https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
"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."
http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-w...
Contrary to popular belief, wage theft is a criminal act rather than a contractual dispute. Wrongfully withholding or sequestering a person's property is just as illegal as taking it from their hands.
> This failure to pay what workers are legally entitled to can be called wage theft;
That is totally dumb. If a legal entitlement is denied it is a violation of law but not necessarily violation of a person's private property. I have happily worked more than 8 hours for my employer so many times and done unpaid internships happily even though the employer likely broke several labor laws. I think I gained from it.
Even more importantly those people who think they are getting a raw deal can leave immediately or sue the employer.
I think he's choosing to go by a different definition -- namely where "theft" is when you're deprived of what's justly yours by whatever unethical means; not simply when the law proscribes it as such. Or in other word: based more on an intuitive sense of fairness (or "natural law"), rather than what's on the books.
Granted, it's a fuzzier definition, and you may not particularly like it. But I'm just saying, it's a different one.
This is the same trick that advertisers use (Police don't like this new insurance rule) or politicians deploy (calling a person sexual offender when he was merely peeing in open) but I think journalists should show far more sense.
BTW it may be more accurate to describe the authors as policy researchers, rather than journalists.
Inside warehouse, worker hides pallet of expensive goods by surrounding it with cheaper goods. Boss cannot find the expensive pallet. Worker has stolen the goods, even though none have left the warehouse. He has converted them from his boss's possession to his own constructive possession. Just like a boss that withholds wages, worker cannot suddenly make the pallet appear once the cops show up. The theft has occurred even if the thief later returns the goods.