No the fuck it fucking isn’t. Wage theft is a serious issue, don’t dilute the message with stupid lies.
[deleted]
Submitted 3 months ago by FenrirIII@lemmy.world to workreform@lemmy.world
Comments
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You’re a little confused but you got the right spirit, this is surplus value extraction. Wage theft is simply a company refusing to pay contractually agreed upon wages for performed labor.
I agree with the message but we have to use our words carefully and correctly, so that definitions of these don’t become exceedingly broad and useless.
TheDoozer@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Look, I completely agree with the general sentiment, but if you conflate the current illegal theft of agreed-upon and earned wages with what workers deserve to be paid, it doesn’t help the latter argument, it just confuses the former.
This type of thing is “defund the police” all over again, where the intention is to transfer funds from the police to social services specialized in situations the police shouldn’t be handling in the first place, and then got conflated with the idea of abolishing police. And while the former would have, it seemed, broad support (even among a lot of police who felt ill-equipped and trained to deal with every kind of emergency), the latter immediately turned off a significant portion of people, and conflating the two hurt the entire movement.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a serious focus on wages increasing with profitability, I’m saying don’t use the terminology of a separate problem that needs to be fixed and could have broad support right now.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
It’s true that this comic is not actually about wage theft. But then you lost me.
greenskye@lemm.ee 3 months ago
The conspiracy theorist in me sometimes wonders if this type of thing is deliberately done by bad actors to sabotage these movements with poor messaging.
halvar@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I’m not from America, but I thought I had a pretty good understanding on some of these issues. Turns out I only got the memo for “defund the police” meaning “abolish the police”.
apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It did/does.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Nope. Let’s not do that. Don’t change the definition. These are not monies workers were contractually or legally owed that were kept by the employer either willfully, via inaction, or in error.
Wage theft is what it is. It is real. This is not it.
This is shitty corporations doing what they always do, wage suppression and being greedy by keeping all the money to themselves. Find a new or existing word that directly means this.
roofuskit@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s wealth redistribution, from the bottom to the top.
pigup@lemmy.world 3 months ago
At first glance, I thought it said waghetti like waluigi’s favorite pasta dish or something.
ImminentOrbit@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Wait, if this really what “wage theft” is? I thought it was not being paid for time worked. To be clear, I think the scenario in the comic is unjust, but I didn’t know that was what was meant by wage theft.
Solemn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
You have the correct legal definition
henfredemars@infosec.pub 3 months ago
You are correct. The comic is expanding the definition beyond what it normally means.