[mullingitover]

The great news here is that the tables have turned dramatically in favor of employers. Laborers will just have to suck it up and get wages stolen and contracts violated occasionally to ensure that the bureaucrats are kept in check.

[bpodgursky]

> In a seismic 2024 ruling with direct relevance to Sun Valley, SCOTUS ruled that citizens are entitled to a jury trial when hit with civil penalties imposed by administrative law judges.

"Citizens are entitled to a jury trial". Is this really the hill you're going to die on — arguing that it's a terrible thing that people are entitled to defend themselves in court?

[UncleMeat]

The 7th amendment has never been understood to be exhaustive.

[bpodgursky]

> In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

> Denied access to an outside court or jury, the Marinos were subjected to an in-house agency process from pillar to post. Pursuit by DOL agents, enforcement by DOL personnel, trial by DOL attorneys, decision by DOL judge, and approval by DOL appellate judges.

The farm was accused of violating labor laws, sued for a half million dollars, got tried and convicted by an internal DOL judge with no jury. Just really, seriously try to argue to me that the drafters of the 7th amendment considered what happened here to be outside the scope of the 7th amendment. They would have said:

"right of trial by jury shall be preserved, unless the federal government sets up an entire parallel legal system to avoid the inconvenience of taking people to trial before taking their livelihoods"

Come on man.

[somenameforme]

I don't understand how any person can come to a conclusion like this from this account. Some employees lied about their qualifications, showed up to work, were unable to do they work they claimed they knew how to do, were unwilling to learn or even try to do so, they quit, and the government then decided this company owed those employees 3/4 of the entire salary they would have been paid had they completed the entire crop year.

In the other issue, their representative mistakenly clicked the 'kitchen provided' food option in the paperwork instead of 'meals provided', with the government claiming there was some conspiracy to defraud the employees into taking meals instead of receiving a food stipend, when they'd been providing home cooked meals to the employees for decades, as the DOL had observed countless times.

In both cases, there was no harm to the employees whatsoever.

[mullingitover]

> Some employees lied about their qualifications

The article uncritically printed this claim, however we have no reporting from the workers. For all we know they got off easy with the level of fines they received. The article is a press release.

[somenameforme]

So your entire criticism comes down to you thinking the article is simply lying about that and presumably everything. And what reason do you have to believe this? And would you make such claims if it were an article that confirmed your biases?

[mullingitover]

> And what reason do you have to believe this?

I didn’t say the article was lying, I said it uncritically reported only one side of the story.

This is an agribusiness news site. Do you think that they’re out here looking for an honest to god scoop about labor abuses? Do you think that if they found them, they’d make a front page story about it?

[somenameforme]

You're assuming there is another side, which there seems to be no reason whatsoever to assume. The facts, outside of the government's behavior, are extremely benign and supported by decades of precedent by the exact same people doing the exact same stuff in the exact same way. I'm certain the guys who quit, or even if they were fired, on the first day didn't expect to get a crop year's salary out of it. This makes the government's behavior all the more absurd. Yet the government's behavior is not in question, only the constitutionality of it. And indeed it turns out that it was unconstitutional.

[mullingitover]

> You're assuming there is another side, which there seems to be no reason whatsoever to assume

There are at least two sides to every contract, that's how contracts work. There are a lot of people lining up to defend the business owner, and I'm not finding a single word from any of the H-2A workers, who are uniquely powerless and in a class who has a well-documented history of being exploited.

Those workers 'quitting' was found to be constructive dismissal. They were coerced into quitting, that's the 'other side.' That meant they surrendered their transportation costs back home (which they would've been entitled to if they were fired), and arguably lost out on other work they could've done.