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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

If it exists, and money can flow, it will be gamed.

We should have much stricter penalties for fraud. Vastly more money is stolen this way than by petty theft or robbery, but the perpetrators tend to get off very lightly by comparison.

Wage theft is the largest form of theft by a wide margin. Everything from not paying people at all for contracted work, forcing people to work overtime without additional pay, structuring contracts/agreements in terms of bonuses that can never be attained with the insane performance requirements, to paying people late.

To be fair, in most states you don't even have to sue to recover back wages. You just file a report with the state labor board, who are empowered to bring legal action on your behalf.

And that might take years if anything happens at all, this isn't an easy process and one that will absolutely end in retaliation in most work places.

>Wage theft is the largest form of theft by a wide margin

I doubt that is true in the US for sensible definitions of wage theft.

>structuring contracts/agreements in terms of bonuses that can never be attained with the insane performance requirements

I disagree that this is theft although it might be exploitation if the employee has less experience or knowledge than the employer.

> I doubt that is true in the US for sensible definitions of wage theft.

It is absolutely true.

Here's the raw data, you can look for yourself. Kind of shocked someone on HN doesn't already know this.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data/charts/all-acts

> Wage theft in the U.S. is a massive, underreported problem, with estimates showing employers steal over $15 billion to $50 billion annually from workers. This surpasses the combined value of all reported robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, which totaled significantly less, making wage theft the largest form of theft in the country.

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Theft and robbery are not just monetary crimes, that's why the penalties are different.

Theft almost always has a component of violence done or threatened against a person and robbery involves violating a persons formerly thought-to-be safe space. There is a large psychological/emotional component to these more petty crimes. It's mostly not about the money, it's about what you had to do to get it.

It's an offset for the amount of effort and forethought put into the fraud

What's an offset? The money stolen from other people? I can't understand what you mean

well the bravery for robbing a bank deserves some respect, not jail time

sexual assulters deserve respect due to their manliness and will-to-action

hmm can't see what's wrong here? well that's your intelligence level

Remember DOGE?

Yeah. Good luck!

Now apply that logic to the academics, journalists and NGOs whose income depends on temperature readings ...

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