Wage Theft is Theft.
If you are willfully owed money for work or services provided, you are the victim of a crime.
$50,000,000,000 per year is stolen from workers through Wage Theft.
Wage Theft is a business model.
With all the diverse types of work, multitude of industries, and mosaic of legitimate business models, it is no wonder that a percentage of wages goes unpaid every day. Most are simple accounting errors or honest mistakes that quickly get revealed and corrected. But wage theft is not a mistake. It is a choice and it is a crime. I have met good intentioned small business owners that use wage theft as their model thinking it is a legitimate practice. Often in construction, for example, someone who worked for cash eventually went out on their own and continued to pay workers as they’d always been paid. When confronted with the facts, business owners face a choice: change their practices, or become a knowing participant in this black market economy.
Wage laws are diverse. Certain general aspects are governed by federal law, like overtime pay, while others are left to the states for definition and interpretation. This creates a patchwork system of rules that can be hard to understand and even harder to navigate. To make it worse, in almost every case, enforcement of any laws or standards is always underfunding and understaffing. Adequate resources for investigation and enforcement are the key to not only preventing the crime, but also preventing the prosecution of honest mistakes by well intentioned business owners.
Local jurisdictions are stepping up to fill that gap with targeted laws and ordinances that more clearly define wage theft and create avenues of investigation and prosecution. I have started to compile a library of these statutes for reference by individuals and even local officials that may want to enact effective measures in their own community.