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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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wage theft is the biggest crime in the country. Which causes severe poverty, which leads for people stealing to survive.
guess which one is addressed by the state?
At one of my old jobs, some of the software engineers would work nights and weekends without being paid extra. I said we shouldn't do that. Management gave me a talking to about how I was demoralizing the team and it doesn't hurt me if they want to work extra. It didn't seem the appropriate time to argue that them devaluing the same labor I do does hurt me.
In my experience people who systematically work long hours have crap productivity because they're much more tired and tired people produce a lot more negative work (in the form of bugs, bad design decisions, inflexible code that will need to be rewritting if changed, weirdly structured code that's hard to work with, "stupid lazy" bad practices that shave seconds from coding time upfront whilst adding hours latter on, and so on) which adds to the total work that needs to be done (as those things either have to be fixed or make later work be harder to do in that codebase).
So the people working like that were only devaluing your labor in the eyes of incompetent managers (competent managers measure results to determine "productivity", not "bums on seats").
Then again, if those manager actually applauded them for doing it, those manager were most assuredly incompetent.
PS: Not saying that any of this make it right, just saying that it's a symptom of stupidity and incompetence all the way to the top.
At the risk of being over-pedantic, we shouldn’t be calling that theft. I’m not condoning it but we should call it what it is
What the article calls “direct theft” is clearly theft
But the article also describes market manipulation like union busting as theft. That’s clearly a problem and I don’t know what to call it but we lose impact by equating this legal exploitation with clearly illegal theft
As my teens are getting their first jobs, I’ve talked to them about “direct theft” and other abuses common to minimum wage employers. I’m proud that one stood up for himself when his manager started trying to abuse his conscientiousness
It is theft though: they are taking something that would otherwise belong to someone else (the wealth difference that would have been accumulated), and they're keeping it for themselves. That fits the definition of theft. The method may be more indirect, but the end result is the same. Inventing euphemistic terms to describe something that can be described with a simple existing word, will only end up muddying the waters in my experience.
I mostly agree - people love to overcomplicate certain terms. Theft is theft.
The only edge case to this is theft to survive/have a basic level of dignity, which I believe deserves special recognition. It's a problem for our society to solve and it is within our means to do so.
When somebody lives in extreme lack, hunger, thirst, untreated illness, and/or an inability to provide for themselves or those they care for - they physically can't think clearly. They also likely see a society that does not care about them. It hardens their heart.
People living in lack, worrying about their survival or basic dignity, is not desirable for a healthy society.
Capitalism is based on theft. If a worker makes 100 burgers, but their pay is only worth 15 burgers, the capitalist stole 85 burgers worth of production from the worker. The entire system relies on exploitation and theft.
Colonialism is when capitalists do to other countries what they've practiced doing in their own.
some of them through pure bailouts, aside from the taxcuts.
USA was built by slaves which is a form of wage theft.
That’s all?
Rookie numbers. Gotta get those up!