Employers ripping workers off!

NERA, the National Employment Rights Authority, had to prosecute 108 employers this year for failure to comply to a legal situation already skewed in their favour.

6,000 workers had over €2.5 million stolen from their wages and this figure is only the tip of the iceberg with NERA employing only 69 inspectors and with most workers in the dark as how to proceed with suspicions or complaints against ruthless bosses. Even when these cases reach the point of prosecution the companies can hold them up in the High Court and with the NERA budget being cut from €9.6 million to €7.9 million it looks like the reality of super exploitation is much higher than the above figures for money recouped reveal.

13% of employers don’t provide proper pay slips for workers, 47% were found not be complying with holiday entitlements, some employers kept no records whatsoever and one facility in the midlands, for example, paid no holiday pay.

Karl Marx a long time ago pointed out that our wages represent only a portion of the working day, they don’t bear any relation to the amount of value we create, if you make 10 TV sets a day your wage may be enough to buy 2.

The boss’s profit comes from that unpaid part of every day when you make him 8 TV sets for free. So the system is based of theft even when it runs according to it’s own legality. But this isn’t enough to satisfy the boss’s absolute greed and as the NERA figures indicate there is another layer of extra exploitation dumped on workers whenever the bosses feel they can et away with it. We have to make it clear that they can’t.