Employer Wage Theft Is A $3 Billion Epidemic In The United States

wage theft
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According to the Economic Policy Institute, American companies steal $3 billion from their employees each year. This comes in several forms, ranging from actual withheld wages to denied benefits: remuneration that’s owed to workers on both a legal and an ethical level.

These findings couldn’t come at a worse time. American workers are already dealing with wages that have remained stagnant for decades, leaving many Americans,?even those with one or more full-time jobs, scrambling to provide for themselves and their families. Add to this the ?epidemic? levels of wage theft, and you have the makings of a very sick economy with some very deep problems.

What Is Wage Theft?

The phrase wage theft refers to small sums of money which are either deducted from an employee’s paycheck or never paid to begin with. These losses are typically small, which is much of the reason why nobody really appreciates the scale of the problem. It gives a new and unfortunately modern meaning to the phrase ?nickel and dimed.?

Examples of wage theft include failure to pay employees for non-optional tasks, such as preparing their work space each morning. Another very real example occurred when a class-action case involving Amazon.com went all the way to the Supreme Court. In it, Amazon warehouse workers demanded to be paid for the time they spent waiting for their turn to walk through metal detectors at the beginning of each break and the end of each shift. As someone who worked in just such a warehouse for a time, I can tell you that the experience was every bit as degrading as it sounds?and no, I wasn’t paid for that time, which on occasion stretched on for several minutes, several times per day.

Indicative of Larger Issues

If you’ll allow me put on my Democratic Socialist hat for a moment, I’d like to talk about some of the larger issues at play here, of which wage theft is only one sad example.

To begin with, I’d like to park on the phrase ?wealth redistribution? for a moment, since it gives so many on the Right such trouble. Their idea seems to be that American progress would grind to a halt if we let the government take from the few and give to the many. Such arguments seem to forget that our country was very much founded on such charitable ideals?whether you want to call them socialist, populist, or even Christian.

In point of fact, America definitely does redistribute its wealth?but it’s flowing in the wrong direction. Wage theft is nothing more or less than corporate America shaking down our most vulnerable citizens for more profit.

We see further examples of this in the way American companies deny workers other basic dignities such as paid sick leave, paid family leave, and a reasonable amount of vacation time. New mothers, for example, are afforded very little time off to spend with their newborn. Exceed your allotted time off, and you’re fired. And even in those few places in America where family leave is provided for, it’s often unpaid; most American families literally can’t afford to take time off to start a family. The US is one of only two countries that doesn’t provide paid family leave. The other is Papua New Guinea.

In other words, American workers are seen as little more than pieces of equipment, as expendable as they are interchangeable.

The Societal Price Tag

Getting back to wage theft, let’s take a look at the numbers for a moment.

If we were to combine the losses attributed to any kind of criminal theft in the US?including larceny and burglary?the price tag would be something like $14 billion. In comparison, the price tag of wage theft is $3 billion. And yet we seem to consider only one of these to be criminal in nature.

Worse still, nobody seems to be able to precisely quantify the current state of wage theft in America. We know that about $933 million was recovered in 2012 for cases of reported wage theft, but we also know that many more cases go unreported each year. And that 2012 figure? It’s more than triple the funds lost to ?conventional? robberies in that same year.

How Do We Fix This?

The short version is that Congress needs to sign further worker protections into law. Given the GOP’s significant majority, though, this seems rather unlikely to gain any significant ground before 2017.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration has made a couple of important steps forward, including adding 300 investigators to the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. It’s a good start, and it indicates that this problem is at least on somebody’s agenda.

But another problem has less to do with legislation and more to do with some of the unspoken tenets of ?company culture? in America. Despite protections for American workers put forth in the National Labor Relations Act, we hear stories all the time of employees being dismissed for discussing the details of their salaries or wages. Section 7 of the aforementioned NLRA provides protections for workers who want to discuss remuneration, and who want to engage in collective bargaining, but this particular law is frequently ignored by American employers. Clearly there’s a lot of work to do before we can be confident that the law is being followed.

Wage theft and other assorted worker indignities are going to be an important issue as the 2016 presidential election draws ever closer. What you need to ask yourself, when you stare down the list of candidates, is?who these politicians really work for. For my money, the only candidate so far who seems totally committed to the Average American is Bernie Sanders, who is aggressively opposed to taking money from corporate interests. But you can decide for yourself.