7 ms·

I totally agree that wage theft is a real problem, but the comparison is disingenuous. A more meaningful comparison would be wage theft vs employee shoplifting

• aussiegreenie 6y ago
  Tens of billions are stolen from employees and nothing happens.
  • paulpauper 6y ago
    Consider an alternate universe in which there is no unpaid labor . you think that the unemployment rate would be higher or lower? OR that prices would be higher or lower? A variable amount of unpaid labor is built into the economy. Eliminating it would have all sorts of unforeseen and possibly undesirable consequences.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • kevinmgranger 6y ago
      If this is remotely true, it's the best indictment of our economic system that I've ever seen.
• tyrust 6y ago
  >in fact a much larger amount Citation?
• cousin_it 6y ago
  Yeah, I suspect that both wage theft and {employee slacking + employee shoplifting} could aggregate to really large numbers.
  • reitzensteinm 6y ago
    Now subtract unpaid overtime.
  • ianmobbs 6y ago
    "Employee slacking" is not illegal, but wage theft is.
    • leetcrew 6y ago
      kinda depends on what type of "slacking" we're talking about. so called "time theft" is essentially fraud, which is definitely illegal. usually not worth the effort to prove when you can just fire people.
      • MisterBastahrd 6y ago
        I did this as a kid. I was 11 years old and hired by a country club to clean restrooms and the grounds around the swimming pool during the summer. I had to be in and out before the first guests arrived because I wasn't a member. They decided to pay me $1.85 an hour when the minimum wage was $3.35 or so at the time, but I had no bargaining power because I was legally under age. Our timesheets were paper and the club had no surveillance, so I gave myself 1.5 hours of work every day because I was a quick worker (the person I alternated with took more time anyway) and they were assholes.
  • thebean11 6y ago
    Do you think salaries are based on employees giving 110% effort every day? People have off days, get bad sleep, get sad etc. All of this is (must be) factored in already. You don't owe them for being human.
• ska 6y ago
  Are you saying total value of employee shoplifting is higher than total value of wage theft? That sounds surprising, do you have a source? Are you including all kinds of fraud, not just shoplifting? For that matter how are the estimates of employee vs. customer shoplifting separated?
  • spottybanana 6y ago
    Quickly googling, here is an estimate that annual shoplifting value is 15-20 billions. Should be quite easy to find data on this because companies probably research it a lot - might be skewed ofc. https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/92309-annual-retail-theft-survey----more-losses-from-shoplifters-and-dishonest-employees-in-2019 https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/92309-annual-retai...
• Apes 6y ago
  > employee shoplifting ... is in fact a much larger amount Could you share your numbers on this, please?
• jakelazaroff 6y ago
  How is the comparison disingenuous? The point is that the attention that different types of theft receive is disproportionate to how much is stolen in aggregate.
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    the linked article is comparing robbery and wage theft based only on the dollar value stolen. by definition, robbery is theft that involves (the threat of) physical violence. when I worked in restaurants, I had a boss that would routinely reach into our tip jar to pay himself back for mistakes we made. it fucking sucked, but not nearly as much as having someone threaten to end your life on the spot.
• mlyle 6y ago
  It's completely disingenuous, comparing wage theft to robbery... deliberately excluding burglary which is massive in comparison.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    Victims of burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.4 billion in property losses in 2018. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/topic-pages/burglary https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year. TFA: https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/ https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-... Total wage violations estimated at $40 billion: https://i.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg https://i.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg
    • mlyle 6y ago
      You're missing that they picked "robbery", excluding the much larger "burglary" and "shoplifting" and "fraud" categories. They then say "Much bigger problem than other forms of theft"... Implying "Much bigger problem than [all] other forms of theft" instead of "Much bigger problem than [some] other forms of theft". And, if you're going to go with broadly estimated (and somewhat questionable) numbers, then surely you need to consider the ~$50B estimated lost to retail theft each year. Don't just compare $933 million proven lost to wage theft to the over-precise $340,850,358 aggregated from some robbery reports (really, 9 sig figs?) and call it "other theft". Not to mention that that $933M "recovered" includes many cases of trebled damages... Wage theft is important. But make an honest case.
      • dredmorbius 6y ago
        I gave you the FBI's own burglary numbers. You have issues with those?
        • 6y ago
• ojnabieoot 6y ago
  It is not “in fact a much larger amount” - it actually looks to be about the same. The article estimates about $50bn wages are stolen every year, while [1] suggests about $50bn is stolen/embezzled by employees every year. I will add that even if the net amount is the same, it is much worse morally to rob a worker than a business. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-businesses-50-billion-a-year.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...
  • skrtskrt 6y ago
    Without evidence, I would also imagine that the poorest workers are most hurt by wage theft, and not equally "benefited" by theft/embezzlement.
  • woopwoop 6y ago
    Color me genuinely surprised. I would have guessed that wage theft was much larger. Experience suggests to me that ~everyone has been pressured at least once to roll hours forward to avoid overtime, but most people don't shoplift.
    • loeg 6y ago
      There may be fewer embezzlers with disproportionately high average theft, probably with a much more skewed distribution (a few very large embezzlements covers a lot of minimum wage hours).
      • Gibbon1 6y ago
        My mother was a CPA that audited businesses. Someone embezzling 4 figures was unremarkable.
        • loeg 6y ago
          Four figures covers a lot of minimum wage hours.
    • thatguy0900 6y ago
• cbozeman 6y ago
  This only works if you're considering work as "hours worked" versus "impact and output". I've had this conversation with several employers. They're not paying me for how many hours I was at my desk, they're paying me for my economic output and my impact on the organization. I get not every single job can have this level of flexibility, but the amount of "theft of time" and "employee shoplifting" that occur throughout America? I would bet my bottom dollar it isn't even close to employers' wage theft.
  • walshemj 6y ago
    The is the very definition of 99% of salaried grades outside of some edge cases - IE no fixed hours of work I new one company that I worked for where many salaried grades actually worked many hours every week over the "expected time"
• morelisp 6y ago
  For 2/3 of low-wage workers to have been affected by wage theft, either most low-wage workers are overwhelming employeed by a small number of companies (which if true is also concerning - but not bourne out by the numbers in the EPI report), or most companies are stealing from at least some workers. That's obscene. The converse is not true. For most stores to have been affected by employee shoplifting only requires a tiny minority of employees - one per store! - to shoplift. There is also an equilibrium; in the general case employees can't shoplift more than the equivalent security measure to prevent the shoplifting would cost. The equivalent limit to stolen wages is considerably more harrowing: the workers' mental and physical health. Collectively this means shoplifting can be addressed by fairly typical business measures - additional security, hiring practices, lawsuits against individuals, etc. The infrastructure for all that is already in place, because capital already put it in place to protect itself and because shoplifting is not the norm. But wage theft requires radical or systemic change to ensure employees have the ability to punish all employers, because capital has again put measure in place to protect itself, and wage theft is the norm. Finally, there is the issue of what you're measuring. Assuming shoplifting and employer theft from low-wage workers occur at the same rate for the same percentage, shoplifting would still dominate because it's much closer to a percentage of total revenue. Obviously total revenue is higher than a fraction of wages! So how, exactly, is that comparison more meaningful?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• leetcrew 6y ago
  it's kinda apples-to-oranges to just compare the dollar value stolen in each category. like if I get mugged, the problem isn't just that I lost my phone, credit card, ID, and some petty cash; it's also that someone stuck a gun in my face. who knows how close they were to pulling the trigger? an employer shaving a few percent off my paycheck doesn't affect whether I feel safe walking outside the next day.
  • kilburn 6y ago
    That's true, but wage theft towards the lower-income people is particularly perverse. Life is much harder at those ranks, and there's not much needed to start a seemingly unstoppable demise. Those few percent off of a paycheck can mean you now cannot pay off your month's credit balance. Next month the debt is larger (due to the outrageous interests), but you still cannot pay it off because your car broke down and you had to fix it to get to work. Next month your mother got sick and you had to help her pay for some medication. Now your debt is growing faster than you can pay it off.
• lostmsu 6y ago
  I wonder if "employee shoplifting" actually involves no crime in its majority. My friends had experienced a few cases where they were never asked to return company equipment upon leaving, and that includes expensive laptops, phones, etc. E.g. the company was supposed to contact them to get it back, but never did. If this equipment is then simply marked as "stolen" to write-off, and this situation is prevalent in tech companies, I could see it being a sizable chunk of the "shoplifting". P.S. I don't claim literal shoplifting is not happening.
  • josephcsible 6y ago
    The term "shoplifting" applies strictly to goods that the company was trying to sell, not things they were using themselves, so even if non-returned company equipment were counted as stolen, it wouldn't count towards the shoplifting numbers.