If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you have heard me call the minimum wage a "wage theft". I believe that. Any employer who pays minimum wage (or near it) is stealing some of the worker's labor, because that low wage is simply not sufficient to live on in this society. But it gets even worse than that. Some employers have the greedy audacity to pay a worker a very low wage, and then illegally withhold some of that already pitiful wage.The Economic Policy Institute estimates that at least 64% of low wage workers in the U.S. have at least some of their pay stolen out of their checks by employers every week -- and that 75% of low wage workers who earn overtime have part or all of those overtime wages stolen by their employers. This is both illegal and unethical, but it happens -- primarily because those employers know it is very unlikely they will be caught and punished by the federal government (Department of Labor). Why? Here is what the Economic Policy Institute says:
Enforcement of wage and hour laws has long been strikingly lax. When the federal minimum-wage law was first established in 1941, there was one federal workplace inspector for every 11,000 workers. By 2008, the number of laws that inspectors are responsible for enforcing had grown dramatically, but the number of inspectors per worker was less than one-tenth what it had been in 1941, with 141,000 workers for every federal enforcement agent. With the current staff of federal workplace investigators, the average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year. That is, an employer would have to operate for 1,000 years to have even a 1 percent chance of being audited by Department of Labor inspectors.
Common sense would tell us that theft is theft -- whether done by a criminal holding up some business or by an employer stealing from his low wage employees. But that is just not true in a capitalist economy like ours. While a criminal holding up a business will be caught and severely punished, a criminal stealing from employee paychecks (that he/she has the authority to write) is unlikely to even be caught, let alone severely punished. Theft from an employee is simply not considered nearly as great a crime as theft from an employer. For too many employers, it just their way of "doing business".
One look at the chart above (from the Economic Policy Institute) will show just how out-of-hand wage theft is in the United States. Note that when you combine the value of all the robberies from banks, convenience stores, and gas stations for a year ($56,950,000), it still pales in comparison to a year's worth of wage theft by employers ($185,287,827). The robberies from banks, convenience stores, and gas stations combined only make up about 30.7% of wage theft.
It goes without saying that something needs to be done about this. It's bad enough that these workers aren't paid enough to live on, but stealing from that already very low wage should be considered an unforgivable crime. But don't expect the government to help. The sequestration cuts by the Republicans (and agreed to by Democrats) have made sure that there are less Labor Department investigators -- and the parties are now discussing even deeper cuts.
This is just one more example of how unfair our economy has become.
