16 ms·

How Employers Get Out of Paying Their Workers

113 points by nols 11y ago

snarfy 11y ago
This is how employees get free stuff. The only thing that stopped them before was morality. When employers steal their tips, don't pay them, etc it makes stealing so much more justified to the employee.
stegosaurus 11y ago
Wage theft is quite a vitriolic term (and so might only be reasonably applicable to actual breach of contract), but I think I can reasonably make the claim that this is essentially a thing that happens to all workers. A lucky few upper middle class folks might be outside of this. Examples: Downtown minimum wage job. Impossible to afford downtown rent, resulting in a non-optional hour long unpaid commute. Business travel staying overnight. Direct expenses dealt with, but no compensation for the hours spent away from family stuck in front of a hotel TV. Retail job. Shift ends at store closing time. Shuffling off the last customer and closing and locking up ends possibly 20 minutes later. I could go on. Most people I know basically think this stuff is 'normal' and that you are just being lazy or finicky if you refuse to do so (maybe you 'deserve' to lose your job). This is basically what poverty is here... an extreme lack of time and state of stress or tiredness cauaed by ridiculous employment. Many minwage workers would genuinely be better off camping under bridges and reading books, if they didn't have families and social connections. The bottom end of the labour scale really is a horrible place to be at. I think that wealthy right wing folk don't often really understand it in the correct way. I think the idea these people have is that the poor have, or at least have the option of, a life that is just like being rich but with less fun stuff. e.g. a bike instead of a car, a flat instead of a house, and so on. The reality is that there exists a qualitative difference between being working and middle class in the sense that you are spending most of your mental cycles just trying to make ends meet at all.
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  If we're to take the minimum wage example seriously, we'd also have to treat the act of employing people at minimum wage, in a state with lower minimum wage, the same way -- in both cases the person has less compensation per time occupied than the given baseline minimum wage, whatever that is. Likewise, if the minimum wage were lower but downtown rent more affordable, we'd have to treat equivalent longer work hours at the lower minimum wage -- which gives the same effective conditions -- to be a form of "wage theft." So I think you would say that if the minimum wage is too low, paying people at that wage is a form of wage theft. Or simply, paying people at low wages is a form of wage theft. Minimum wage works because it improves some workers' negotiation positions so that they can capture more of their job's economic surplus -- likewise, somebody sprung with surprise business travel, or surprise retail job responsibilities, is in a poor position to negotiate just compensation for this change in situation. So the presence of some sort of weakness of negotiation position might be what characterizes your generalized notion of wage theft. The minimum wage example is distinct from the others though because it doesn't spring any surprises on the employee.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    Right. I kind of disclaim the term 'wage theft' because it brings in all sorts of legal connotations like breach of contract etc. It basically says that the law is the only thing that matters. It makes much more sense to simply reason about what is morally correct (assuming we accept capitalism and the idea that employers deserve to dictate to employees to some degree). In the full blown Marxist world view any appropriation of surplus value is essentially 'wage theft'. Of course, if that were completely returned to workers, there would be no point in bothering with employees. Instead, we can consider that if a worker has a wage low enough that their quality of life is really bad (e.g. complete inability to build capital as 100% of wage goes on absolute essentials), if there exists any more surplus value with which they could be paid more, it is reasonable for the employer to do so and unreasonable for them not to. Is it 'theft' not to? Well... no. In the same way that my landlord doesn't 'steal' my labour by exploiting the fact that buying property is difficult. It's still not great though.
    - SamReidHughes 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 11y ago
  Except for people on minimum wage, I don't agree that those really count as wage theft. Say you forced employers to account for the time closing and locking the store or to compensate people for spending hours away from their family. What would happen is that the hourly salary would drop to account for that, since in reality the workers are already taking those into account (as you say, they already consider it normal - and therefore expect it) when they accept the job. Except for minimum wage workers, they are just examples where the actual contract is an informal agreement, and not the piece of paper that was signed.
  - derekp7 11y ago
    I've often thought the same about unpaid overtime for salary IT employees -- in some high profile cases where a company was successfully sued for unpaid overtime, the affected employees were reclassified as hourly and given a pay adjustment that resulted 20% or lower than their previous pay (although their paychecks ended up being about the same, because they could then earn overtime).
  - chrismcb 11y ago
    Of course they should get paid for locking the doors, minimum wage or not. You claim hourly salary would drop, but at places that pay people correctly, it doesn't. Say a store is open from 10 am to 10pm. You hire one person to work 8 hours in the middle of the day. They come in say at noon, work 8 hours and leave at 8. Someone else comes in at 2 and works till closing, say 10:30. They do an extra half hour to clean up and lock up, so they should get paid less?
    - icebraining 11y ago
      I suppose in a shop where workers have a fixed schedule (e.g. noon to 8pm, 2pm to 10pm) that might happen, but the vast majority of retail jobs aren't like that. According to surveys, besides personal experience, something like 80%+ of retail jobs have at least shifts, if not full on-demand schedules, so there's no set of workers that always close the shop and others that don't - they all do, some of the days.
  - 11y ago
- rayiner 11y ago
  I think it's an appropriate term. The employer that asks people to show up at 8:30 for a job where they're only getting paid 9-5 is a thief, no different than the guy on the street that takes $10 out of your wallet. If we called it what it is, maybe people would feel shame like they ought to.
  - frenchman_in_ny 11y ago
    Except US Supreme Court just said that it's legal [0], and did so unanimously... [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-rules-against-worker-pay-for-security-screenings.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-rul...
    - danielweber 11y ago
      In very specific circumstances. You can't have people show up at 8:30 because you want to eliminate stragglers, or to have meetings in the "downtime" before the "real work" begins.
      - ehnto 11y ago
        That is still time from your life that you are dedicating to your job, thus you should be paid. Also I'm not sure how a meeting for work could be considered non-work, it is again time out of your life that you are doing a task to meet the needs of the company, thus you should be paid for it. If your company does client work, but doesn't bill meetings to the client, that's their prerogative, but I as an employee should by contract be paid for the work I am doing for my employer. If it's in my contract that I should do meetings without being paid, then I'm probably an idiot for signing that contract.
        true_religion 11y ago
        Truth be told, the only places I've seen that will pay you incrementally by the minute for anything out of the 9-5 will also dock you incrementally by the minute for taking too long of a lunch break, and count the number of bathroom breaks you take. For salaried work, I don't think it should matter if you show up anytime within 1 hour of the start of business so long as no one is relying on you to be there (e.g. for a meeting or to work hand-in-hand with you).
- GeneralMayhem 11y ago
  I don't think the first one is comparable to the others, as it's not strictly in the company's control. Also, I know this is anecdotal, but when I worked retail/fast food in HS/college, we were always paid up until we were done work. If the store closed at 9 and we couldn't leave until 10 because of customers and cleanup, we got paid until 10. I would have thought it bizarre if they did anything different - I'm sure it happens, but it didn't where I worked (a few national/international chains). This could of course cause some perverse incentives with closing up slowly, but there are other ways to deal with that, the simplest of which being to just fire people who are intentionally working slowly.
  - Retra 11y ago
    There is nothing that says a company should only pay it's employees on terms it can only strictly control. If you don't want to pay someone for 4 hours of commute per day, maybe dedicate some time to locating a closer place for them to live and paying for a move. Like you said: there are other ways to deal with it.
    - stegosaurus 11y ago
      Indeed. This is basically the power imbalance in action - 'he who has the gold makes the rules'. If employers should not pay for events out of their control then employees should not work if it exists out of their control (e.g. shift work). In this case though the premise is wrong. Take a McDonalds restaurant in central London. Their workers have to commute. The store knows this. The workers don't choose it out of some sort of work life balance decision - it is impossible to rent downtown on minimum wage (as in, literally the rent is greater than 13K GBP a year).
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - VLM 11y ago
    "I would have thought it bizarre if they did anything different" 25 years ago at the food store, it was explained to me that the owners liability insurance only covered employees on the clock, and customers while the store was open as per posted hours. He would "generously" allow us to walk thru the store uninsured on the way to the exit door, but we'd be fired if we were caught working off the clock uninsured as he had no financial interest in losing the store to someone with a foot run over by a pallet jack or something. Obviously employers no longer have liability insurance issues like this or they'd be insane to have people working off the clock. If you want to get rid of slavery, make it too expensive by reversing whatever insurance regulation changed sometime in the last 25 years. Could also play an OSHA game where any accident of any sort not matter the facts is automatically guilty if the employee is off the clock under some doctrine of them being a member of the general public not an employee. Either way your best bet is not a morals or ethics argument (businessmen if anything tend to oppose them in general because usually the people making them are usually trying to screw them) but change the game rules to make it a simple financial argument.
- techsupporter 11y ago
  > Most people I know basically think this stuff is 'normal' and that you are just being lazy or finicky if you refuse to do so (maybe you 'deserve' to lose your job). This is the part that really gets my goat about being an employee in this culture. My coworkers, by and large, have this idea that if they are not almost wholly devoted to our employer, then they "must be" morally bad people. Like someone who works on the same team as me got an e-mail from our boss on a day that is weekend for us (we work shifts that don't line up the normal weekend days) saying "So-and-so gave you the information for Project X and says you should be able to run with it; how soon can you get started?" He interpreted that e-mail to mean "better get started immediately, even though it is my day off" versus replying to our boss with "I will begin on [day I return to the office]." All of my coworkers are employed in high-five-figures to mid-six-figure IT jobs for a large company. Most of us work defined shifts and, thus, we always have someone working in the hours before our shifts start and after our shifts end. We, in all seriousness, have the absolute best work-life balance anywhere in IT, but there is still the expectation and belief that putting in anything less than 15% over means one is a slacker and deserves to get cut. I work odd hours and have been at this long enough that I'm done with it. My employer pays for a certain number of hours from my life. Barring a one-off or rare crunch emergency--which, truthfully, does not happen very often--I am working the hours they buy from me and no more. I'm tired of feeling like I owe my employer above-and-beyond extra because I get to have a life without having to perpetually compete with the hordes of nothing-but-work-matters folks.
- gaius 11y ago
  I think that wealthy right wing folk don't often really understand it in the correct way You had me up 'til there, but this isn't a left-right issue at all, wealthy champagne socialists trample the workers as gleefully as any capitalist running-dog. The only difference is they tell the workers it's actually for their own good.
- chrismcb 11y ago
  Commute time shouldn't be paid for. Sitting in a hotel room, that is questionable. Shift ends at closing time, then you are done work, and you can go home. If they expect you to stay and clean, close, chase out the last customers, then they need to pay you.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    The fact you consider hotel room time 'questionable' shows how far the table is stacked in favour of the employers. You exist in a place you have no control over, far away from family, with dramatically curtailed freedom over activities you can perform. It doesn't matter whether you are 'labouring'. You wouldn't be there otherwise. Doing that for free is selling yourself short.
    - sukilot 11y ago
      Do people get minimum wage and unpaid travel? Usually the travel requirement is part of the job earning a higher salary, and includes upgrades comfort of accommodations.
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  I think you are confusing bad contract terms with actual withholding of wage. At best, "wage theft" could be considered "wage fraud", with a slightly better connotation (if at all). We're not really talking about middle-class workers who think their boss is a douche.
- kens 11y ago
  You might find the term "wage theft" objectionable, but note that it's in response to the term "time theft" that employers (notably Walmart) drill into their hourly employees. The idea of "time theft" is that employees are costing them billions of dollars by stealing time through breaks that are too long, socializing on the job, personal phone calls, being idle, etc, and they can fire employees for "time theft". The average employee is said to "steal" 54 minutes per day. So the term "wage theft" basically just turns the tables on these employers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pascal1usa 11y ago
They left out the most egregious form of wage theft: taxes! Taxes (often called income taxes) steal wages from the hard working middle class on scale orders of magnitude larger!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 11y ago
  How are those roads you're driving on? Did you go to school? What about the police force, did they ever do anything useful for you? In most countries you'd have free access to medical assistance as well and quite possibly a state pension when you're over 65 as well as if you become disabled or simply out of work. Taxes are not always spent efficiently which is a real problem and plenty of times they are used to be spent on things we don't actually need but on the whole you can't really argue that all taxes are theft.
  - monort 11y ago
    Do you mean anyone stealing money from you and then using some percent of them to provide services for you is not a thief? This explanation do not explain why non-government entity doing the same thing is still a thief.
    - douche 11y ago
      Or a protection racket
    - ehnto 11y ago
      Which non-government agency is stealing money from you as "tax"? Genuinely interested, as where I live the only tax taken from our wages is federal tax.
    - Squarel 11y ago
      That is neither what the poster meant, nor what they said. The poster did not state that taxes are theft, nor that they are stolen from you. Stealing is taking without the right to take, or the permission of the individual. Whilst you may not like paying taxes or agree with them, I am fairly sure the government has the right to take them.

113 points by nols 11y ago

This is how employees get free stuff. The only thing that stopped them before was morality. When employers steal their tips, don't pay them, etc it makes stealing so much more justified to the employee.

stegosaurus 11y ago

Wage theft is quite a vitriolic term (and so might only be reasonably applicable to actual breach of contract), but I think I can reasonably make the claim that this is essentially a thing that happens to all workers. A lucky few upper middle class folks might be outside of this. Examples: Downtown minimum wage job. Impossible to afford downtown rent, resulting in a non-optional hour long unpaid commute. Business travel staying overnight. Direct expenses dealt with, but no compensation for the hours spent away from family stuck in front of a hotel TV. Retail job. Shift ends at store closing time. Shuffling off the last customer and closing and locking up ends possibly 20 minutes later. I could go on. Most people I know basically think this stuff is 'normal' and that you are just being lazy or finicky if you refuse to do so (maybe you 'deserve' to lose your job). This is basically what poverty is here... an extreme lack of time and state of stress or tiredness cauaed by ridiculous employment. Many minwage workers would genuinely be better off camping under bridges and reading books, if they didn't have families and social connections. The bottom end of the labour scale really is a horrible place to be at. I think that wealthy right wing folk don't often really understand it in the correct way. I think the idea these people have is that the poor have, or at least have the option of, a life that is just like being rich but with less fun stuff. e.g. a bike instead of a car, a flat instead of a house, and so on. The reality is that there exists a qualitative difference between being working and middle class in the sense that you are spending most of your mental cycles just trying to make ends meet at all.

SamReidHughes 11y ago
If we're to take the minimum wage example seriously, we'd also have to treat the act of employing people at minimum wage, in a state with lower minimum wage, the same way -- in both cases the person has less compensation per time occupied than the given baseline minimum wage, whatever that is. Likewise, if the minimum wage were lower but downtown rent more affordable, we'd have to treat equivalent longer work hours at the lower minimum wage -- which gives the same effective conditions -- to be a form of "wage theft." So I think you would say that if the minimum wage is too low, paying people at that wage is a form of wage theft. Or simply, paying people at low wages is a form of wage theft. Minimum wage works because it improves some workers' negotiation positions so that they can capture more of their job's economic surplus -- likewise, somebody sprung with surprise business travel, or surprise retail job responsibilities, is in a poor position to negotiate just compensation for this change in situation. So the presence of some sort of weakness of negotiation position might be what characterizes your generalized notion of wage theft. The minimum wage example is distinct from the others though because it doesn't spring any surprises on the employee.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  Right. I kind of disclaim the term 'wage theft' because it brings in all sorts of legal connotations like breach of contract etc. It basically says that the law is the only thing that matters. It makes much more sense to simply reason about what is morally correct (assuming we accept capitalism and the idea that employers deserve to dictate to employees to some degree). In the full blown Marxist world view any appropriation of surplus value is essentially 'wage theft'. Of course, if that were completely returned to workers, there would be no point in bothering with employees. Instead, we can consider that if a worker has a wage low enough that their quality of life is really bad (e.g. complete inability to build capital as 100% of wage goes on absolute essentials), if there exists any more surplus value with which they could be paid more, it is reasonable for the employer to do so and unreasonable for them not to. Is it 'theft' not to? Well... no. In the same way that my landlord doesn't 'steal' my labour by exploiting the fact that buying property is difficult. It's still not great though.
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 11y ago
Except for people on minimum wage, I don't agree that those really count as wage theft. Say you forced employers to account for the time closing and locking the store or to compensate people for spending hours away from their family. What would happen is that the hourly salary would drop to account for that, since in reality the workers are already taking those into account (as you say, they already consider it normal - and therefore expect it) when they accept the job. Except for minimum wage workers, they are just examples where the actual contract is an informal agreement, and not the piece of paper that was signed.
- derekp7 11y ago
  I've often thought the same about unpaid overtime for salary IT employees -- in some high profile cases where a company was successfully sued for unpaid overtime, the affected employees were reclassified as hourly and given a pay adjustment that resulted 20% or lower than their previous pay (although their paychecks ended up being about the same, because they could then earn overtime).
- chrismcb 11y ago
  Of course they should get paid for locking the doors, minimum wage or not. You claim hourly salary would drop, but at places that pay people correctly, it doesn't. Say a store is open from 10 am to 10pm. You hire one person to work 8 hours in the middle of the day. They come in say at noon, work 8 hours and leave at 8. Someone else comes in at 2 and works till closing, say 10:30. They do an extra half hour to clean up and lock up, so they should get paid less?
  - icebraining 11y ago
    I suppose in a shop where workers have a fixed schedule (e.g. noon to 8pm, 2pm to 10pm) that might happen, but the vast majority of retail jobs aren't like that. According to surveys, besides personal experience, something like 80%+ of retail jobs have at least shifts, if not full on-demand schedules, so there's no set of workers that always close the shop and others that don't - they all do, some of the days.
- 11y ago
rayiner 11y ago
I think it's an appropriate term. The employer that asks people to show up at 8:30 for a job where they're only getting paid 9-5 is a thief, no different than the guy on the street that takes $10 out of your wallet. If we called it what it is, maybe people would feel shame like they ought to.
- frenchman_in_ny 11y ago
  Except US Supreme Court just said that it's legal [0], and did so unanimously... [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-rules-against-worker-pay-for-security-screenings.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-rul...
  - danielweber 11y ago
    In very specific circumstances. You can't have people show up at 8:30 because you want to eliminate stragglers, or to have meetings in the "downtime" before the "real work" begins.
    - ehnto 11y ago
      That is still time from your life that you are dedicating to your job, thus you should be paid. Also I'm not sure how a meeting for work could be considered non-work, it is again time out of your life that you are doing a task to meet the needs of the company, thus you should be paid for it. If your company does client work, but doesn't bill meetings to the client, that's their prerogative, but I as an employee should by contract be paid for the work I am doing for my employer. If it's in my contract that I should do meetings without being paid, then I'm probably an idiot for signing that contract.
      - true_religion 11y ago
        Truth be told, the only places I've seen that will pay you incrementally by the minute for anything out of the 9-5 will also dock you incrementally by the minute for taking too long of a lunch break, and count the number of bathroom breaks you take. For salaried work, I don't think it should matter if you show up anytime within 1 hour of the start of business so long as no one is relying on you to be there (e.g. for a meeting or to work hand-in-hand with you).
GeneralMayhem 11y ago
I don't think the first one is comparable to the others, as it's not strictly in the company's control. Also, I know this is anecdotal, but when I worked retail/fast food in HS/college, we were always paid up until we were done work. If the store closed at 9 and we couldn't leave until 10 because of customers and cleanup, we got paid until 10. I would have thought it bizarre if they did anything different - I'm sure it happens, but it didn't where I worked (a few national/international chains). This could of course cause some perverse incentives with closing up slowly, but there are other ways to deal with that, the simplest of which being to just fire people who are intentionally working slowly.
- Retra 11y ago
  There is nothing that says a company should only pay it's employees on terms it can only strictly control. If you don't want to pay someone for 4 hours of commute per day, maybe dedicate some time to locating a closer place for them to live and paying for a move. Like you said: there are other ways to deal with it.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    Indeed. This is basically the power imbalance in action - 'he who has the gold makes the rules'. If employers should not pay for events out of their control then employees should not work if it exists out of their control (e.g. shift work). In this case though the premise is wrong. Take a McDonalds restaurant in central London. Their workers have to commute. The store knows this. The workers don't choose it out of some sort of work life balance decision - it is impossible to rent downtown on minimum wage (as in, literally the rent is greater than 13K GBP a year).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- VLM 11y ago
  "I would have thought it bizarre if they did anything different" 25 years ago at the food store, it was explained to me that the owners liability insurance only covered employees on the clock, and customers while the store was open as per posted hours. He would "generously" allow us to walk thru the store uninsured on the way to the exit door, but we'd be fired if we were caught working off the clock uninsured as he had no financial interest in losing the store to someone with a foot run over by a pallet jack or something. Obviously employers no longer have liability insurance issues like this or they'd be insane to have people working off the clock. If you want to get rid of slavery, make it too expensive by reversing whatever insurance regulation changed sometime in the last 25 years. Could also play an OSHA game where any accident of any sort not matter the facts is automatically guilty if the employee is off the clock under some doctrine of them being a member of the general public not an employee. Either way your best bet is not a morals or ethics argument (businessmen if anything tend to oppose them in general because usually the people making them are usually trying to screw them) but change the game rules to make it a simple financial argument.
techsupporter 11y ago
> Most people I know basically think this stuff is 'normal' and that you are just being lazy or finicky if you refuse to do so (maybe you 'deserve' to lose your job). This is the part that really gets my goat about being an employee in this culture. My coworkers, by and large, have this idea that if they are not almost wholly devoted to our employer, then they "must be" morally bad people. Like someone who works on the same team as me got an e-mail from our boss on a day that is weekend for us (we work shifts that don't line up the normal weekend days) saying "So-and-so gave you the information for Project X and says you should be able to run with it; how soon can you get started?" He interpreted that e-mail to mean "better get started immediately, even though it is my day off" versus replying to our boss with "I will begin on [day I return to the office]." All of my coworkers are employed in high-five-figures to mid-six-figure IT jobs for a large company. Most of us work defined shifts and, thus, we always have someone working in the hours before our shifts start and after our shifts end. We, in all seriousness, have the absolute best work-life balance anywhere in IT, but there is still the expectation and belief that putting in anything less than 15% over means one is a slacker and deserves to get cut. I work odd hours and have been at this long enough that I'm done with it. My employer pays for a certain number of hours from my life. Barring a one-off or rare crunch emergency--which, truthfully, does not happen very often--I am working the hours they buy from me and no more. I'm tired of feeling like I owe my employer above-and-beyond extra because I get to have a life without having to perpetually compete with the hordes of nothing-but-work-matters folks.
gaius 11y ago
I think that wealthy right wing folk don't often really understand it in the correct way You had me up 'til there, but this isn't a left-right issue at all, wealthy champagne socialists trample the workers as gleefully as any capitalist running-dog. The only difference is they tell the workers it's actually for their own good.
chrismcb 11y ago
Commute time shouldn't be paid for. Sitting in a hotel room, that is questionable. Shift ends at closing time, then you are done work, and you can go home. If they expect you to stay and clean, close, chase out the last customers, then they need to pay you.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  The fact you consider hotel room time 'questionable' shows how far the table is stacked in favour of the employers. You exist in a place you have no control over, far away from family, with dramatically curtailed freedom over activities you can perform. It doesn't matter whether you are 'labouring'. You wouldn't be there otherwise. Doing that for free is selling yourself short.
  - sukilot 11y ago
    Do people get minimum wage and unpaid travel? Usually the travel requirement is part of the job earning a higher salary, and includes upgrades comfort of accommodations.
bayesianhorse 11y ago
I think you are confusing bad contract terms with actual withholding of wage. At best, "wage theft" could be considered "wage fraud", with a slightly better connotation (if at all). We're not really talking about middle-class workers who think their boss is a douche.
kens 11y ago
You might find the term "wage theft" objectionable, but note that it's in response to the term "time theft" that employers (notably Walmart) drill into their hourly employees. The idea of "time theft" is that employees are costing them billions of dollars by stealing time through breaks that are too long, socializing on the job, personal phone calls, being idle, etc, and they can fire employees for "time theft". The average employee is said to "steal" 54 minutes per day. So the term "wage theft" basically just turns the tables on these employers.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pascal1usa 11y ago

They left out the most egregious form of wage theft: taxes! Taxes (often called income taxes) steal wages from the hard working middle class on scale orders of magnitude larger!

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 11y ago
How are those roads you're driving on? Did you go to school? What about the police force, did they ever do anything useful for you? In most countries you'd have free access to medical assistance as well and quite possibly a state pension when you're over 65 as well as if you become disabled or simply out of work. Taxes are not always spent efficiently which is a real problem and plenty of times they are used to be spent on things we don't actually need but on the whole you can't really argue that all taxes are theft.
- monort 11y ago
  Do you mean anyone stealing money from you and then using some percent of them to provide services for you is not a thief? This explanation do not explain why non-government entity doing the same thing is still a thief.
  - douche 11y ago
    Or a protection racket
  - ehnto 11y ago
    Which non-government agency is stealing money from you as "tax"? Genuinely interested, as where I live the only tax taken from our wages is federal tax.
  - Squarel 11y ago
    That is neither what the poster meant, nor what they said. The poster did not state that taxes are theft, nor that they are stolen from you. Stealing is taking without the right to take, or the permission of the individual. Whilst you may not like paying taxes or agree with them, I am fairly sure the government has the right to take them.