piefed.eeYSK: Wage theft is the biggest crime by annual losses
bearboiblakehttps://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/2b859693-1adf-4155-9413-dbdf4f3ebad3.avif
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In the United States, civil forfeiture (also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture) is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from people who are suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States#Statistics
What is a “rest break violation”?
Taking not enough breaks I assume..
Yeah, like if you have ever had to work through an unpaid lunch break, for example
Or just not given a state-mandated break at all.
In my state, employers are mandated to give employees one 30-minute (unpaid) break and two 15-minute paid breaks for every 8 hour shift. If you’re not getting those 15-minute paid breaks (and a lot of people aren’t, especially if they don’t smoke), you’re a victim of wage theft. Your employer is stealing half your hourly wage from you every single workday.
I figured that was classed under wage theft but that also makes sense. I know I sure as hell don’t usually get my 15 minute paid I’m legally required to have.
I’ve been out of the work force for a little while, but it used to be (and may still be) that employees are guaranteed a 15-minute on-the-clock break every 4 hours. Making you work without taking a break would be a rest break violation. It used to be funny when managers would try to pull that with me. I knew the labor laws and didn’t really give a shit what the boss thought.
More likely being forced to clock out for breaks, but still having to work during that time, or having other illegal restrictions on what you choose to do with that time.
MalReynoldsConspicuously absent are tax avoidance and fraud (insider trading and whatever soon to be illegal scam fintech dreams up, currently AI circlejerk for example), which likely gives wage theft a serious run for it’s money (boom boom), and as u/minorkeys says, labour value theft is where the capital comes from.
explodicleTax avoidance is legal. When it’s illegal it’s called tax evasion.
Miles O'BrienMy employer “encourages” everyone to clock in for the day and from lunch up to 7 minutes early.
My employer also likes to take any and every opportunity to punish people for “abusing breaks” which here means “you walked to the break area and took your 15 minute break and walked back to your station” instead of “15minutes starts at your station and ends at your station so you really only get an 8-12 minute break depending on how far you have to walk.
And forget about bathroom breaks outside your 15s and lunch.
My employer also pays the same every single week, regardless of whether you clocked in 7 minutes early every day or exactly on time.
My employer calls our “abuse” of breaks and lack of clocking in early “wage theft”
The first time I got written up for going to the bathroom and he said “wage theft” I went and printed out 100 copies of a wage theft guide with sources and graphs to demonstrate how employers are the #1 driver of wage theft and it’s not even close. Plastered them all over where there are no cameras.
Sounds like you’re on your way to starting a union. Keep going.
I’ve slowly gotten a couple people around on “collective bargaining”, I’m avoiding using the big scary U word to them
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮Isn’t larceny just theft over a certain value?
Hey so Larceny is taking and carrying away of anything with value, grand larceny is items over a certain value.
But I also didn’t know and went to check Wikipedia what larceny was, and I found this absurd example which has me thinking about donuts in new and exciting ways.
I want to go and rotate a donut around not its centre of mass, but around an axis through its torus, off-centre from its centre of mass, because apparently that is not a larceny.
If it’s not taken from its original position, how is it even theft? 🤨 The only kind of theft I can imagine that would not require moving the thing being stolen is squatting.
Nah, squatting is trespass, theft can only affect personal property or real property when it’s moved, apparently. Squatting doesn’t move any property. Even moving a sofa from one room in your squat to another doesn’t count as theft because there’s no intent to deprive the owner of the couch.
Rotating a donut on its own isn’t theft, you have to also have an intent to take it or deprive its owner of it unlawfully.
Because the police and all the government agencies protect the capitalist class. Expect this to get much much worse because we are living through the biggest deregulation in American history. We’re losing all the workers rights our ancestors fought and died for. Thank the MAGATS, lobbyists and heritage foundation
Labour value theft(profit) is and will always be the bigger crime.
Yeah this reads weird… the wording sounds like “employees stealing from employers”, but the graph references things like “minimum-wage violations”, which implies “employers stealing from employees” (a form of labour value theft)…
Yet overtime violations and rest-break violations could be people not being paid for OT or given mandated breaks, or it could be people claiming OT they didn’t work, or taking longer breaks than agreed upon ?!
In this case I think “Data Is Confusing” may be more accurate than “Data Is Beautiful.”
TiredTiger“Wage theft” is defined as the theft of wages by employers, and it’s actually a crime in several states. “Minimum Wage Violations” would be people being paid less than minimum wage, “Overtime Violations” would be people not being paid overtime, “Rest Break Violations” would be people not receiving breaks, and “Off The Clock Violations” would be people working without getting paid.
Pretty sure claiming hours you didn’t work would be considered some form of fraud, but I don’t see any kind of fraud listed on this graphic.
EDIT: Of course, theft of labor value would dwarf all of this, but capitalists don’t see that as theft.
Ahh! Ok, my bad - I don’t hear it often, so I got them mixed up - the other, that some capitalist opinion-piece writing bags of shit were complaining about a lot over the last few years is referred to as “time theft.” (Took some tricky search-fu to find it)
Businesses have put significant amounts of money into shrinking the other ‘theft’ categories. They put nothing into protecting the worker because it’s worth it to them to rip us off, and the fines are minimal if caught.
Conspicuously absent are tax avoidance and fraud (especially insider trading), which likely give wage theft a serious run for it’s money (boom boom), and as u/minorkeys says, labour value theft is where the capital comes from.
Yup, tax avoidance seems to be orders of magnitude than anything in this infographic
This State of Tax Justice 2025 report shows that over the six year period for which data is available, US-headquartered multinational corporations cost countries around the world US$495 billion in lost corporate tax – some 29% of the global total of US$1.7 trillion lost to global corporate tax abuse. The United States itself is the biggest loser to global corporate tax abuse, losing $US271 billion to its own multinationals.
YerboutiI would say rich people and business not paying taxes is on par with this.
Now add civil asset forfeiture
It would be between robbery and auto theft. (~$2.3B)
Hey. Just so you know, these are counted not as loss, but as gains
Depends on which side you’re standing, I guess
[off topic?]
Back in the day, then-NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg introduced a wide ranging plan to stop City workers from unfairly collecting overtime. The project, CityTime, was supposed to cost about $65 million. Somehow, the cost swelled to over $1 billion.
The plan was being run by Bloomberg’s daughter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal#:~:text=The%20CityTime%20payroll%20scandal%20was%20a%202003%E2%80%932010%20public,New%20York%20CityTime%20electronic%20payroll%20and%20timekeeping%20system.
I bet she bought a new mansion that year…
Link to article?
Not quite an article, and the link in the watermark is wrong, but this is the data source
And they say the US isn’t striving to be green enough. This picture is from 2012, I think it looks much greener in 2026.
The biggest crime? Oh my sweet summer child…
Wages are only a minor inconvenience to corporations. It is just a very small tip of a giant iceberg: tax evasion, created scarcity, inflated prices (including markup upwards of 10,000% on medical supplies), price agreements, unethical marketing strategies, dark internet patterns, and many many other evil corporate strategies.
No article?
I’m not a fan of US-centric posts. What do the statistics look like for other countries?
I’m also not a fan of US-centric,but the problem is usually that it assumes all readers are from the US and know its about the US without ever mentioning the US. This one actually says “in the US” at the top, so its fine by me.
I have no idea, maybe you could research it and make a post for your own country? Be the change you want to see in the world!
TBF lately most of the visuals are USA Vrs rest of the world based on wars started/abuses occurred/corruption level etc. This is light reading in comparison.
But but that’s Free Market Freedum! We can’t punish the Job Creators, because bible or some shit.
Yet you have countless dipshit MAGAts, who’ve struggled desperately for decades, gleefully supporting Trump and his war on Iran, while asserting to you that shoplifting from billion dollar corporationsis one of the greatest threats to America right now.
I’m pretty sure taxes, company profit and land rent are much bigger numbers by many orders of magnitude.
This wage theft narrative normalises capitalism while quibbling over a relatively small amount.
No doubt about that, and you’ll get no arguments from me against that.
Yeah, I can see your point. The reason I present it is because there are lots of narratives in the mainstream press about shoplifting, “organized retail crime”, and how we need to fund the police to detect/prevent/reduce crime, whereas unpaid overtime is pretty much expected, especially in blue collar jobs. It exposes the media and the prevailing mainstream narratives as being biased in favor of the ruling class.
Robbing the poorest schmucks out there is a crime and needs to be punished for the first time in 26 years.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
I’m suggesting to do away with the whole system that enables and encourages crimes like wage theft rather than focusing on individual symptoms of the system.
Well until you get rid of the system, we should enforce our laws against employers that steal from their poor employees.
I thought this was about surplus value, not even mentioned.
The ruling class have a loophole - extracting the surplus value of their workforce isn’t a crime, sadly. Not yet, anyways. Inshallah.
Where’s fraud? It seems like the categories chosen are a sampling
Fraud would be counted under Larceny, which is a pretty broad category - robbery is larceny with violence, burglary is larceny with breaking and entering.
But if those are categories under larceny why is larceny its own category?
The omission of fraud as its own category sticks out to me because of how much healthcare companies do medicare fraud. I think I remember hearing trump pardoned some guy who alone committed it in the billions of dollars? If it’s included in larceny on this chart it seems low in that context.