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Comment by _DeadFred_ | Hacker News Reader

Stealing from employees is just normal business in the US. $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered for US workers between 2021 and 2023. Imagine how much wasn't recovered. It is often the least able to take action/most in need of every dollar of their income that are stolen from. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats those with the least power versus those with power.

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/

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That seems like a really small number? To compare - total US retail shrink in those years combined was a little over $300B[0] - averaging about 1.5% of sales. $1.5B seems like a rounding error when talking in those terms.

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-retailers-cite-rising-theft-...

I think their point was that this was all that was recovered, from the approx $20b stolen each year through wage theft. I believe wage theft is one of the largest value crime by $ amount in the US - but is very rarely prosecuted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

Actually it turns out fraud and white collar crime takes more out of the American economy.

I skimmed the article - any significant concrete numbers were all sourced to the EPI site linked by the GP. There's an unsourced FBI chart that says >19B in 2012, but I couldn't find the actual numbers when I looked. Frankly - I don't trust this claim if the only one actually putting big numbers on it is one publication.

EDIT: I'm going to cast more suspicion on the FBI graph. According to a 2022 report[0], the number of robbery offenses reported in 2018 was 1691 cases. The median loss being about $2k. Doing some caveman-math, that's about $3B lost to robbery in 2018. Unless we went through some insane spike of lawlessness between 2012 and 2018, I don't see how $340m in 2012 jumps to $3B in 2018.

[0]: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

1691 * $2k is about $3M, not $3B.

Caveman math indeed. Thanks for the correction - that's a pretty big error. Though then I'm not sure what to make of the discrepancy between the numbers. They still don't square up w/ the Wikipedia article any way you look at it

You are comparing ACTUAL recovered wage theft numbers to industry trade group estimated numbers and making claims/drawing conclusions off of two totally differently types of numbers?

Why not compare recovered to recovered, which are pretty close to each other? https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...

That business appears to steal as much from their workers as criminal theft rings surely is kind of a big deal (based on the matching ACTUAL recovery numbers).

Let's be conservative by taking GDP for only the middle year. In 2022 American GDP was 26 trillion (rounded down). Let's also gross up the stolen wages from your comment to 2.6 billion.

That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and the reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.

If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!

I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand your point? Does it being a small % of the GDP matter to those stolen from? Does it mean we shouldn't attempt to remedy it?

We should care about it 0.002% as much as we care about other economic problems.

Not quite- from a strictly financial perspective, it means we should care 0.002% as much as we care about an intervention that doubles the GDP or eliminates 100% it. Neither exists, so we're better off comparing to other theft- this is about 15% of numbers for retail shrink, 50% of reported personal theft, so this suggests we should care proportionally.

But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.

Wage theft takes more money out of people's pockets than robbery, auto theft, burglary and larceny combined.

Should we not care about them as they are such a small part of gdp?

Wage theft is about $20b a year.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

We all know employees generate more revenue than what they're paid. Otherwise you wouldn't have a successful business.

Comparing wages with GDP in this context doesn't prove anything.

The RECOVERED number matches retail theft recovery numbers. So it is AT LEAST on par with organized and unorganized criminal retail theft. I'd say that is significant (I would argue retail theft if much easier to catch and pursued much more often, making wage theft a larger issue) especially as it's happening within the structure of/approved by businesses.

https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...

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