 Asayela Spinoza spends his nights on the road delivering pizzas in Chicago. But on some nights, he says the longer he works, the less he makes. Four dollars per delivery. The pizzeria owner claims drivers are independent contractors, paid by the delivery, not the hour. But Espanosa says he works a scheduled shift, and that he's expected to clean and stock shelves when he's not delivering, without getting paid a dime. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that $50 billion is stolen from ordinary Americans every single year, which if true is the equivalent of 5.5 million stolen cars, 12 million bank robberies, or 76 million snatched purses, according to CBS News. And if the EPI's estimate is correct, then, as CBS News explains, that number dwarfs criminal offenses such as robbery, which accounted for just under $500 million in losses in 2019, according to FBI data. Burglary accounted for about $3 billion in losses that same year, and motor vehicle theft made up about $6 billion. Furthermore, demos used data from the Economic Policy Institute and Global Retail Theft Barometer, and found that the value of wages lost due to minimum wage violations alone was higher than the estimated value of merchandise lost due to shoplifting between 2013 and 2015. But keep in mind that wage theft involves more than just minimum wage violations. It also includes unpaid overtime and rest break, as well as off-the-clock violations among other types of violations. And when you combine all types of wage theft, it actually surpassed all other forms of theft in 2018 as visualized by this popular Tompkins County Workers United graphic using data, again, from the Economic Policy Institute. And CBS News reports that if wage theft crossed the threshold to be considered a felony, which is going to vary by state to state, by the way, then 27% of the total wage theft cases they examined would be considered a felony. And even though the ratio between wage theft and other types of theft varies each year, this issue hasn't gone away, right? It still harms hundreds of thousands of American workers every single year, and the point in comparing wage theft to other types of theft is to show you how prominent it is, but yet this just doesn't get discussed in other conversations related to crime. But the question is, why is this crime so rampant? Well, as CBS News reports, there's a good chance they'll get away with it. They continue, that confidence is well-founded. Most wage theft is never reported in the first place, according to Shelley Rosika. For those unaware, this is the development director of Aray Chicago. This is an organization that tries to help Chicago workers recover stolen wages. She continues, sadly, it's people who have the least political power who are victims of wage theft, Rosika said. If you're poor, you might have to work three jobs and you don't have time to do anything else. Basically, besides work and try to take care of your family the best you can. If you don't speak the language, you might be afraid to go and talk to the government. So, that's part of the problem. And the fact that in many instances wage theft goes unreported, it makes it so much more difficult to track than, say, retail theft, where corporations can give an exact number related to their annual shrink or loss in profits due to theft. But to make matters even worse, when it is reported, many victims of retail theft never see justice even when they win. CBS continues, CBS News submitted public records requests to nearly every state labor department in the country and built a database of more than 650,000 total complaints. Of those cases, state agencies ruled in favor of claimants only about half the time. Even when workers won their claims, more than a third of those successful cases were rolling nearly a billion dollars showed no money was ever recovered. And this is because, depending on where someone lives, they might have more or fewer ways to fight for what they're owed. In big cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, victims of wage theft can report it to the city, the state, and even the federal government. But in some states, such as Alabama and Florida, where there is no state-level process for filing a wage theft claim at all, workers have fewer options. These variations in wage theft laws obviously complicates things. And even though wage theft is illegal, it's just not treated like a crime in the traditional sense. And what I mean by that is, if your employer, for example, catches you stealing from the cash register, they can call the police on you and you'd go to jail. But if your employer commits wage theft and makes you work off the clock, well, you don't have that same luxury. You can call the police on your employer and say that they're stealing from you. So there's this imbalance here. And wage theft is almost never included in more general discussions about crime, even though it quite literally by definition is also a crime. And it's not just another crime. It is one of, if not the most common crimes depending on the year and almost all multinational corporations do it. And these criminal corporations lobby against action whenever state and federal lawmakers try to address it. And more perfect union details this in a lengthy thread with numerous examples of this explaining, fast food corporations and trade groups have spent $4 million lobbying against a California bill that would hold corporations responsible when franchise owners break the law. Some of these companies unsurprisingly have a history of wage theft. Fast food corporations are often exempt from legal liability at franchises operating under their name. AB 1228's authors, this is referring to a California bill, say the lack of corporate responsibility is partly why the industry is rife with wage theft and other labor law violations. Yum Brands, which owns restaurants like Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut has spent more than $33,000 to defeat AB 1228. Between lawsuits and fines, Yum has been penalized at least $53 million for wage theft in the United States going back to 2000. Chick-fil-A and Jack in the Box have reportedly spent a collective $83,000 against the bill. Last year, a Chick-fil-A franchise owner in North Carolina was fined for paying some employees with meal vouchers instead of wages. In 2022, an Oregon jury awarded former Jack in the Box employees more than $6 million for wage theft claims against the company. The Noon AB 1228 coalition has spent $3.5 million lobbying against the bill. Companies backing the coalition include McDonald's, Subway and Domino's. McDonald's and its franchisees have paid more than $35 million to settle wage theft claims. One group of Subway stores in California was recently shut down by a federal court after the U.S. Department of Labor charged the owner with wage theft as well as child labor violations and intimidating workers. And Domino's Pizza has been charged with more than $12 million in wage theft since 2000. In 2021, a North Carolina franchise owner agreed to pay more than $3 million to more than 3,000 drivers to settle wage theft claims. So there are countless examples of these large multinational corporations repeatedly stealing from their own employees. And thankfully, that particular piece of legislation referenced in that thread has passed California State Assembly and it now heads to the State Senate. And that legislation comes after we learned just how egregious wage theft is in California alone where again they have more protections than states like Alabama and Florida. A study released in May of 2022 by the Service Employees International Union and FIFER 15 found that among the 410 fast food workers that they surveyed from 259 fast food restaurants across 86 Californian cities, 85% of those workers experienced at least one form of wage theft, 57% experienced multiple forms of wage theft, and nearly a third were retaliated against for asking to be paid properly. Now remember, California is just one state and that study looked at one industry. But this is happening across the country in all sectors of the economy. So if you extrapolate and you look at states with less protections in different sectors of the economy, then you can imagine that it's probably much worse there. And again, it's bad in California when they have protections, but imagine how bad it is in say Florida. So it is really impossible to overstate how common this phenomenon is. And we've looked at the data, but it's important to remember that this isn't just about numbers and statistics. This is a crime that affects real people. And wage theft doesn't just involve employers, nickel and diming employees here and there when it comes to breaks or overtime. Sometimes it involves companies paying workers late or just not paying them at all. And if you think that this isn't common, well it happened at one of the country's largest retailers, Kroger. It was the first pay period of October and I didn't get a paycheck. Nothing directly deposited into my bank. And I thought, that's odd. Kroger employees say they've been paid late for weeks. A payroll computer glitch they're telling us. New payroll software is cheating them out of their hard-earned money. When the money comes, it doesn't come in full. At the beginning, it felt like this was maybe a one week, one payroll issue, and it was going to get corrected. But now we're sitting here about six months later and we're still dealing with payroll issues. If billers don't, you're working for a sweatshop and nobody cares. They don't fix the problem. They make it look like you're the problem. I show up every day, but yet they can't pay me. It just felt really bad. That paycheck was missing from October 6th until maybe a couple of days before Christmas. At the time when it happened, Thanksgiving was right around the corner. You think they asked me about, is Thanksgiving, you need a turkey, some stuffing, a gallon of milk. Nope. Nothing. It's particularly bad for Kroger workers to miss a paycheck because many of the workers are struggling to survive. My income from Kroger is very important because I have little ones. I am the breadwinner of this family. There was a study published at the beginning of last year by the Economic Roundtable and some of the things that came out in that study was 78% of Kroger workers were dealing with food insecurity. When you put it into that perspective, missing a paycheck or two is catastrophic. Now imagine if one of those employees decided to just take the money that they were owed out of the cash register. What do you think would happen? The manager would call the police on them and they'd go to jail, even though it's technically not stealing since they're the ones being stolen from. And something that Tanya said, it really stood out to me. She said that they don't fix the problem, they make you look like you are the problem. And that is so true. It speaks to this exploitative relationship between employers and employees where any and everything that they do is acceptable by default because that's the way it can be when you have all the money and all the power. I mean, if a worker complains too much, then they can take away their livelihoods like that and lead them high and dry. They can lose everything. So it doesn't just feel that way, by the way. We're not just going off of vibes here. This is how it is in practice. This is how our capitalist system is designed. And that's why wage theft isn't treated like other crimes. And on that note, the Associate Director of Policy and Research at Demos explains, the American justice system is skewed in favor of power and privilege, treating crimes of the powerful such as stealing from employees' paychecks far more leniently than crimes committed by those with less power such as shoplifting. The disparity between the crimes of the powerful and those with less power is deeply linked to who the victims and perceived perpetrators are. Women, people of color, and immigrants, especially undocumented workers are disproportionately likely to be victims of wage theft. A violation that disproportionately impacts them is allotted fewer resources for deterrence, investigation, and enforcement compared to shoplifting, and penalties are weaker. In contrast, even though shoplifting is committed by people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, people of color, particularly African American consumers, are profiled as potential shoplifters, feeding into racial and ethnic disparities throughout the criminal justice system. And that's the conclusion of her 2017 report for Demos about why wage theft and shoplifting are treated so differently. It's dated for sure, but her conclusion is as true as ever. In our capitalist society, we have been conditioned to think that theft is only a crime when the work in class commits it, right? But if the ruling class steals from you, they get a little slap on the wrist at most. If you steal from them, your life could be over if you get caught. But crime is crime, and wage theft is a crime whose victims are very real. So why aren't we talking about this? And if you're larping as a progressive who pretends to value labor, maybe your act would be more believable if you show just an ounce of concern about these crimes and not just the ones that disproportionately affect the profits of large multinational corporations.