It's been done. 1971
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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I'll be the pedantic one here and say it: Big Bird is wrong here, this is not wage theft.
Wage theft is unpaid wages, unpaid overtime, unpaid benefits, tip theft, etc.
If Big Bird is a Marxist, he should describe this type of theft as surplus labor value.
Or if Big Bird is a capitalist, he would just call it profit.
Considering that wage theft is the biggest form of theft, It’s not good to dilute the word.
I'll be more pedantic. If the bosses hinted or promised pay raises if sales went up, which bosses often do, and sales often do, then it is wage theft.
no, that's not wage theft. it has a specific legal definition.
Shouldn't it be proportional increase in wages?
That would be glorious, but we are just asking for them to be indexed to worker productivity, the two have been uncoupled for about 55 years now.
Happens to social services too.
In 2019, the total cost of every robbery in the country was $482 million.
The cost of wage theft was more than 100 times that number.
The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program recorded 267,988 robberies in 2019. Those robberies cost businesses and the public $482 million in total losses. But wage theft costs workers $50 billion every year. And most of the time, employers get away with stealing money from their employees.
What is wage theft? Wage theft means underpaying workers. It can take several forms, including paying less than the minimum wage, withholding overtime pay, or not compensating workers for all of their work hours.
Imagine you work at a minimum wage job. But your company asks you to show up 30 minutes before the store opens every morning to prep – without paying you for that time. Over the course of a year, you’ve logged more than 100 unpaid hours of work. That’s wage theft.
And even that's dwarfed by the greater losses.
For just one example: I hear Wall St destroy 7 times as much wealth as they ~~make~~ extract. (First estimate a websearch offered me, suggests around $60 billion in 2025... so about £480 billion taken out of the economy [that would be] of benefit for everybody.)
The suppressed technologies that could emancipate us, are incalculably more yet. (Consider even just in terms of patents. Patents unscrupulously being sat on and perpetuated to infinity. Patents being used (honestly, basically like intended), excluding others. And especially secreted patents.)
Yeah, wage theft's really wrong, regardless whether by strict corporate legal definition, or more slippery. But it's still miniscule compared to the rest of the headroom we'd have without the crooks.