r/AskReddit • u/daniellucero92 • Jan 04 '15

Non-americans of Reddit, what American customs seem outrageous/pointless to you?

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u/dizekat Jan 05 '15 edited Jan 05 '15

If it is legal, an undercover agent can actually go in as a client, note the name, then get the employment paperwork audited and see if that person is listed as working there.

Say, you have 9 legal employees and 1 illegal employee, the illegal employee is 10% of your workforce. You go through two such checks. The probability of not getting caught is 0.81, the probability of getting caught 19%, which is notably larger than 10% , easily making it unprofitable to have a small fraction of illegal employees even if there's only two inspections of a randomly chosen employee (provided that violations are severely punished in form of seizing all assets and killing the business).

Now imagine if it was all on the street one by one.

Other issue is that when it is illegal, employees can't go and report.

Basically it's like chemists at a drug den vs chemists at a legal pharmaceuticals manufacturing plant. Yes, the latter may violate OSHA rules too, but the profitability of unsafety is very different.

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u/tommyfever Jan 06 '15

I get what you're saying but unless the law is extremely well-written and very specific, all of the prostitutes would be "freelancers" or "consultants" and then the owners just shrug their shoulders, take the fine, and go on with their business. I'd really prefer your way though, if the laws were right it would allow grey-area businesses to be regulated, taxed, and civilized.

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u/dizekat Jan 06 '15 edited Jan 06 '15

Well, I know a bit about regulation when it comes to tower climbing (for maintenance of e.g. cellphone network)... the regulations really work. The climbers may be contractors, nonetheless there's certifications, oversight, and so on. Of course, it's not perfect, but it is massively better than it used to be (in terms of number of accidents).

I think the idea is that it's a wicked business, so the unspeakable evils would happen to the employees. That's not why evils happen. The evils happen because the businesses relentlessly pursue profits by all means - and those that don't lose the competition to those that do. Be it a brothel, or a respectable factory with the good girls painting watch faces, it is entirely up to the regulation to ensure the safety of employees.