Here’s a reminder that wage theft accounts for nearly 75% of all theft. It’s literally larger than every other form of theft combined, and then multiplied by almost three.

If you walked into a convenience store and blatantly stole a $2 candy bar at the same time every single day, they’d have a cop waiting for you by the end of the week. But if that same convenience store chain steals $2 in wages from each of their 5000 employees every single day, then that is just good business.

Part of the issue is that lots of people seem to think “my employer didn’t pay my check” is the only form of wage theft. In reality, wage theft typically happens via a thousand tiny things. Things like unpaid breaks that still require work. Unfair time clock rounding that shaves a fraction of an hour off of every employee’s clock in/clock out times. Managers requiring employees to show up early, and then not allowing them to clock in until their shift is scheduled to begin. Employers automatically deducting an hour of time for meal breaks, (for “convenience”) even if the employee was working during that time and got a shorter break. Employers requiring employees to clock out at the scheduled end of their shift to avoid overtime, then requiring those employees to finish their closing tasks while clocked out. Requiring employees to “always be on-call” but refusing to pay them an on-call fee when they take work calls while clocked out.

All of those minor things quickly add up to massive amounts of stolen wages. For the employees, it is death by a thousand cuts. No single infraction is large enough to sue over, and no individual employee is going to bother going to court over $2 in unpaid wages. But when the company is doing it at scale, it means every employee is being paid less, which leads to massive illegal profits for the employer.