A business that doesn't make enough money to pay workers but provides returns to owners is a charity operated on behalf of the owners at the expense of the workers.
I totally agree that wage theft is a real problem, but the comparison is disingenuous. A more meaningful comparison would be wage theft vs employee shoplifting (which still, obviously, does not justify wage theft, but is in fact a much larger amount).
Consider an alternate universe in which there is no unpaid labor . you think that the unemployment rate would be higher or lower? OR that prices would be higher or lower? A variable amount of unpaid labor is built into the economy. Eliminating it would have all sorts of unforeseen and possibly undesirable consequences.
kinda depends on what type of "slacking" we're talking about. so called "time theft" is essentially fraud, which is definitely illegal. usually not worth the effort to prove when you can just fire people.
I did this as a kid. I was 11 years old and hired by a country club to clean restrooms and the grounds around the swimming pool during the summer. I had to be in and out before the first guests arrived because I wasn't a member. They decided to pay me $1.85 an hour when the minimum wage was $3.35 or so at the time, but I had no bargaining power because I was legally under age. Our timesheets were paper and the club had no surveillance, so I gave myself 1.5 hours of work every day because I was a quick worker (the person I alternated with took more time anyway) and they were assholes.
How is the comparison disingenuous? The point is that the attention that different types of theft receive is disproportionate to how much is stolen in aggregate.
the linked article is comparing robbery and wage theft based only on the dollar value stolen. by definition, robbery is theft that involves (the threat of) physical violence. when I worked in restaurants, I had a boss that would routinely reach into our tip jar to pay himself back for mistakes we made. it fucking sucked, but not nearly as much as having someone threaten to end your life on the spot.
If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.
You're missing that they picked "robbery", excluding the much larger "burglary" and "shoplifting" and "fraud" categories. They then say "Much bigger problem than other forms of theft"... Implying "Much bigger problem than [all] other forms of theft" instead of "Much bigger problem than [some] other forms of theft".
And, if you're going to go with broadly estimated (and somewhat questionable) numbers, then surely you need to consider the ~$50B estimated lost to retail theft each year. Don't just compare $933 million proven lost to wage theft to the over-precise $340,850,358 aggregated from some robbery reports (really, 9 sig figs?) and call it "other theft".
Not to mention that that $933M "recovered" includes many cases of trebled damages...
It's also a bit disingenuous to cherry-pick one point without responding to the overall statement.
But, sure, I do have an issue with those. Just like you don't think every dollar of wage theft is paid as damages, one might also reasonably believe that not every dollar of burglary losses is reported and captured in those aggregate numbers.
If you want to talk, prove your good faith by responding to my overall points above instead of finding smaller and smaller points to niggle with and ask leading questions about.
Seriously, the loaded/dishonest article and your antagonistic and pseudo-dishonest mode of argument has done more to erode how seriously I will take arguments in this area than to deepen my concern. If this is your objective, keep going down this path.
On the other hand, it's stupid: wage theft is a severe enough concern, deserving of additional advocacy, that it can be done honestly without these kinds of questionable argument tactics.
OK. If your ground is "I think I can slightly defend the estimate of burglary numbers reported to 9 sig figs and not talk about any of the other concerns about the article...," then you may consider me less convinced of the truthfulness of advocates and arguments about wage theft than when you began.
Nuance is important; people who advocate for one side or the other, honesty be damned, almost never help the situation.
I'm not attempting to represent anything about your views, but instead your argument tactics. The history is straight above, and I believe my representation of it is accurate. You're free to "fix it" by addressing the broader points, but as long as you don't, this stands.
It is not “in fact a much larger amount” - it actually looks to be about the same. The article estimates about $50bn wages are stolen every year, while [1] suggests about $50bn is stolen/embezzled by employees every year.
I will add that even if the net amount is the same, it is much worse morally to rob a worker than a business.
Color me genuinely surprised. I would have guessed that wage theft was much larger. Experience suggests to me that ~everyone has been pressured at least once to roll hours forward to avoid overtime, but most people don't shoplift.
There may be fewer embezzlers with disproportionately high average theft, probably with a much more skewed distribution (a few very large embezzlements covers a lot of minimum wage hours).
I think you would be surprised about the most people don't shoplift bit. I've worked at krogers and target, and I would wager most employees did. Nothing huge and not cash but some food here and a drink there and you're talking real money in a years time.
Edit: just remembered a funny anecdote, a employee was caught stealing food at krogers, but it was normal enough that they told him if he paid for it they would forget it happened. He pretended to check out and was caught stealing the same food twice so they had to fire him. It was like a 2$ sandwich.
The number conveniently adds up. There’s a line between appropriate controls and theft, for example being forced to get searched without pay, having forced unpaid breaks, or enforcing late clock in.
I think I would quibble with the first point, as retail losses are demonstrable, and wage theft is hard to quantify with any certainty. But in any case, I don’t think it matters so much in light of your second point, with which I strongly agree.
So the CNBC article immediately mentions the $50 billion number, links to a source that requires a paid account to even see that $50 billion number, and then does not reference that study again.
They then interview someone else about their independent research that only shows about $400 million in theft.
That is an extremely good point - I grabbed that article because I was just looking for a source. In retrospect I shouldn’t have trusted CNBC.
I believe the data is based off the Hiscox report [1], which makes the extremely important point that 85% of losses are due to employees at the managerial level or above - who are of course far less likely to be victims of wage theft! So this “eye for an eye” mentality is truly gross, beyond just the ways where it’s self-evidently gross.
Why is it morally worse to rob a worker than a business?
An extreme case: What if the business only breaks even and it pays many specialized workers while doing so? Stealing from such a business and thereby killing the business will cost every worker his or her job. Stealing from this business is therefore equivalent to stealing the livelihood from every worker. The moral wrongdoing in this hypothetical scales like the number of workers.
a) Being laid off is not nearly as bad as actually being stolen from (especially in countries with unemployment benefits)
b) Speaking from personal experience: having your wages stolen puts you in a horrible position of wondering if maybe you’ll get paid if you keep your head down, or worrying that you’ll be fired if you complain. The extortion is inherent in the nature of the theft, unlike shoplifting and most corporate embezzlement. It’s not just the money, it’s long-term abuse and exploitation of people who can’t easily defend themselves.
c) Obviously there is a scale: the Enron embezzlement (which is analogous to your extreme example) is worse than stealing $100 from a single worker. But $50bn in stolen wages is a much graver crime than $50bn in embezzled goods.
This only works if you're considering work as "hours worked" versus "impact and output".
I've had this conversation with several employers. They're not paying me for how many hours I was at my desk, they're paying me for my economic output and my impact on the organization.
I get not every single job can have this level of flexibility, but the amount of "theft of time" and "employee shoplifting" that occur throughout America? I would bet my bottom dollar it isn't even close to employers' wage theft.
For 2/3 of low-wage workers to have been affected by wage theft, either most low-wage workers are overwhelming employeed by a small number of companies (which if true is also concerning - but not bourne out by the numbers in the EPI report), or most companies are stealing from at least some workers. That's obscene.
The converse is not true. For most stores to have been affected by employee shoplifting only requires a tiny minority of employees - one per store! - to shoplift.
There is also an equilibrium; in the general case employees can't shoplift more than the equivalent security measure to prevent the shoplifting would cost. The equivalent limit to stolen wages is considerably more harrowing: the workers' mental and physical health.
Collectively this means shoplifting can be addressed by fairly typical business measures - additional security, hiring practices, lawsuits against individuals, etc. The infrastructure for all that is already in place, because capital already put it in place to protect itself and because shoplifting is not the norm. But wage theft requires radical or systemic change to ensure employees have the ability to punish all employers, because capital has again put measure in place to protect itself, and wage theft is the norm.
Finally, there is the issue of what you're measuring. Assuming shoplifting and employer theft from low-wage workers occur at the same rate for the same percentage, shoplifting would still dominate because it's much closer to a percentage of total revenue. Obviously total revenue is higher than a fraction of wages!
So how, exactly, is that comparison more meaningful?
it's kinda apples-to-oranges to just compare the dollar value stolen in each category. like if I get mugged, the problem isn't just that I lost my phone, credit card, ID, and some petty cash; it's also that someone stuck a gun in my face. who knows how close they were to pulling the trigger? an employer shaving a few percent off my paycheck doesn't affect whether I feel safe walking outside the next day.
That's true, but wage theft towards the lower-income people is particularly perverse. Life is much harder at those ranks, and there's not much needed to start a seemingly unstoppable demise.
Those few percent off of a paycheck can mean you now cannot pay off your month's credit balance. Next month the debt is larger (due to the outrageous interests), but you still cannot pay it off because your car broke down and you had to fix it to get to work. Next month your mother got sick and you had to help her pay for some medication. Now your debt is growing faster than you can pay it off.
I wonder if "employee shoplifting" actually involves no crime in its majority. My friends had experienced a few cases where they were never asked to return company equipment upon leaving, and that includes expensive laptops, phones, etc. E.g. the company was supposed to contact them to get it back, but never did.
If this equipment is then simply marked as "stolen" to write-off, and this situation is prevalent in tech companies, I could see it being a sizable chunk of the "shoplifting".
P.S. I don't claim literal shoplifting is not happening.
The term "shoplifting" applies strictly to goods that the company was trying to sell, not things they were using themselves, so even if non-returned company equipment were counted as stolen, it wouldn't count towards the shoplifting numbers.
What about it? It’s a different problem altogether. First, it’s not necessarily illegal. Second, there is a power disparity between employer and employee that makes wage theft hard for an employee to fight.
How do you define "employees stealing time from the employer"?
It seems to me the only way to "steal time" from the employer would be if you literally had someone else clock in for you when you weren't there or lied on your time card, both of which generally get the offender fired and are small-scale issues. Once someone has clocked in, it seems impossible to "steal time" from the employer -- the employer is paying for the employee's presence, so it's all just shades from slacking to working hard.
<What about employees stealing time from the employer?>
If an employee is caught stealing time from his/her job, they are usually fired, no questions asked. If an employer steals time from an employee, especially when the times of work were preset and agreed upon, if the employee complains usually they are reminded that there's always someone else who can do the job if they don't want to.
I care about a small time clinician who finds out someone on his staff has been wasting time on facebook half the day instead of working on a project they need done. I care not even one teeny-tiny little bit about the same behaviour at a corporation that pays its CEO 300x the average worker, poisons tax policy with lobbying, and actively tries to outsource its workforce.
I care a lot about the small time dev who is forced into working unpaid OT. I don't give any shits whatsoever about big boy contractor charging 500/hour not getting paid for a week because of a dispute.
This is not a ledger issue, this is a power issue.
Is it any surprise? Entirely too many founder-types think because someone doesn't throw 16 hours a day into their job, they're lazy, not realizing that most people don't share, or even give a shit, about their 'dream'.
To take it further, a lot of founder types dont understand (or refuse to) the difference in risk-reward across employees, especially employees with different hiring vintages. I've seen orgs where employees have 500 shares, and others have 500,000 and yet others (founders) probably have 5,000,000 -- all with unknown denominators (lol) -- and all employees are expected to work at the same intensity.
So measured wage "theft" comes out to $3 per person per year. But it's a contract violation, not violence, so a monetary comparison is completely sociopathic. Also, this headline excludes transfer payments as a form of theft.
> But it's a contract violation, not violence, so a monetary comparison is completely sociopathic.
Theft in general doesn't involve violence or the threat of violence. You're thinking of robbery.
One merely has to illegally deprive someone of something they legally own in order to commit theft. A pickpocketing is a theft. A mugging is a robbery. Wage theft is an entirely appropriate name. You could also call it "wage misappropriation" or "wage embezzlement" (though "embezzlement" generally applies to company property) if you want to make it sound classier :-P
They literally are not. If I have my pocket picked or my house burgled when I'm out, I may not find out until later. There was no violence or threat of violence employed against my person.
Robbery and theft are legally defined as separate crimes. The former is treated far more harshly than the latter.
Yes they do. If somebody’s got their hand in your pocket, you can forcibly remove it. If they’re burgling your house, you’ve got the right to shoot them dead.
> If somebody’s got their hand in your pocket, you can forcibly remove it.
It's still pickpocketing, which is theft. Unless they employ force against you in turn, or threaten you, to stop you from removing their hand. That makes it robbery.
> If they’re burgling your house, you’ve got the right to shoot them dead.
It's still burglary, which is theft. Unless they also employ violence against you, or threaten violence against you, in the course of committing the burglary. That makes it robbery.
This isn't my opinion, so there's no use arguing with me. You're arguing against the law and the English language.
In most of America you can shoot people who are burglarizing in your house. It's called the castle doctrine. In Texas you can shoot them as they're running off with your property, if it's after dark.
That's great and all but has no bearing on whether the intruder is a thief or a robber. Even in Texas. They have to offer violence or threaten it to be considered a robber. Otherwise they're a trespasser or thief.
If you don't like this, take it up with the dictionary. Sorry for the bluntness but this is getting a bit ridiculous.
We need to enforce the laws as they are written and right now that means prosecuting time theft by employees a criminal offense. Law and economics tells us that the degree of wrong done by inconveniencing someone is in proportion to the worth of that persons time. If a person of importance to society has a suit against them it must be speedily dismissed.
> By contrast, the total amount recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million in 2012. This is almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year. Further, the nearly $1 billion successfully reclaimed by workers is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government.
That's the low estimate, based on recovered losses:
But we do know that the total amount of money recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million—almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year.
The fact is, this isn’t really theft. It’s a change in wages that has occurred after you switched jobs, only instead of saying “actually we’re going to pay you $X, now that you’ve started,” they sneak in lower wages through other means. That’s not a good thing, but it’s hardball negotiation, not theft.
> That’s not a good thing, but it’s hardball negotiation, not theft.
Nah, paying someone under the negotiated rate by lying about how many hours they worked is certainly a form of theft. Failing to give statutory-required pay is also a form of theft.
No, $50 billion is not 'made up", it is extrapolated, based on direct assessments. Much the same as any other sampling acomplishes.
I'd looked up earlier today: the three metro areas account for nearly 1/5th all US economic activity. NYC, LA, and Chicago metro areas represent 17% of US GDP. That's a sizable chunk.
Methodology questions or quanitative comparisons are reasonable objections. Bald acusations of fabrication are going to require some substantial foundation least they be dismissed for their own claim: that they're made up.
Oh it's not a fine line. It is on the fraud side of things, to bring on an employee, get them to quit their old job, and then switch out the deal. It's not "good." But if everybody does this, let's say by 5% of wages, then it just becomes a pre-calculated factor taken into account when negotiating for jobs.
Monetary impact is serving as a proxy and metric for the scope of the problem.
As others have pointed out, not all burglary and larceny is necessarily violent. But you're also missing the point that wage theft is not always a dispassionate contract dispute between equal parties. Especially for those most vulnerable (minimum wage workers, people with medical conditions, people with dependents, the food and housing insecure) there is a massive level of coercion going on as well. These individuals often cannot afford to risk a legal fight to assert their claims to what they're fairly owed.
I have friends who knew their employer was stealing from them and had to forgo things like medications because they couldn't make ends meet that month. Friends in the restaurant industry who've had to skips meals and go hungry while their manager skimmed from the tip pool. It may not meet the Oxford English Dictionary definition of "violence" but it sure seemed like violence to me.
For most of my adult life, I worked hourly jobs in low pay positions and "wage theft" always meant me, the employee, stealing from the company by not working every single second I was there. Interesting to see it defined the other way, "employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to".
I think the usage here is the common one, and your idiosyncratic. "wage theft" has been consistently talked about this way for several decades at least among policy types etc.
Thanks for the comment. A sibling comment points out "time theft" which I have also heard regarding an employee not working, so to speak. I can honestly say I did not read economic policy pieces until quite recently in my life, so I had not, as far as I can recall, heard it used this way. I can also anecdotally say that most management in lower paying positions in the parts of the US I have worked are rather infamous for malapropisms.
I worked at a place (public company, retail) in college where the general managers task on Wednesday night was to “trim” the payroll by editing out fractional hours or reducing spiffs. The managers got a bonus if their labor spend was between 98.5% and 99.25% of budget.
It’s really telling about what American society values that wage theft perpetrated by the owning class is rarely prosecuted and is considered a civil matter, while non-violent offenses including petty theft and drug possession perpetrated by the labor class (which cause orders of magnitude less fiscal harm) make up something like 90% of all arrests in the US.
Are there other societies you have in mind where wage theft is a criminal offense? It seems to me that the difference in punishment is because of the mechanism of the theft, not a judgment that the underlying fiscal harm doesn't matter.
I don’t know enough about other countries’ wage theft situation to comment. I would assume countries with larger union representation would experience less wage theft of this kind, but I don’t really know.
I do know that other countries don’t incarcerate anywhere close to as many of its citizens as the US, especially for what amounts to a rounding-error’s worth financial loss due to petty theft (a handful of fighter jets worth).
If the only thing that mattered was the fiscal harm, then shoplifting or embezzling or the like should also be a civil matter like wage theft. There's definitely a value judgement involved in the way our penalties are structured.
Because anything different is "hostile to business" and will result in businesses "leaving the country." It's all FUD that ensures that crimes perpetrated by the owning class aren't actually prosecuted.
This reminded me of an hourly job I had where I was expected to be there 15 minutes early, then I got in trouble for clocking in as soon as I sat down. I just told my supervisor and manager that if I'm there I'm clocking in. After that, I had permission to show up late.
>"Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies."
Are we to ignore the fact that the crimes mentioned involve life-threatening situations for those affected? Apparently, human life is not as important as the amount of money lost.
Can happen to highly paid employees too. Since 2018, I've been owed over $20,000 USD by Surf Air (the LA-based startup in the airline business) that has failed to pay. Some of the other contractors were based out of California and even going the government complaint route has still not paid off for them. At one point, they setup a payment plan and made the initial 1 of 6 monthly payments and then failed to make the rest of them.
As a contractor, I've chalked it up as yet another possible cost of doing business however it is frustrating and there seems to be very little one can do that actually results in getting paid without eating up the majority of the payment. Lawyers? See eating up the payment. Collection agencies? My experience was they were out for a quick buck but it was basically no protection from not getting paid a lesser amount (revised terms that ate into the payment). Government? See the other contractors experience -- probably will pay off but company might go bust before it happens. Going public? I think this might be the best route because at least it warns others (although typically it'll be too late).
Stepping back, I'm doing just fine and I'd be far more annoyed for those who have to work off the clock at minimum wage.
You need a lawyer. They are a cost of doing business in the contracting world. If you don't have a lawyer, you're going to get run over... over and over again.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Maybe we (myself and the other contractors involved) have been unlucky but we haven't been able to get anything done the lawyer route. I'm happy to try again but I've realized which lawyer is important and would love a referral if you have one (my email is in my profile).
The problem may be, you're getting a lawyer after the fact. Maybe your contract sucks and you have little to no recourse. You need a lawyer up front, reviewing your contract.
There are a bunch of studies showing that minimum wages don't cause drop-offs in employment. I'd never really considered that flagrant lawbreaking as a possible option accounting for that anomaly.
This is silly - it's more about the mismatch between the custom of buying a person's time and paying for the outcomes an employer is looking for. The flip side of this is that employees are stealing from their employer whenever their attention wavers from the job, for example talking with co-workers or texting or web browsing or whatever.
The reality is that hourly pay is almost always a poor approximation for the expectations between employer and employee. Calling any deviation from strictly kept time for an employee in 100% service to their employer "theft" is just silly, whether it's an employee chatting about their weekend, or an employer asking for some extra minutes. Each should (and outside of artificial constructs like this article does) weigh total compensation against benefit / effort and decide if the relationship is worth continuing.
> Each should (and outside of artificial constructs like this article does) weigh total compensation against benefit / effort and decide if the relationship is worth continuing.
Really fucking hard to do that if you are an employee with no power, easily replaceable and dependent on the job to keep you and your family alive.
This kind of hand waving real social struggles down to "they should just personally negotiate and be able to walk away from the deal if it's not good for them" is, at best, myopic. At worst is a lack of empathy and a very narrow worldview of labour.
130 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadhttps://i.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7ebdyu/bil...
Citation?
People have off days, get bad sleep, get sad etc. All of this is (must be) factored in already. You don't owe them for being human.
That sounds surprising, do you have a source? Are you including all kinds of fraud, not just shoplifting?
For that matter how are the estimates of employee vs. customer shoplifting separated?
Should be quite easy to find data on this because companies probably research it a lot - might be skewed ofc.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/92309-annual-retai...
Could you share your numbers on this, please?
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.
TFA: https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
Total wage violations estimated at $40 billion:
https://i.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg
And, if you're going to go with broadly estimated (and somewhat questionable) numbers, then surely you need to consider the ~$50B estimated lost to retail theft each year. Don't just compare $933 million proven lost to wage theft to the over-precise $340,850,358 aggregated from some robbery reports (really, 9 sig figs?) and call it "other theft".
Not to mention that that $933M "recovered" includes many cases of trebled damages...
Wage theft is important. But make an honest case.
But, sure, I do have an issue with those. Just like you don't think every dollar of wage theft is paid as damages, one might also reasonably believe that not every dollar of burglary losses is reported and captured in those aggregate numbers.
On what basis?
What repercussions might the reporter of property theft face? Of wage theft?
Seriously, the loaded/dishonest article and your antagonistic and pseudo-dishonest mode of argument has done more to erode how seriously I will take arguments in this area than to deepen my concern. If this is your objective, keep going down this path.
On the other hand, it's stupid: wage theft is a severe enough concern, deserving of additional advocacy, that it can be done honestly without these kinds of questionable argument tactics.
Nuance is important; people who advocate for one side or the other, honesty be damned, almost never help the situation.
I will add that even if the net amount is the same, it is much worse morally to rob a worker than a business.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...
Edit: just remembered a funny anecdote, a employee was caught stealing food at krogers, but it was normal enough that they told him if he paid for it they would forget it happened. He pretended to check out and was caught stealing the same food twice so they had to fire him. It was like a 2$ sandwich.
They then interview someone else about their independent research that only shows about $400 million in theft.
I believe the data is based off the Hiscox report [1], which makes the extremely important point that 85% of losses are due to employees at the managerial level or above - who are of course far less likely to be victims of wage theft! So this “eye for an eye” mentality is truly gross, beyond just the ways where it’s self-evidently gross.
[1] https://www.hiscox.com/documents/2018-Hiscox-Embezzlement-St...
An extreme case: What if the business only breaks even and it pays many specialized workers while doing so? Stealing from such a business and thereby killing the business will cost every worker his or her job. Stealing from this business is therefore equivalent to stealing the livelihood from every worker. The moral wrongdoing in this hypothetical scales like the number of workers.
b) Speaking from personal experience: having your wages stolen puts you in a horrible position of wondering if maybe you’ll get paid if you keep your head down, or worrying that you’ll be fired if you complain. The extortion is inherent in the nature of the theft, unlike shoplifting and most corporate embezzlement. It’s not just the money, it’s long-term abuse and exploitation of people who can’t easily defend themselves.
c) Obviously there is a scale: the Enron embezzlement (which is analogous to your extreme example) is worse than stealing $100 from a single worker. But $50bn in stolen wages is a much graver crime than $50bn in embezzled goods.
I've had this conversation with several employers. They're not paying me for how many hours I was at my desk, they're paying me for my economic output and my impact on the organization.
I get not every single job can have this level of flexibility, but the amount of "theft of time" and "employee shoplifting" that occur throughout America? I would bet my bottom dollar it isn't even close to employers' wage theft.
I new one company that I worked for where many salaried grades actually worked many hours every week over the "expected time"
The converse is not true. For most stores to have been affected by employee shoplifting only requires a tiny minority of employees - one per store! - to shoplift.
There is also an equilibrium; in the general case employees can't shoplift more than the equivalent security measure to prevent the shoplifting would cost. The equivalent limit to stolen wages is considerably more harrowing: the workers' mental and physical health.
Collectively this means shoplifting can be addressed by fairly typical business measures - additional security, hiring practices, lawsuits against individuals, etc. The infrastructure for all that is already in place, because capital already put it in place to protect itself and because shoplifting is not the norm. But wage theft requires radical or systemic change to ensure employees have the ability to punish all employers, because capital has again put measure in place to protect itself, and wage theft is the norm.
Finally, there is the issue of what you're measuring. Assuming shoplifting and employer theft from low-wage workers occur at the same rate for the same percentage, shoplifting would still dominate because it's much closer to a percentage of total revenue. Obviously total revenue is higher than a fraction of wages!
So how, exactly, is that comparison more meaningful?
Those few percent off of a paycheck can mean you now cannot pay off your month's credit balance. Next month the debt is larger (due to the outrageous interests), but you still cannot pay it off because your car broke down and you had to fix it to get to work. Next month your mother got sick and you had to help her pay for some medication. Now your debt is growing faster than you can pay it off.
If this equipment is then simply marked as "stolen" to write-off, and this situation is prevalent in tech companies, I could see it being a sizable chunk of the "shoplifting".
P.S. I don't claim literal shoplifting is not happening.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Are you suggesting full-time employees who are exempt from overtime laws working less than 40 hours a week some weeks?
Or are you suggesting employees who write down that they started at 10:00 and left at 6:30 but really got in at 10:05?
It seems to me the only way to "steal time" from the employer would be if you literally had someone else clock in for you when you weren't there or lied on your time card, both of which generally get the offender fired and are small-scale issues. Once someone has clocked in, it seems impossible to "steal time" from the employer -- the employer is paying for the employee's presence, so it's all just shades from slacking to working hard.
I care a lot about the small time dev who is forced into working unpaid OT. I don't give any shits whatsoever about big boy contractor charging 500/hour not getting paid for a week because of a dispute.
This is not a ledger issue, this is a power issue.
The same way ripping a movie or copying an artist is not theft, that's abuse or plagiarism.
Isn't it abuse or manipulation performed in order to accomplish theft? How is what you're describing not resulting in theft?
To me, theft is when something is taken away from someone without consent. By force or by subterfuge.
In your infringement example, it is proper to not call it theft. Nobody is denied property they have title to.
Here, people are denied property they have title to. It is theft.
Is it any surprise? Entirely too many founder-types think because someone doesn't throw 16 hours a day into their job, they're lazy, not realizing that most people don't share, or even give a shit, about their 'dream'.
Theft in general doesn't involve violence or the threat of violence. You're thinking of robbery.
One merely has to illegally deprive someone of something they legally own in order to commit theft. A pickpocketing is a theft. A mugging is a robbery. Wage theft is an entirely appropriate name. You could also call it "wage misappropriation" or "wage embezzlement" (though "embezzlement" generally applies to company property) if you want to make it sound classier :-P
Burglary is violence too. So is pickpocketing.
They literally are not. If I have my pocket picked or my house burgled when I'm out, I may not find out until later. There was no violence or threat of violence employed against my person.
Robbery and theft are legally defined as separate crimes. The former is treated far more harshly than the latter.
It's still pickpocketing, which is theft. Unless they employ force against you in turn, or threaten you, to stop you from removing their hand. That makes it robbery.
> If they’re burgling your house, you’ve got the right to shoot them dead.
It's still burglary, which is theft. Unless they also employ violence against you, or threaten violence against you, in the course of committing the burglary. That makes it robbery.
This isn't my opinion, so there's no use arguing with me. You're arguing against the law and the English language.
If you don't like this, take it up with the dictionary. Sorry for the bluntness but this is getting a bit ridiculous.
> By contrast, the total amount recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million in 2012. This is almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year. Further, the nearly $1 billion successfully reclaimed by workers is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government.
But we do know that the total amount of money recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million—almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year.
https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
High is $50 billion.
2019 workforce was 164 million.
-> $305/worker.
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-summary....
50 billion is a made up number.
The fact is, this isn’t really theft. It’s a change in wages that has occurred after you switched jobs, only instead of saying “actually we’re going to pay you $X, now that you’ve started,” they sneak in lower wages through other means. That’s not a good thing, but it’s hardball negotiation, not theft.
Nah, paying someone under the negotiated rate by lying about how many hours they worked is certainly a form of theft. Failing to give statutory-required pay is also a form of theft.
I'd looked up earlier today: the three metro areas account for nearly 1/5th all US economic activity. NYC, LA, and Chicago metro areas represent 17% of US GDP. That's a sizable chunk.
Methodology questions or quanitative comparisons are reasonable objections. Bald acusations of fabrication are going to require some substantial foundation least they be dismissed for their own claim: that they're made up.
Welll... it's still over the lowest estimate possible, because it's the amount of damages paid and damages are often trebled.
As others have pointed out, not all burglary and larceny is necessarily violent. But you're also missing the point that wage theft is not always a dispassionate contract dispute between equal parties. Especially for those most vulnerable (minimum wage workers, people with medical conditions, people with dependents, the food and housing insecure) there is a massive level of coercion going on as well. These individuals often cannot afford to risk a legal fight to assert their claims to what they're fairly owed.
I have friends who knew their employer was stealing from them and had to forgo things like medications because they couldn't make ends meet that month. Friends in the restaurant industry who've had to skips meals and go hungry while their manager skimmed from the tip pool. It may not meet the Oxford English Dictionary definition of "violence" but it sure seemed like violence to me.
edit:typo
I do know that other countries don’t incarcerate anywhere close to as many of its citizens as the US, especially for what amounts to a rounding-error’s worth financial loss due to petty theft (a handful of fighter jets worth).
https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/wage-theft-legislation-passes...
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216319
Are we to ignore the fact that the crimes mentioned involve life-threatening situations for those affected? Apparently, human life is not as important as the amount of money lost.
As a contractor, I've chalked it up as yet another possible cost of doing business however it is frustrating and there seems to be very little one can do that actually results in getting paid without eating up the majority of the payment. Lawyers? See eating up the payment. Collection agencies? My experience was they were out for a quick buck but it was basically no protection from not getting paid a lesser amount (revised terms that ate into the payment). Government? See the other contractors experience -- probably will pay off but company might go bust before it happens. Going public? I think this might be the best route because at least it warns others (although typically it'll be too late).
Stepping back, I'm doing just fine and I'd be far more annoyed for those who have to work off the clock at minimum wage.
This is relevant for every contractor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
The reality is that hourly pay is almost always a poor approximation for the expectations between employer and employee. Calling any deviation from strictly kept time for an employee in 100% service to their employer "theft" is just silly, whether it's an employee chatting about their weekend, or an employer asking for some extra minutes. Each should (and outside of artificial constructs like this article does) weigh total compensation against benefit / effort and decide if the relationship is worth continuing.
Really fucking hard to do that if you are an employee with no power, easily replaceable and dependent on the job to keep you and your family alive.
This kind of hand waving real social struggles down to "they should just personally negotiate and be able to walk away from the deal if it's not good for them" is, at best, myopic. At worst is a lack of empathy and a very narrow worldview of labour.