Diana Borland's Fissured Workplace

844 Words2 Pages

Diana Borland’s situation is a representation a major problem occurring in the United States. Workers that are being classified as independent contractors are not being protected under the current labor laws even though they have a legal incoming paycheck. I believe that this is wrong. In 1938, the country passed minimum wage laws to protect all employees and now, in 2018, some people are being paid half of the minimum wage and there is nothing that they can do about it. As a country, we need to realize that companies are able to use loopholes in the law by simply calling their employees by a different name. As an at will employee, UPMC had no obligation to keep her around, however the new company, Nuance, should be forced to pay her at least …show more content…

If she earning a paycheck from another party, she should be able to seek benefit from existing labor laws. While she may not be entitled to the $19 per hour that she started with, the new company should be required to pay her a minimum wage salary. David Weil, a former head of the Department of Labor, sees this in the same light. Weil argues that alternative work agreements are causing the workplace to crack and become unstable for the labor force. He refers to this phenomenon as “The Fissured Workplace.” His main arguments stemmed form the fact that new independent contracting was undermining social protections and lowering wages. He also argued that workers are generally worse off in these positions as opposed to previous ones. Weil is correct when he says that social protections are being forgotten in …show more content…

Although an increase in pay leads to better productivity of employees, this is only because they feel they are being paid more than someone at other companies. By definition, efficiency wages are more than the normal wage for a specific job. If every company decided to implement efficiency wages, this would effectively become the new minimum wage and the increase in worker productivity would be non-existent. The textbook reinforces this idea by saying that productivity in the workplace stems from fear of taking a decline in salary if they were to lose their current jobs (178). Humans are naturally motivated through competitive nature. The desires to be better off than the person next you are something that all of us have, even if we don’t want to admit it. Therefore, if your wage is higher than other people in the same position as you, your productivity will also be higher. This entire mindset is seen in a real world setting through Walmart. By increasing their wages, they were able to see an increase in productivity out of their employees as well as a decrease in workers leaving the company. This is only the case because they knew that it was unlikely that they were going to get paid better anywhere else. "Walmart's Efficiency Wages Are Working," states that another benefit from paying higher wages is the access to a different

Open Document