We’re in the midst of watching Apple get away with criminal contempt for forcing consumers to be as ignorant as possible of their IAP fees - including forcing Patreon to exclusively use them while under court order to allow them to link to their own payments!
“I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”
I suspect you need an actual share in the company to qualify for shareholder protections. A share in a fund is a share in a fund, not a share in each company the fund has shares in.
Stealing from employees is just normal business in the US. $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered for US workers between 2021 and 2023. Imagine how much wasn't recovered. It is often the least able to take action/most in need of every dollar of their income that are stolen from. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats those with the least power versus those with power.
That seems like a really small number? To compare - total US retail shrink in those years combined was a little over $300B[0] - averaging about 1.5% of sales. $1.5B seems like a rounding error when talking in those terms.
I think their point was that this was all that was recovered, from the approx $20b stolen each year through wage theft. I believe wage theft is one of the largest value crime by $ amount in the US - but is very rarely prosecuted.
I skimmed the article - any significant concrete numbers were all sourced to the EPI site linked by the GP. There's an unsourced FBI chart that says >19B in 2012, but I couldn't find the actual numbers when I looked. Frankly - I don't trust this claim if the only one actually putting big numbers on it is one publication.
EDIT: I'm going to cast more suspicion on the FBI graph. According to a 2022 report[0], the number of robbery offenses reported in 2018 was 1691 cases. The median loss being about $2k. Doing some caveman-math, that's about $3B lost to robbery in 2018. Unless we went through some insane spike of lawlessness between 2012 and 2018, I don't see how $340m in 2012 jumps to $3B in 2018.
Caveman math indeed. Thanks for the correction - that's a pretty big error. Though then I'm not sure what to make of the discrepancy between the numbers. They still don't square up w/ the Wikipedia article any way you look at it
You are comparing ACTUAL recovered wage theft numbers to industry trade group estimated numbers and making claims/drawing conclusions off of two totally differently types of numbers?
That business appears to steal as much from their workers as criminal theft rings surely is kind of a big deal (based on the matching ACTUAL recovery numbers).
Let's be conservative by taking GDP for only the middle year. In 2022 American GDP was 26 trillion (rounded down). Let's also gross up the stolen wages from your comment to 2.6 billion.
That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and the reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.
If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!
The RECOVERED number matches retail theft recovery numbers. So it is AT LEAST on par with organized and unorganized criminal retail theft. I'd say that is significant (I would argue retail theft if much easier to catch and pursued much more often, making wage theft a larger issue) especially as it's happening within the structure of/approved by businesses.
I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand your point? Does it being a small % of the GDP matter to those stolen from? Does it mean we shouldn't attempt to remedy it?
Not quite- from a strictly financial perspective, it means we should care 0.002% as much as we care about an intervention that doubles the GDP or eliminates 100% it. Neither exists, so we're better off comparing to other theft- this is about 15% of numbers for retail shrink, 50% of reported personal theft, so this suggests we should care proportionally.
But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.
I agree, but this point seems to be orthogonal to the matters being discussed here. Your point is roughly analogous to 'providing too much consumer surplus is rewarded with more customers'.
You're adding assumptions that the employee is #1 on salary, and #2 not getting a raise for the additional work. You've changed the assumptions and the situation...
No, the original comment (now flagged) was about salaried employees not working hard enough. The argument was that they weren't working hard enough for their current salary. There was nothing about getting a raise. You made that up.
As far as I can tell, there was nothing about salaries until your comment. There was also nothing (either way) about raises until my recent comment. You asserted that the employees were salaried and wouldn't get a raise.
If an employee completes all the work assigned to them and passes performance reviews then what you're describing is a suboptimal use of the employees on the part of the employer.
Even if it wasn't, being a poor worker still isn't theft, and it's the companies responsibility to both measure and correct employee performance. If they're bad at that and these things go under the radar, that's still on the employer.
The only way employees can steal is if they steal time, like clocking in then going home. Salary employees are not paid by time, so they cannot steal time. Employers want to have their cake and eat it too - they want to consider salary employees not time based when it comes to OT, but when it comes to day-to-day they DO want them to be considered time-based. Not how it works. Your workers being bad at their job is not theft, it's just incompetence.
Deliberately putting in less than the asked for effort in an attempt to extract more pay for less work is theft in the same way that attempting to minimize pay and maximize effort is "wage theft".
It's a knife that cuts both ways. If companies attempting to maximally exploit their employee's time is wage theft, so too is an employee's attempt to get a paycheck without doing work.
Right, but it's not - because salary paid workers are not paid for their time spent, but rather for their quantity and quality of work. Which is up to employers to measure.
Me spending 5 minutes filling up my water is not stealing. Me taking a nice 15 minute walk is also not stealing. Presumably you're going to draw the line somewhere, but the implication of salary jobs is that productivity is not linear.
Me spending an extra hour working on something does not translate into an extra unit of work done. Me taking that 15 minute walk doesn't translate to 1/4th less unit of work, either. In fact, it might translate to 1 extra unit of work done. Look at that, I am now bending time into the negative. Human productivity is complicated, and we're not assembly line workers.
Also, even the concept of "less work" is dubious. The level of work being done varies from person to person, and nobody actually knows what the minimum is. Everybody should be optimizing for the minimum work necessary to get their pay, because that's just obvious. No hourly worker is going to spend even 1 minute working off the clock. But alas, we have no clock, and we're just kind of... estimating... what level of work really needs to be done, and then calculating that in with our own levels of accomplishment we want, and then convenience. I might work a bit extra to find a nice stopping point, or because I really want to conquer a bug.
If a worker decides to work less than whatever their current level of work is, and they don't get fired or even reprimanded, I have to conclude they were previously working above the level of work expected of them. Which means that, overall, not only is this worker not stealing, they've actually been giving.
When I say "less work", I'm intentionally not specifying how the work output is measured, because, as you say, it's different for salaried vs hourly employees (and those are only the two most common forms!)
However, the point still remains! Moving the goalposts--or trying to motte-and-bailey the difference between salaried and hourly--is just intellectually dishonest, and doesn't really counter my argument at all.
If you want to refer to salaried employees specifically, then yes, "less work" means "consistently getting less done than is asked for on the timescale expected of you". But my argument still holds! This is something I've personally witnessed a handful of co-workers do. You're not wrong that it's up to employers to measure, but part of that measurement relies on trust between the employee and employer.
What you're implicitly arguing for is a complete lack of trust, which leads to an entirely different set of workplace problems
> What you're implicitly arguing for is a complete lack of trust, which leads to an entirely different set of workplace problems
This is already the current situation. This is why your computer is monitored and you badge in.
And, on the topic of badging in, the reason we do this is because measuring output is hard, and company's are lazy. Measuring time is easy, so they just use that as a proxy for output.
That's why a good worker being 15 minutes late every day will eventually get fired, but a bad worker sitting around on his phone will not.
Is this is a good way to measure output? Of course not, it's pretty much the most naive and simplistic way you can do it. But it's the most popular method chosen, so, here we are.
Look, getting less work done than is expected of you relies on knowing that expectation, which you don't. Has it occurred to you that those "stealing" might just legitimately think that they ARE doing what's expected of them? I mean, they're doing it... and they're employed... so what's the expectation?
At the end of the day it would be nice to all hold hands and sing kumbaya. But ultimately, we are all trying to do the least stuff we need to do to get results. Companies are putting in the absolute least amount of effort to measuring performance, and employees are putting in the least effort to get their job done. So, it seems fair to me, and I don't think anyone is stealing.
> This is already the current situation. This is why your computer is monitored and you badge in.
But it's not, and I'm not?
I haven't ever worked under these conditions, and I've worked a handful of jobs over close to 20 years. I'm always confused when people like yourself make these sweeping statements, given I've never once encountered them.
I know I haven't encountered them because I've witnessed coworkers at a few of those jobs do fuck all all day and never get in trouble for it. Their computers clearly weren't being monitored, because they used them to work on personal projects all day.
> That's why a good worker being 15 minutes late every day will eventually get fired, but a bad worker sitting around on his phone will not.
I've had coworkers very infrequently show up to work and just "work from home" while still getting nothing done, so again, my lived experience contradicts your absolute statements? Maybe I'm just not working the same kinds of jobs you are?
> Is this is a good way to measure output? Of course not, it's pretty much the most naive and simplistic way you can do it. But it's the most popular method chosen, so, here we are.
Every place I've worked has measured output in terms of concrete objectives being achieved in "reasonable" timeframes. "Reasonable" is always highly subjective, and I've definitely been the one who hasn't gotten things done within initial estimates because it turned out here there be dragons or some such. I've generally had good managers who understand the work, and are technical enough to understand why it sometimes takes longer than expected.
The coworkers I've seen fired for poor performance were the ones who consistently didn't get things done within their own estimates, and were consistently unable to provide good rationale for why. The ones I've seen who have done fuck all and gotten away with it were the ones especially good at coming up with plausible reasons for the endless delays, and were otherwise on good terms with their managers (or had less technically managers who were easier to hoodwink). Others took the tactic of never taking on solo work, and then always "pairing" on everything (but never actually contributing any real work).
> Look, getting less work done than is expected of you relies on knowing that expectation, which you don't. Has it occurred to you that those "stealing" might just legitimately think that they ARE doing what's expected of them? I mean, they're doing it... and they're employed... so what's the expectation?
Seems to me you are arguing in favor of people doing nothing and getting paid for it? I mean, isn't that what you're saying here?
That's literally stealing, is it not? Sure, they might be getting away with it, but people steal and get away with it all the time, but that doesn't make it right.
You're essentially making the argument that "if you can get away with theft, it's not theft," which really says a lot more about you than it does about me.
> At the end of the day it would be nice to all hold hands and sing kumbaya. But ultimately, we are all trying to do the least stuff we need to do to get results. Companies are putting in the absolute least amount of effort to measuring performance, and employees are putting in the least effort to get their job done. So, it seems fair to me, and I don't think anyone is stealing.
Yeah, no, this has never been the case for any of the places I've worked, and I find it hard to believe I've just "gotten lucky". I think you're just spewing bullshit that isn't actually reflective of reality. It might be true for some companies, but it's absolutely untrue as a general rule, which is what you're putting forth here.
> You're essentially making the argument that "if you can get away with theft, it's not theft," which really says a lot more about you than it does about me.
No, that's not at all the argument I'm making. I'm making the argument that being a poor worker is not theft because it cannot be. Because theft requires you stealing something, and salary employees cannot steal time because they are not paid by time.
> I think you're just spewing bullshit that isn't actually reflective of reality
This has been the case everywhere I've been employed and has also been the case with everyone I know.
Look, I don't really care if you think your company is different and I'm certainly not going to try to convince you that your experience isn't real. That's not productive.
All I'm saying is, if we have a problem where workers aren't doing a good job, that's a measuring problem. Your company figured out the measuring problem. Congratulations! Most haven't, which is why they have so many shitty workers. They just need to put in more effort into measurement.
Ultimately the company is the sole entity responsible for setting expectations. If they're letting people get away with less work, then they're signalling "what you're doing is okay and you should keep doing it". I'm not going to fault random workers who have zero leverage or control in anything because their company and managers decided to be lazy and irresponsible.
You want to measure performance? Yeah, that takes effort and knowledge. Putting in an HID reader isn't gonna cut it.
Sure, but there's inherent latency between detecting the bad behavior and punishing it. Sometimes that latency is infinite, as tends to be the case in many government jobs.
It's not just a "bad management" issue, and trying to blame it entirely on the company is just as bullshit as blaming it entirely on the worker.
Most often an employee caught stealing is just fired. If there's significant value involved perhaps the police would get a call.
Telling an employee to clock out and keep working is a labor law violation, that's not just a civil matter. It happens, but often with the agreement of the employee. I.e. "I know you're about to hit overtime, so if you clock out I'll give you cash, otherwise I have to send you home."
When this conversation comes up it is typically mentioned that employers have mechanisms of enforcement that are tied to their basic accounting required for taxes as well as surveillance cameras that are also meant to watch customers for theft. They also have the ability to contact law enforcement and have their employees arrested for theft.
There is an asymmetry in this relationship however where employees don't practically have recourse when their employers steal from them.
My sister was a waitress at Red Lobster in somewhat of a tourism city and made absolute bank. She still stole stuff like cutlery, salt shakers, etc. Let’s not pretend that most people that are stealing are Robin Hood types.
This comment is so on point, reminds me of the old one about if you owe the bank 500k they own you, but if you owe then 2Billion you own them. Something along those lines, maybe I'm only noticing it more recently but it seems to me that there's also a higher prevalence of "Non class actions" clauses in terms and conditions these days too.
It's amazing how badly customers are willing to be treated but at the same time, you're not obliged to buy a service so I can't really rant too much.
Edit : Found the quote and unironically it's credited as an American Proverb.
> If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb.
