I wrote this a few months ago, and it fell through the cracks. Here it is, though.

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Apparently, more and more American workers are suing employers for unpaid overtime pay:

Americans were pushed to their limit in the recession and its aftermath as they worked longer hours, often for the same or less pay, after businesses laid off almost 9 million employees.

Now, many are striking back in court. Since the height of the recession in 2008, more workers across the nation have been suing employers under federal and state wage-and-hour laws. The number of lawsuits filed last year was up 32% vs. 2008, an increase that some experts partly attribute to a post-downturn austerity that pervaded the American workplace and artificially inflated U.S. productivity.

Workers’ main grievance is that they had to put in more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay through various practices:

• They were forced to work off the clock.

I noted this story because my one experience in court was exactly this. It was back in 1984, if I am not mistaken. I worked at a movie theater for a couple of certifiable douchebags, perhaps the two most unpleasant and dishonest people I have personally known.

They came across as convincingly earnest at first, as douchebags often do. When they took over the theater, they told all the people who were already working there about their dreams to make that theater a terrific place. However, they needed to build up capital, and could not afford everything at the start. They said that they could guarantee us a good health care plan later on, for example, if we would be willing to forgo overtime pay for a while at the beginning. We thought that an actual health care package was way more than we could expect, and didn’t think that overtime would matter much, so we agreed.

Of course, the no-overtime policy never disappeared, and the promised health care plan never materialized.

At one point, one of the workers left and sued the theater for unpaid overtime pay. At that point, the owners told everybody that before they would accept our timecards, we would have to re-write them–falsifying the records, spreading the hours around so that they would never go over 8 hours a day or 40 per week.

Soon afterwards, I quit the theater. The overtime issue was not the only reason, of course. These guys made the place a horrible place to work, and really pushed the limits on what you could even stand by and watch. Someday I’ll go into detail perhaps, but right now it’s beside the point. Suffice to say they disgusted me and I wanted nothing to do with them.

Afterwards, I decided to sue for the overtime pay. I had copied all of my timecards, and decided not to try to make a point of the falsified records; I just sued for what was on the books, which came out to a bit more than $500.

I served them by registered mail and showed up in court, armed with all the documents to prove my case. They did not show, and got away with it. These guys were not new to being served (again, stories for another time), and the dominant douchebag of the pair signed the registered mail as “Rob Roy.” While I’m sure signing that way is illegal, there was no way to pin it on him, and without a valid signature, the registered mail was not sufficient to show the guy had been served. The judge told me I’d have to re-file.

This time I had someone I knew serve them (in exchange for a few six-packs of beer). The day for the court case came, and again they did not show. The judge ruled in my favor by default.

At that point, they had, if I recall correctly, thirty days to appeal, which I was sure they would do. They never did. I think they just figured that they didn’t need to; they were already deep in debt, and figured that they could just refuse to claim, maybe use some more tricks to keep from coughing up the judgment (plus fees and costs).

I don’t think they realized that I knew which bank they used.

All I needed to do was to hire a county deputy sheriff to go to the bank and get the money; all he needed was the bank name and the name of the account holder. A few days later, I got every penny.

I did say these guys were scummy; I did not say that they were particularly bright.

With all the “furor” over breastfeeding, I figured it would be appropriate to re-post this image from 2006:

Frankly, I think people freak out over this way too much. Seriously, we can send troops overseas, have them fight and kill and die, but we can’t handle moms feeding their kids. For crying out loud, get a grip.

In the past two weeks, I’ve had the same uncomfortable experience four times: some guy walks through the train car I am in. Immediately in his wake, he leave a foul, pungent odor. Not sulfurous, if that’s what you were thinking. More like, kind of a “I haven’t bathed in six months” aroma. It takes a full minute for the smell to dissipate.

This being Japan, nobody in the crowded car so much as turns their head. But if you have become even a bit attuned to people’s expressions here, you can see they feel the same way I do: disgusted by the smell, and grateful that the guy walked through and out to the next car instead of settling in among us here. I feel badly for the people he does camp out next to, though.

I don’t even know if it’s the same guy, but I would not be surprised.

Such things are not rare on Japanese trains, but they are not common, either. I do recall a passenger who was much worse once. This was back on the Chuo Line, maybe in the late 80’s (possibly the early 90’s). A short, stocky guy, messily dressed. The car was not packed, but all the seats were taken. This fellow came to a bench at the end of the car, where three people can sit. Nobody was standing in front of the bench, and the three occupants were either women or slight men.

He stood in front of one of the three people sitting there, and after a few seconds, started hitting the seated passenger’s knees with his knees. More or less he was saying, “I want to sit here, pal, so get out!” After a few seconds, the accosted passenger got up and fled to another part of the car.

But the brazen ass didn’t sit down. He moved on to the next passenger, and did the same thing. After that person left, he got to the last passenger and went through the exact same act as before.

After he cleared the bench that way, he laid down and went to sleep.

Yep. Apparently it is now an official Florida tradition. The Florida GOP’s brazen schemes to strip legitimate Democratic voters of their ability to cast their votes comes back, with a vengeance. Republicans claim they are trying to stop voter fraud, something for which there is extremely little evidence–unless, of course, you count the massive voter fraud inherent in repeated GOP attempts to disenfranchise Democrats over the years. But no, they’re not concerned with that. The purge is–surprise!–heavily biased against Democrats, Independents, and Hispanic voters (everyone except Republicans, how strange!), according to a Miami Herald study.

Back in 2000, state Attorney General Katherine Harris, partisan extremist and Bush loyalist, carried out the first politically-directed purge, one which stripped tens of thousands of legal Democratic voters of their right to vote in Florida on the bogus assertion that they were felons. This, in an election which was decided by only a few hundred votes. We have Harris to thank for eight years of G. W. Bush, and, in his wake, a stacked Supreme Court, a bitter partisan divide, a battered Constitution, two massively costly land wars in Asia, and eight trillion dollars of debt.

In 2002, the purge continued, with the company charged to maintain the list claiming that as many as 91,000 of the 94,000 names on the list were not illegal voters. Florida “promised” to clean up the list.

Jump to 2004. Guess what? The voter purge list was still alive, this time even more flawed than ever, and–like all of its iterations–it “accidentally” purged decisively against Democratic voters. Whoopsie! How could that have possibly happened?

Fast-forward to 2008, and we see the techniques to purge Democratic voters continued, albeit in a milder form: meaningless small typos and variations in how names were written (with a middle initial or full name, for example) purged tens of thousands of voters. While this would not target Democrats with the initial purge, it affected Democrats more in the end because elderly and minority voters–heavily Democratic–would be far less able to repair their status. And while ACORN (which legally registered many poor people to vote) was under a vicious attack which would eventually shut down it down, Florida imposed new laws making new registration harder, a move that would disproportionately disadvantage older and minority voters (again, Democrats).

Well, the mild-mannered days of 2008 are out the window, and we see the brazen and corrupt Republican machine surge back into action, this time with an all-new list of 182,000 voters to purge, with easily tens of thousands of them clearly legitimate–and, according to a study by the Miami Herald, “predominantly made up of Democrats, independents and Latinos.” The last groups was famously spared the purge back in 2004, but that was before the numbers shifted from Republican-friendly Cuban-Americans to a current, far greater majority of Democratic-friendly non-Cuban Latinos in the state.

And that really does highlight how this is blatantly political–every single time this happens in Florida, it just “happens” by “accident” that the majority of voters “mistakenly” stripped of their right to vote are Democrats.

Not that any of this is a surprise; Republicans have become more and more shameless and open in their attempts to disenfranchise Democrats. Expect more of this in the months and years to come.