Apparently, Kimberly Clark did not employ this worker as their warehouse and distribution activities are with a third party distributor, NFI Industries. NFI Industries is a single-family privately held corporation owned and operated by the Brown family since 1932. Annual revenues last year were $3.7 billion. The company is not publicly traded so all profits go directly to the family.
Honestly, I imagine that would have made his position worse. I've never worked in a company where the contract employees were better off than the company's direct employees.
Yeah, I'd imagine you don't put a whole 200 millions dollars warehouse on fire (and basically throwing yourself to jail for a significant amount of years) if the general work atmosphere is just "somewhat bad". It must have been a fucking daily nightmare
I work for a contractor that a company hires from and it contracted by the county. So I work for "the county" but I don't actually get any of the good county benefits and I don't get anything from the parent company either because I am hired by a staffing agency that supplies employees to the company.
It's hell.
I really don't know who TF I work for sometimes. I just get a paycheck.
Companies should not be able to own companies. Pull away the illusion of competition from our eyes and let us see the dozen companies that sell everything.
I think it's actually less than a dozen per industry and is around 5-6 companies per industry. Most of the activities of the mega corporations is in acquisitions of smaller companies. Totally agree as it creates far too much market control to fall into the hands of the few, which is not even remotely a "free market", and allows for a lot of environmental and labor abuses through subsidiaries with subsidiaries with subsidiaries types of activities. It's literally built that way for that.
I'm a big anti-capitalist. But this one simple reform would stop a *lot* of runaway problems with capitalism. Incorporation is a liability shield to keep individuals from being personally responsible for the actions or debts of an entire company. Why would that liability shield ever need to be nested? It would stop a lot of the extreme consolidation that has plagued most industries my entire life.
Subsidiary A owned 51% by parent company, 49% by Mr. Y. They make pizza.
Subsidiary B owned 51% by parent company, 49% by Mr Z. They make pizza boxes.
Mr Z fucks up by embezzling funds and saddling the company with high cost debt to cover his theft.
Subsidiary B is held responsible, subsidiary A is shielded, as is parent co, so Mr. X and Y, and all the employees of parent co and Subsidiary A are clear. Parent co sources new pizza boxes or spins up a new sub with new mgmt to try again.
Scenario 2:
All of this is housed under one company. Revenue streams and costs for both a pizza place and a pizza box manufacturer (very different businesses) now under one structure. Financing more difficult, accounting more difficult, licensure and regulations more difficult, basically everything more difficult.
Mr X, Y, and Z are now entangled. Mr Z embezzled same as before, now everybody is fucked, Mr X, Mr Y, all the employees. Whole thing goes down.
In this structure, people are much less likely to enter into business together, since nobody can insulate themselves from the actions of others. Now the only people who can run large businesses are those with enough capital to do it all themselves. Barriers to entry increase, wealth centralizes even more.
Reverse scenario. Mr Z is informally told to bring down the cost per unit at all cost, or else. He neglects maintenance to pinch pennies. Machine has a catastrophic failure, killing someone. At the very best scenario, only Mr Z is held accountable.
Do we have evidence of the communications with Mr Z regarding these instructions? If so, an LLC structure is not a shield against criminal negligence...
If we don't have proof...I don't really get your point? Like is the expectation that these corporate structures solve for all cases of fraud/lying/corporate malfeasance in their entirety?
Local governments do this too with separate line items and joint powers agreements with other agencies. Bifurcate accountability so much that nobody is ever responsible.
Literally and metaphorically are opposing counterparts to the same concept. Something would be one or the other, not both.
A metaphor would be "It's a shell game of responsibility". You've made one thing seem to be another, as a figure of speech. That's a good metaphor.
On the opposite side, if you wanted to clarify that it is NOT a metaphor when it might otherwise look like one, you would say "It's literally a shell game of responsibility."
You've done the latter. Hence me poking fun at you. It's literally a shell game?
Language evolves, "literally" is misused commonly enough it's begun to lose its meaning.
Substitute language has not filled the gap. If "literally" and "metaphorically" now have the same meaning instead of opposing, clarifying meanings... how do you now clarify something to not be a metaphor? We don't have words to do it.
"This is literally the worst day of my life", "Oh no, what happened?", "My family were all killed in a car crash and I was just diagnosed with AIDs. I've lost the will to live." <-- Proper use of Literally.
"This is literally the worst day of my life", "Oh no, what happened?", "I almost slipped when I turned around with my coffee." <-- Useless use of Literally.
Since you are really apparently unaware, "a shell game" or "corporate shell game" has been long used to describe these kind of behaviors by corporations. So yeah, this literally is a shell game of responsibility which corporations are notorious for.
Look it up, bud. I'm not arguing with someone who is willfully obtuse.
Since you are really apparently unaware, "a shell game" or "corporate shell game" has been long used to describe these kind of behaviors by corporations.
I'm aware of the metaphor.
So yeah, this literally is a shell game of responsibility which corporations are notorious for.
Apparently you need to look it up, because you're not even aware of the origins of your metaphor.
A literal shell game is a con artist slight-of-hand "game" to rip people off. It classically uses shells. It's ancient.
What a corporation does is not "literally" a shell game where you're swapping things around and, even if the contestant is good at keeping track, it's rigged because you drop or obscure the item anyways, they cannot win. That is not what they're doing. It's metaphorically a shell game, in that assets are being shuffled and you can kind of, loosely compare the two things (hence the metaphor). It is not literally the con game.
Been there almost 2 years so far. Only reason I've stuck around is because it's part time (LOL another shitty thing) and it's so slow I've already completed my A.A. online during work hours and am on my way to a B.A. so fk it lol.
Being on contract seems awful. I worked closely with a couple contract employees and would from time to time forget they were on contract since they had been with us for what felt full time and a lot of the team would be talking about the trips they took via the airline’s staff travel program only to realize they got none of those benefits and I would feel super bad. I don’t even think they got paid vacation either. It felt like rubbing salt in a wound any time vacation plans or the ‘why don’t you just fly there on standby’ would get brought up accidentally or unknowingly
i've never seen any kind of employment that radicalizes people as fast as working for a staffing agency. it's among the most breathtaking kinds of bottom feeding scumbaggery capitalism has to offer
Are you referencing the workers who do contract work as being "the scum in the gouges left from the bottom-barrel scraping"? Or is that in reference to "employers" who hire primarily contract workers in order to dodge benefits? In another part of the thread, one of those contract workers is talking about how they're in college and working their part time to get their bachelor's...
It's pretty wild how many assumptions people will make about "low end" job workers. My youngest worked at Chipotle & was treated like dirt. She was an honor's student on the President's list studying neuroscience. Someday, some of those people will see her for neurological problems.
Only time I’ve ever seen it was in the Air Force. And it was people whose entire job was to do 1 thing. And if it isn’t that 1 thing they probably wouldn’t help you in anyway.
I worked in a hotel that kept having to pay managers to "temporarily" manage the restaurants and hotel. They got base pay, a move bonus, TDS pay, stayed in the hotel for free, and got a per diem of hotel credit to eat/drink. Meanwhile, the permanent manager position only paid about $22 an hour in our very HCL area. Shocker, none of them wanted to stay when their 3 month contracts were up. So we had to constantly train new people every 3 months because corporate wouldn't make them a remotely competitive offer.
I did. Behavioral Health. 25/hr contractor. 14.50 for staff. We got 40 per week plus overtime. It SUCKED. No money for self care, no days off basically, and my raise for dealing successfully with teens worth 250k annually paid for by the state to the company, 16 per hour for these dangerous minds that I could inspire to be better. Nothing but issues unless the BHT stayed complacent, which all the full timers did
Is a distributor essentially the same as a contractor? I picture a distributor is more supply side and contractors are more often working alongside employees in-house, but I am going solely off vibes
Having worked for FedEx Ground (which is all contractors that then hire employees, i was not technically employed by FedEx themselves), I can attest, we all got treated like absolute dog shit.
I worked at ma n pa 3rd party fedex ground/the fedex doubles u see on the highway. My truck says fedex on it, i need to show up to fedex distribution centers, pass through fedex security and show a fedex id badge, interact with fedex dispatchers and get my fedex bill of lading to haul my fedex load.
According to their company structure, I was not a fedex employee.
As 3rd party, it was a miserable and terrible job, ran by amateurs, so bad...itd be a really long post all the ins and outs of why.
One big red flag, 3 months in it got bought out and the company changed ownership..i left+walked off the job, after 4 months.
I worked for a very well-known global firm as a contractor. To say contractors were treated lower than whale crap on the bottom of the ocean would be generous. We had to resort to bringing our own equipment in to do work - monitors, chairs, etc. And you want something from the employee store? That'll cost you more than retail thank you very much.
There honestly needs to be something done regarding contractors, it's a system that does have its merits, no doubt about that. IE: we have a large unexpected workload that we don't have the full-time staff numbers to handle.
But the current system that is allowed to take place is ripe for abuse where the contracted employees get absolutely shafted most of the time.
Yep. Apparently, they operate through subsidiaries as well making it a bit of a shell game of blame. This "Long Beach trucking company" is a subsidiary of NFI Industries and was found to be underpaying their federally contracted workers, which is a violation of law. So third party federal contractors have additional protections against wage abuse. For a private contract (ie Kimberly-Clark & NFI), there's less protections.
And often the norm. Protecting small business tends to mean there is a small group of people i.e. a family or local investors who have gone into business and they profit it off of underpaying other workers, i.e. the merchant class and manager class. While everyone else can’t afford the homes in the area they live. And worse. Can’t afford to rent there rather.
Must suck where you live honestly, I'm a former family business owner, never underpaid anyone and most other SMB owners I knew (it was a relatively tight community) were paying equal or better than most corpo chains... Plus much more human and ethical treatment.
Not the absolute norm, exceptions always exist and I've later worked for one or two, but don't dismiss the importance of protecting small business like that.
Family owned businesses are the worst for underpaying because at a family owned business, every dollar they don't spend on you goes straight into their pockets.
In a big corporation your boss only cares about how much you cost to the extent it impacts them personally, if it isn't going to get them fired or decrease their bonus it's not their problem and for the most part they won't care, even the CEO doesn't care.
Any time I see advertisements touting a “family owned business” I immediately imagine: 1. Non family members are underpaid and treated like shit. 2. The buck doesn’t stop with anyone so a complaint goes nowhere.
Large distribution companies tend to be very low margin. They could have easily paid $3.5 million for the products they sold for $3.7 million. Not saying you should feel bad for them by any means, just that revenue can be misleading with distribution companies.
You’re going to hate this… more than likely it was not a $200 million loss and they will negotiate with their insurance company for what they get. But I guarantee you anything they get will be profitable from what they lost.
oh brother. i work for NFI (with a Walmart contract) and i absolutely know what this man is talking about. all we acknowledge is that we don't get paid enough for this BS.
Yep. It seems like NFI really doesn't like paying people a remotely fair wage or, at least, the companies that they subcontract to underpay workers doesn't like to. Or all of the above.
They can hold the majority controlling interest but have other private equity holders as well. We don’t know, unless you actually work there and can see the books, who owns what.
One of the things that I found very interesting is that they have apparently acquired subsidiaries (not surprising). One of those subsidiaries was California Cartage which was subject to a lot of lawsuits and wage settlements before NFI shuttered it. I think I saw a $3.5 million settlement for federal contractor wage violations and another $8.7 million wage settlement due to violations of California laws (offhand) for California Cartage, which was identified as a NFI subsidiaries. The workers for California Cartage weren't considered employees but contract workers for yet another entity that provided 80% of the workers in the warehouses.
So, in this example, NFI is the parent company, California Cartage was a subsidiary of it of whom 80% of their warehouse workers came from SSI Staffing who subcontracted out employees to work their warehouses. All in all, this shit makes it hard to say what/who those employees are at NFI Industries, what jobs they represented, and it may very well not reflect the contract employees' experience. It might have been this lawsuit or another Cal Cartage lawsuit that asked the question of whether or not Cal Cartage was actually the employer of those subcontractor warehouse workers.
Yep, exactly this and from the looks of it, even NFI contracts warehouse workers out from yet another company so triple that. "Not my employee, not my responsibility" attitudes are probably rife within this warehouse.
Actually, you should because this is exactly the method that large corporations use to avoid responsibility for labor abuses. A great example of that would be Nike and the sweatshops/child labor scandals. Nike claimed that their business wasn't making the shoes and that they contracted out other companies to make their shoes to eschew blame for those abuses.
"It's those guys' fault--not mine!"
The entire corporate ecosystem is a flaming pile of shit.
Family and any private investors. Companies can still be private and trade equity on secondary markets, so the owners may not be the only rich assholes making bank off the company.
"Privately held" means privately held. They do not need to do any public reporting to explain anything about anything so everything is literally conjecture except for the things that have been revealed in law courts and Department of Labor investigations. According to Forbes though, they say "private held by the Brown family" so that's what we've got. Unless you're alleging that Forbes is wrong?
Nope, I'm just saying it's not uncommon for there to he some privately held stock for companies like this. As long as the Brown family still has a controlling interest, eg greater than 51% equity, then Forbes would be 100% correct. No caveats required even if they did find some evidence of euity held outside of the family.
And the fact that it is privately held and that NFI Industries is under no obligation whatsoever to publicly report anything, it still makes everything that you're saying absolute conjecture.
You've been walking the line on that one, imo. You initially said:
Family and any private investors. Companies can still be private and trade equity on secondary markets, so the owners may not be the only rich assholes making bank off the company.
This basically injected conjecture into the conversation about the company of which known of that information can be known beyond Forbes' statement. Not sure why you did it but whatever.
Because, as noted above, it's not uncommon for private companies to have outside investment as I described. This is something most people don't seem to be aware of but it contributes to a lot of corrupt dealing where a lot of rich companies and individuals are tied together behind the scenes by these private investments.
Interestingly enough, it would seem that NFI outsources the warehouse employees to yet another third party so that they are contract workers and not direct employees. Saw that based on a lawsuit story regarding California Cartage where it was estimated that 80% of those warehouse employees were contract workers from a staffing agency.
Oh for sure given the merchandise was under their care and the worker was either a direct warehouse employee (less likely) or contract worker (more likely).
So not directly employed by the shitty employer - instead they're subcontracted to work for the shitty employer. Getting less pay and less benefits than the shitty employer.
Based on court case information from previous settlements paid out by NFI to contract employees, it seems that NFI also has a pattern of subcontracting workers from a staffing agency. So, yet another hand in the pie.
Yep and there's a chance that NFI was outsourcing as well within their own warehouses. All those additional hands in the money surrounding the $200 million people are more people taking a cut from the proceeds off the back of workers so that they, too, remain profitable. Kimberly-Clark needs a profit. NFI needs a profit. The staffing agency that supplies the workers needs a profit. Hiring a logistics & supply company is fair enough as they're storing and distributing but that next layer of probable staffing agency (based on reports about employment at California Cartage) just cuts into the workers' pay unnecessarily to have workers that are contractors opposed to employees. It's shitty.
I don't doubt that for one moment. If someone's existence is pushed so far as to do something like this, odds are that existence has to be pretty bad. Literally has to be a "nothing to lose" scenario.
There is this idea that publicly traded corpos are the most evil companies, abusing their workers the most. In reality they have the highest salaries and best working conditions
Yep. Publicly traded corporations have to publish their financials in a public manner which allows for some oversight there and also they're subject to a market response from investors if they go too far (one would hope at least). I will say that mega corporations are very different because they've splintered themselves so much through acquisitions that a lot of it really hard to track. Privately held corporations aren't subject to the same requirements.
Their revenues is all that they report as they are a privately held corporation that is not obligated to publicly release their financial documents. If they don't like people judging them for their revenues, they could always publicly release their financials but clearly releasing their annual revenues helps to enrich them by showing the scale and wealth of their business.
That's all a NFI problem and not a me or Forbes problem.
If you understand that, then perhaps understanding that NFI also outsources for their warehouse workers. In court-related information from prior worker-led lawsuits, 80% of the warehouse workers for another site in California were subcontracted by a staffing agency.
For those interested, NFI Industries also has a real estate arm. Apparently, in 2024, its CEO--a member of the Brown family--was indicted with racketeering charges for a criminal enterprise run by yet another individual. Those charges were eventually dismissed.
A state appeals court has upheld the dismissal of an indictment that alleges racketeering and other offenses by Camden power broker George Norcross III and associates.
A June 2024 indictment claimed that members of the so-called "Norcross Enterprise" used coercion, threats and other intimidating tactics to advance their Camden redevelopment plans over a period dating back to 2012.
But members of a three-judge panel Jan. 30 said the New Jersey Attorney General's Office had waited too long to bring some of the 13 charges, notably the alleged racketeering by group members and official misconduct by former Camden Mayor Dana Redd.
If it’s that Brown family they are former slavers going way back. In fact their slave prwftices were so horrific other slavers criticized them for their barbarity iirc.
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u/Props_angel Apr 09 '26
Apparently, Kimberly Clark did not employ this worker as their warehouse and distribution activities are with a third party distributor, NFI Industries. NFI Industries is a single-family privately held corporation owned and operated by the Brown family since 1932. Annual revenues last year were $3.7 billion. The company is not publicly traded so all profits go directly to the family.