or to punish the wrongdoers and exact restitution from them. This is the real scandal of American corporate life these days, not the so-called "outsourcing" of some jobs. That's a natural part of seeking advantage. But unless you're Tony Soprano or you're willing to admit that the Communists were right about how capitalism must inevitably lead to worse and worse conditions for the working class, I don't see how you can possibly agree that stealing money from already low paid employees or deliberately exposing them to dangerous working conditions is in any way a natural part of capitalism. And yet Bush does nothing but thump the tub on behalf of his corporate paymasters. So yes, I do blame him in part for a climate in which big corporations think they can get away with just about anything.
Do I hate Bush personally? I despise him and his politics. I think he's a smarmy, smirking git who thinks it's all a hugely amusing fraternity prank that he's gotten away his entire life by succeeding thanks to his Daddy's friends. I also think he's doing a dreadful job of making America and the world a better place, and the way these companies are stealing from their poor employees with basically impunity is just another sign of how we're no safer at home than we are abroad. I think Bush is lazily trying to fool us all into thinking we're better off, even though we really aren't.
In any case, when it comes to sufficient evidence, we have far more evidence of corporate wrongdoing than we ever had of WMD in Iraq.
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Tom Beck
my LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/tomfodw/
"I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I never thought I'd see the last." - Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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