Wage Theft Is a Much Bigger Problem Than Other Forms of Theft (2014)

Citation?

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?

Could you share your numbers on this, please?

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Isn't it abuse or manipulation performed in order to accomplish theft? How is what you're describing not resulting in theft?

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.