The EPI article gives some interesting & specific examples of wage theft. However, I think that term and the discussion around it gives the impression that large corporations are looking for opportunities to steal employees wages. When I skim these examples I see a few honest mistakes / bad policies but mostly small likely bankrupt/distressed companies trying to keep the wheels from falling off their business. It's like a ponzi scheme falling apart, payroll checks bounce, tips get stolen, employees are asked to do something while clocked out, etc. Because many businesses have insufficient working capital, this just happens.

Let's take a relative look at the problem

> wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.

$50B / $6.5T [0] = 0.77% of wages are "stolen"

While not good and $50B is a huge amount, I'd argue this is not much of a problem but a rounding error. Unless we require some level of capitalization or reserves by small businesses, a large portion of this will never go away. I would be shocked if even half the restitutions were paid, this forced bankruptcy for most of these businesses I would guess.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-an...

If employee steals from store, they're fired and arrested.

If store steals from an employee, they're told to pound sand at a state level office and hope and pray that some mid-level bureaucrat looks into the issue and writes a "stern letter".

Are you advocating for personal accountability in corporate governance and management? If someone is committing fraud, they could be arrested. But a good deal of this is negligence because requiring education to start a business is silly. For the most part, the system works. Why would an employee put up with it? They have no better opportunities you say? Let’s focus on that end then.

I wonder what the value of the inverse of this is - time theft. How many employees are paid to be on the clock but are not working? I bet it's in the hundreds of billions per year nationwide.