Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed, it opens up the topic to a wider question - why are some things counted as crimes and others not?

For example, why isn't wage theft included in the NCVS?

Surface-level answer: because in most jurisdictions, it's not a criminal offense. Steal $100 from your employer? Go to jail. Your employer requires unpaid overtime adding up to $1,000? A slap on the wrist at best.

Yet employees are victims to billions of dollars of wage theft every year! "Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed workers experienced at least one pay-related violation in the week prior to the survey. On average the workers in the three cities lost a total of $2,634 annually due to workplace violations, out of an average income of $17,616, which translates into wage theft of fifteen percent of income." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft . Does the NCVS list that over half of employees are victims of wage theft?

Why, it's almost as if the laws were structured against poor people in favor of business. Hmm, and ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the poor population.

What about the illegal collusion between Silicon Valley companies to suppress worker wages? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... . Were all 64,000 employees counted as victims in the NCVS? Again, no, because that was a civil suit, not a crime that the police should be involved in.

But again, why is it under civil law, not criminal? (There's no hint that this wage theft is due to racism.)

Or, were the events leading to the lead poisoning of the water of Flint, MI and its coverups a crime? If so, why isn't the population of Flint included as victims? If not, why not?

Or, in discussions related to the 'school-prison nexus', when disproportionate disciplinary actions are taken against students of color, are those students counted as victims? Why or why not?

You are correct. All this inconvenient data indeed makes people dismiss the 'simple "the police are racist"' and replace it with "the system is both racist and biased in favor of the rich".

A moment ago the conversation was about violent crime and "over-policing creates racist bias in crime data". Now it's about laws treating corporate crimes more leniently.

You raise good points, and use them to deftly move past all the claims of racism that homicide statistics and victim surveys largely (but not entirely) refute.

I think the wage theft point is relevant (I was going to bring it up too) for two reasons:

1. Directly, wage theft affects people's ability to get out of poverty and build wealth. Wage theft is a problem that disproportionately affects lower-income people (because they're more likely to rely on wages, instead of salaries or investments) and is disproportionately worse for lower-wealth people (because they can't as easily absorb a loss of $1,000 by covering it out of savings). We know, from those very same victim surveys, that poverty correlates with crime. In fact https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/household-poverty-a... points out that poverty correlates with being a victim of crime.

2. Less directly, but more interestingly from a philosophical standpoint, wage theft is a great example of a crime where how you classify it impacts statistics. Victim surveys tend to look at robberies. Wage theft isn't a "robbery," but if you lose $1,000 from your employer, that's much worse for you than being mugged at knife-point and losing $100 from your wallet. And if you look at homicides: Los Angeles has 200-something homicides per year. It also has 40-something police-caused deaths per year, which are generally not called "homicides." It also has 200-something deaths from car accidents a year, which are also generally not called "homicides." You're equally dead through any of these means, but crime surveys create a specific definition of "violent crime" that only looks at certain forms of violence.

And you've deftly moved past the question "How do you determine if the police are being successful?"

Is your metric only homicide statistics?

geofft commented "police refusing to take police reports or saying that something is a civil matter". My examples were meant to reinforce that issue, where crime statistics place far less weight on theft of services than theft of property, even when the monetary amounts involved are similar.

FWIW, wage theft isn't only a corporate crime. If I promise to pay someone to mow my lawn, and he does it, and I don't pay him (perhaps threatening to call the police because I suspect he's an immigrant without work papers), then that's also wage theft, even though I am not a corporation.

Directly addressing a claim made in the post I replied to (police manipulation/bias of statistics) is not "moving past" anything.

You're welcome to continue onto ever more abstract or systemic claims of racism and bias, but please don't begrudge me pointing out when some of the stepping stones crumble along the way.

You wrote "One could compare police statistics with victim surveys".

On could also compare other statistics, and show that police are over-funded compared to other sorts of enforcement agencies.

The very act of picking which statistics to use is itself biased.

Simply pointing to NCVS is not going to be convincing. Which numbers should we look at? What correlations should we draw? How should we understand the biases in the interpretation? What alternative explanations are there for whatever it is you haven't actually said?

Without pointers to what what your actual point is, I figured it was just as appropriate to point out how your foundation is itself crumbled.

> Your employer requires unpaid overtime adding up to $1,000? A slap on the wrist at best.

Because the two are not at all the same.

I would imagine the reason is that everything should already be on record, and you'd be expected to take said employer to court. That said, if employer tried to explicitly commit fraud e.g. forge documents, illegal employment, I'd expect someone to see jail time.

Theft, on the other hand, is inherently off-the-record and fraudulent.

Also, if said employer forced you to work I'd expect to see punishment vs asking (possibly illegally) for you to work overtime - in the case of theft no-one gets the right to refuse.

> But again, why is it under civil law, not criminal?

NAL but I think its something to do with breaking/violating contracts versus the law. It makes sense to me. You seem to be focusing on the sums involved rather than the context of the theft.

> it's almost as if the laws were structured against poor people in favor of business

legal action is expected (in the US) to be funded by the participants, i.e. they put in a stake. This means those with less money will always have fewer options. A small business can also suffer this way.

The flip side is those with wealth have more to lose, and big pockets often attract lawsuits.

What we perhaps need is better union - no-win-no-fee lawyers to help combat wage theft, but I suspect the cost of layers now is so high that lower salaries just aren't worth the fight - 2634 USD pa might not cover a lot, so you'd need to pool resources and make it all v efficient. I'd be interested in what barriers there are to this.

> lead poisoning of the water of Flint, MI and its coverups a crime?

I think it should be, absolutely. The whole think with Depont dumping shit in rivers is also terrible. I wish the government were more pro-active in punishing these actions, and I'm quite frankly surprised how little action there is - a sign of corruption at a higher level?

> and you'd be expected to take said employer to court

Which, as you seem to concur, makes it hard for low-wage workers to fight against wage theft.

> Theft, on the other hand, is inherently off-the-record and fraudulent.

The Wikipedia entry for wage theft links to https://www.npr.org/2013/04/10/176677299/construction-boomin... with an example of an employer not paying $1,200 in wages until the employee went to the Texas Workforce Commission.

Why should theft of $1,200 cash be a criminal act, while theft of $1,200 worth of services is not?

I don't see how this isn't fraudulent. There's no right to refuse after you've already done the work. And the employee must have originally arranged the work off-the-record because you don't tell the government you had an employee you paid $0.

The Wikipedia article points to other types of wage theft, like employee misclassification, which seems very much like either forging documents or illegal employment.

> I'd expect someone to see jail time

And if they don't, what do you expect to happen?

Because wage theft is rarely punished at all, much less resulting in jail time.

> legal action is expected (in the US) to be funded by the participants

In civil law, yes. Not criminal law.

Why is wage theft not part of criminal law (excepting a few jurisdictions), even for those cases where the employer is doing things off-the-record, fraudulently, and the employee has no right to refuse?

Even within civil law, why is the civil liability to employer so low? There's less need to pool resources if wage theft had treble damages.

> There's no right to refuse after you've already done the work

You implicitly agree to take on a debt when you don't ask for payment upfront, but either way you still should have a contract of some sort. Just because you call it theft doesn't make it so - failure to deliver on a promise (contract) doesn't retroactively become theft.

> the employee must have originally arranged the work off-the-record

Illegally?.. You don't get the same protection of law if you conspire to stiff the taxman.

> And if they don't, what do you expect to happen? Because wage theft..

My comment wrt expectation was about fraud, not "wage theft".

> even for those cases where the employer is doing things off-the-record, fraudulently, and the employee has no right to refuse?

off-the-record and fraudulent activity should be punished, but I see no evidence it is being ignored. If employees are also complicit, maybe that's the reason these cases are not heard.

> why is the civil liability to employer so low?

presumably b/c, without fraud, there should be all the evidence/materials to prove wrong doing in the normal manner (i.e. in court). I agree, though, that those who do it blatantly should be additionally punished if it seems they are banking on poor organisation/resources of their employees.

Shrug. Okay, let's take your points as true, and agree that wage theft shouldn't be criminalized more than it already it.

Why are the enforcement agencies responsible for preventing wage theft - including "the taxman" - so underfunded as compared to the police, even when we're talking about comparable economic effects in the billions of dollars?

When talking about correlations between race and being a "victim", why should we only (or primarily) consider criminal statistics?

Is there a national equivalent of the National Crime Victimization Survey which covers wage theft, workplace harassment, and other illegal activities which aren't part of criminal law?

I dunno. Me code.

> enforcement agencies responsible for preventing wage theft - including "the taxman"

The taxman isn't formally concerned with wage theft, they are concerned with (tax) fraud. I'm not sure what other enforcement agencies there would be - the Department of Labour?

> When talking about correlations between race and being a "victim", why should we only (or primarily) consider criminal statistics?

We shouldn't, but that's a generalisation of the original question: why is wage theft not treated like a criminal offence.

Also, correlations with race doesn't imply causation: If race correlates with X then anything that correlates with X will also correlate with race. Race correlates with wealth, so anything that correlates with wealth can be spuriously correlated to race. If you normalise for wealth and the racial correlation disappears (I do not know if this is the case) then you have a stronger case for a (primary) cause.

> which covers wage theft, workplace harassment

presumably court cases and lawsuit in non-criminal cases. and other non-legal things such as polls and complaints. But I'm not sure why you expand this to workplace harassment etc - legal resources should be better provided at the lower end, but the courts are the proper place for these civil issues, not criminalising (recategorising) everything for the sake of fixing a funding problem.

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