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Usually it happens only if you steal from investors. Stealing from consumers is fine.
by jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
Usually it happens only if you steal from investors. Stealing from consumers is fine.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoStealing 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/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/
- nickff 1y ago[flagged]
- Teever 1y agoThat isn't theft. If an employee completes all the work assigned to them and passes performance reviews then what you're describing is a suboptimal use of the employees on the part of the employer.
- SoftTalker 1y agoReal theft by employees is also extremely common. Especially in retail and food service.
- triceratops 1y agoAnd is treated as a criminal matter. But the manager telling employees to clock out before their shift ends is a civil matter.
- SoftTalker 1y agoMost often an employee caught stealing is just fired. If there's significant value involved perhaps the police would get a call. Telling an employee to clock out and keep working is a labor law violation, that's not just a civil matter. It happens, but often with the agreement of the employee. I.e. "I know you're about to hit overtime, so if you clock out I'll give you cash, otherwise I have to send you home."
- triceratops 1y agoThe point is the police will take a complaint in the case of employee theft. And the "agreement" of the employee is utterly meaningless because it's not a negotiation between equals. Coercion is more accurate. > labor law violation, that's not just a civil matter So people go to jail over it? It goes on their criminal record and comes up in background checks? > I'll give you cash This part sounds like pure fantasy. And the cash would be less than overtime pay (otherwise why even make the offer) so it's still wage theft.
- exe34 1y ago> if you clock out I'll give you cash Yes, but on what planet?
- lostlogin 1y ago> retail and food service. Two industries that typically pay significantly less than a living wage and which have a reputation for treating their employees like absolute dirt. Would you respect your employer if they didn’t respect you?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Auracle 1y agoMy sister was a waitress at Red Lobster in somewhat of a tourism city and made absolute bank. She still stole stuff like cutlery, salt shakers, etc. Let’s not pretend that most people that are stealing are Robin Hood types.
- lostlogin 1y agoI don’t think what you and I have said is in opposition? It’s mutual distain between employee and employer.
- reactordev 1y agoTarget has a whole surveillance department just for this
- Teever 1y agoWhen this conversation comes up it is typically mentioned that employers have mechanisms of enforcement that are tied to their basic accounting required for taxes as well as surveillance cameras that are also meant to watch customers for theft. They also have the ability to contact law enforcement and have their employees arrested for theft. There is an asymmetry in this relationship however where employees don't practically have recourse when their employers steal from them.
- try_the_bass 1y ago> If an employee completes all the work assigned to them I don't think this was implied in their statement?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- const_cast 1y agoEven if it wasn't, being a poor worker still isn't theft, and it's the companies responsibility to both measure and correct employee performance. If they're bad at that and these things go under the radar, that's still on the employer. The only way employees can steal is if they steal time, like clocking in then going home. Salary employees are not paid by time, so they cannot steal time. Employers want to have their cake and eat it too - they want to consider salary employees not time based when it comes to OT, but when it comes to day-to-day they DO want them to be considered time-based. Not how it works. Your workers being bad at their job is not theft, it's just incompetence.
- try_the_bass 1y agoDeliberately putting in less than the asked for effort in an attempt to extract more pay for less work is theft in the same way that attempting to minimize pay and maximize effort is "wage theft". It's a knife that cuts both ways. If companies attempting to maximally exploit their employee's time is wage theft, so too is an employee's attempt to get a paycheck without doing work.
- const_cast 1y agoRight, but it's not - because salary paid workers are not paid for their time spent, but rather for their quantity and quality of work. Which is up to employers to measure. Me spending 5 minutes filling up my water is not stealing. Me taking a nice 15 minute walk is also not stealing. Presumably you're going to draw the line somewhere, but the implication of salary jobs is that productivity is not linear. Me spending an extra hour working on something does not translate into an extra unit of work done. Me taking that 15 minute walk doesn't translate to 1/4th less unit of work, either. In fact, it might translate to 1 extra unit of work done. Look at that, I am now bending time into the negative. Human productivity is complicated, and we're not assembly line workers. Also, even the concept of "less work" is dubious. The level of work being done varies from person to person, and nobody actually knows what the minimum is. Everybody should be optimizing for the minimum work necessary to get their pay, because that's just obvious. No hourly worker is going to spend even 1 minute working off the clock. But alas, we have no clock, and we're just kind of... estimating... what level of work really needs to be done, and then calculating that in with our own levels of accomplishment we want, and then convenience. I might work a bit extra to find a nice stopping point, or because I really want to conquer a bug. If a worker decides to work less than whatever their current level of work is, and they don't get fired or even reprimanded, I have to conclude they were previously working above the level of work expected of them. Which means that, overall, not only is this worker not stealing, they've actually been giving.
- exe34 1y agoWorking too hard is rewarded with more work.
- nickff 1y agoI agree, but this point seems to be orthogonal to the matters being discussed here. Your point is roughly analogous to 'providing too much consumer surplus is rewarded with more customers'.
- exe34 1y agoMore customers means more income. More work on a fixed salary is just more work. Can you spot the difference?
- nickff 1y agoYou're adding assumptions that the employee is #1 on salary, and #2 not getting a raise for the additional work. You've changed the assumptions and the situation...
- exe34 1y agoNo, the original comment (now flagged) was about salaried employees not working hard enough. The argument was that they weren't working hard enough for their current salary. There was nothing about getting a raise. You made that up.
- nickff 1y agoAs far as I can tell, there was nothing about salaries until your comment. There was also nothing (either way) about raises until my recent comment. You asserted that the employees were salaried and wouldn't get a raise.
- speff 1y agoThat 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-and-shrinkage-analysts-want-more-details-559a7136 https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-retailers-cite-rising-theft-...
- selfselfgo 1y ago[dead]
- ljf 1y agoI 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft Actually it turns out fraud and white collar crime takes more out of the American economy.
- speff 1y agoI 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-publications/quick-facts/Robbery_FY22.pdf https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
- microtherion 1y ago1691 * $2k is about $3M, not $3B.
- throwpoaster 1y agoLet'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!
- squigz 1y agoI'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?
- throwpoaster 1y agoWe should care about it 0.002% as much as we care about other economic problems.
- ToValueFunfetti 1y agoNot 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.
- ljf 1y agoWage 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
- bilekas 1y agoThis comment is so on point, reminds me of the old one about if you owe the bank 500k they own you, but if you owe then 2Billion you own them. Something along those lines, maybe I'm only noticing it more recently but it seems to me that there's also a higher prevalence of "Non class actions" clauses in terms and conditions these days too. It's amazing how badly customers are willing to be treated but at the same time, you're not obliged to buy a service so I can't really rant too much. Edit : Found the quote and unironically it's credited as an American Proverb. > If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb.
- teddyh 1y agoPreviously discussed here on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41798027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41798027>
- tyre 1y agoMatt Levine: “I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”
- Brian_K_White 1y agoSimilarly Elizabeth Holmes (In jail, but not for providing bad medical services.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- immibis 1y agoObviously the solution is to buy one share in every company.
- rsynnott 1y agoOr just one share in a whole-of-market index fund.
- immibis 1y agoI suspect you need an actual share in the company to qualify for shareholder protections. A share in a fund is a share in a fund, not a share in each company the fund has shares in.
- mrguyorama 1y agoWhich is why: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/tesla-blocks-stockholders-with-less-than-3-shares-suing-officers-its-behalf-2025-05-17/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...
- boredpeter 1y ago[dead]
- benoau 1y agoWe’re in the midst of watching Apple get away with criminal contempt for forcing consumers to be as ignorant as possible of their IAP fees - including forcing Patreon to exclusively use them while under court order to allow them to link to their own payments!