Abdullah ibn Umar reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Pay the worker his wages before his sweat has dried.”
Source: Sunan Ibn Mājah 2443, Grade: Sahih (authentic) according to Al-Albani
We are all familiar with the hadith of our Prophet ﷺ, and most of us understand it correctly: Pay your workers (or service providers) promptly, right after the work is done.
We typically imagine a classic day laborer scenario, where you hire a few workers, perhaps to help with chopping wood for the upcoming winter. They toil on your property for a few hours, and after completing the task, sweaty and tired, they stand before you. What you should do immediately is reach into your pockets, pull out some silver coins, and pay your workers.
Such a classic work situation has only happened to me once or twice in my life. Specifically, a few years ago, when I hired some young people to dismantle my old living room wardrobe and assemble and secure a new one. They performed this task flawlessly in a few hours. As soon as they finished and took a short break to catch their breath, I had already pulled out the agreed-upon sum of money and handed it to them. Simple.
But how do you implement this command in modern work situations, such as hiring a web developer to build a website? Remote work, commissioned in the USA, executed in a completely different time zone, like Europe? Unfortunately, from my own experience, I can report that this hadith has been correctly implemented by someone only once every few years. Specifically, by a lady, a Muslim, who urgently needed a landing page from me. When I created and handed it over to her in one day, she initiated the bank transfer on the same day, so my payment was there the next day.
Note: On the same day!
However, more often it goes like this: The customer or the company you worked for pays 2, sometimes 4, but sometimes even 6 weeks later. Sometimes you hear excuses like “Our payroll department has only one fixed date per month for such payments.” I don’t care.
Or “Oh, I’ll forward this to our responsible clerk; that’s the YadaYada-BlaBla department’s job.” I don’t care how you’re organized internally. That’s your problem. Pay me. And do it today. Not tomorrow; today.
At best, you can expect an immediate transfer, and the bank delays registering the amount in my account, which has already arrived through lightning-fast electronic signals over the lines in the digital age of 2024.
How do you solve or bypass that? Even if you pay immediately, the money reaches the worker very late due to delays by the banks, at a time when their sweat has already dried three times, they have showered twice, and eaten six times.
For remote work, over greater distances and time zones, as is increasingly the case today, there is only one solution: Pay the worker in Bitcoin via the Lightning network. The Sats are there in seconds. No matter where in the world.
This way, you can still follow this hadith today. And you really should.
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