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Comment by sampleinajar | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

edit:typo

Its a well known hr/ir labor law term.

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.

This is timecard fraud, not wage theft.

I have not heard "timecard fraud" before, but it does seem a more accurate term.

I think another term for that is "time theft"

Fraud and Gross Misconduct are the terms that would be used

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