Employers in the United States must be held accountable for their wage theft, and the employees to whom they have stolen from must be reimbursed.
The state or federal governments government must siphon a portion of the resources they allocate to preventing $12.7 billion lost in property theft in the U.S. annually and put them towards combatting the more than $15 billion lost in wage theft each year.
Preventative and punitive measure need to be put in place to stop wage theft from happening in the now and in the future. “Treble damage” statutes have been shown as an effective deterrent, but more resources are needed towards investigation, protections for workers, and legal fees that allow victims of wage theft to actually get the help they deserve.
If we want to decrease the poverty rate, wage theft must be combatted. It serves to keep those who are already impoverished from improving their quality of life, and to keep people complacent with issues of homelessness and systemic oppression.
Is it not impossible to imagine that this complacency is conditioned?
When you are living paycheck to paycheck you very quickly lose any spark to change the current systems you live within, and just become ground even further into the dirt when your wages are stolen from you.
Lessening the rates of wage theft via strengthening a state’s labor laws can also end up lessening the rates of labor exploitation, retaliation against workers for reporting mistreatment, and poor working conditions as a result. Improvement is a slippery slop to further improvement.
Unionizing is more important than ever when it comes to wage theft, with unions having been shown to reduce rates of such violations.
Since laborers do the labor necessary to run a company, and a business is non-functional without them, why should not the bargaining power always be put in the hands of the employees?
The intersectionality of wage theft affecting the already most oppressed groups makes it a civil rights issue as well as an economic one. The fact that women, people of color, and noncitizen workers are among the groups most likely to be working minimum wage jobs and living in poverty makes them at higher risk of wage theft, something that only further worsens the already disadvantaged positions society imposes on them.
The most effective community methods aside from unions that you can find to combat wage theft are going to be public awareness and education about it and its effects, as well as easily available and free resources saying exactly what you can do to combat and prevent it. Furthermore, public schools should have a requirement to take an “adulting” class that covers all the basics of jobs in a real fashion that includes the ugly side of things, not just a mock interview or two, but real, usable advice.