Unfortunately one has been deemed a “civil matter” and you won’t read any reporting about it in WSJ or Forbes. Hilariously, wage theft is much more organized than any shoplifting conspiracy.

The EPI article gives some interesting & specific examples of wage theft. However, I think that term and the discussion around it gives the impression that large corporations are looking for opportunities to steal employees wages. When I skim these examples I see a few honest mistakes / bad policies but mostly small likely bankrupt/distressed companies trying to keep the wheels from falling off their business. It's like a ponzi scheme falling apart, payroll checks bounce, tips get stolen, employees are asked to do something while clocked out, etc. Because many businesses have insufficient working capital, this just happens.

Let's take a relative look at the problem

> wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.

$50B / $6.5T [0] = 0.77% of wages are "stolen"

While not good and $50B is a huge amount, I'd argue this is not much of a problem but a rounding error. Unless we require some level of capitalization or reserves by small businesses, a large portion of this will never go away. I would be shocked if even half the restitutions were paid, this forced bankruptcy for most of these businesses I would guess.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-an...

I wonder what the value of the inverse of this is - time theft. How many employees are paid to be on the clock but are not working? I bet it's in the hundreds of billions per year nationwide.