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.
For just one example: I hear Wall St destroy 7 times as much wealth as they makeextract. (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 especiallysecreted 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.
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
makeextract. (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.