“We’re constantly being told that there are all of these threats around us. But the threats that the media, the police and certain large corporations want us to focus on are not the things that actually most determine our safety. For example, you’ve seen all over the country conversations about retail theft or a ‘wave of crime’ but what you don’t hear about is wage theft. Wage theft costs $50 billion dollars every single year. Wage theft alone is about 5 times the value of all robbery, burglary, larceny, shoplifting combined. And why are we not hearing about it…? In reality, [law enforcement] only enforces some laws, against some people, some of the time.”

-Civil Rights Corps founder Alec Karakatsanis

While law enforcement has been sounding the alarm about a post-pandemic rise in crime, they’re typically not talking about white-collar crime. While violent crime makes for sensational headlines, it’s the more banal financial crimes that cause widespread harm to thousands, if not millions, of working-class Americans every single year.

As much as the “defund the police” movement has created a backlash resulting in increased police funding, most of that funding is used to enforce “some laws, against some people, some of the time.” Today, I’m walking through some of the types of crimes that are under-reported due to law enforcement’s lopsided priorities and our collective obsession with violence.

Wage Theft

Let’s say it aloud together: wage theft is illegal. So why do corporations get away with this illegal behavior constantly? That’s because their victims aren’t sensationally brutalized with weapons, they’re silently crushed in the shadows by the weight of poverty.

The most basic form of wage theft is when corporations fail to pay employees for work they’ve completed. Often times this is simply a ‘bureaucratic oversight’ like Kroger failing to pay its grocery employees after transitioning to a new payroll system. The problem in these cases is not one of intent but impact: employees are often forced to go without pay for weeks, sometimes months, while these types of disputes are addressed.

“It took three weeks for me to receive my money… I felt that shouldn’t happen somewhere I’ve worked 17 years.” -Horace Campfield, Kroger employee

In other cases, companies deliberately use illegal accounting practices to deprive workers of benefits and/or overtime pay. This type of wage theft is depressingly common and many well-known brands have faced lawsuits regarding these actions including (but not limited to): Apple, Wingstop, Walmart, Wells Fargo, Lowe’s, Amazon and even the Vitamin Shoppe. (Honestly, type any national brand and “wage theft” into Google and chances are you’ll find some *alleged* illegal behavior.)

Even more malicious are minimum wage violations, i.e. when a company illegally pays their employees a rate that is below minimum wage. The Economic Policy Institute found in 2017 that a shocking 17% of low-wage workers were subject to this type of wage theft. And you’re probably asking, how is that even allowed to happen? Well, put yourself in a low-wage workers’ shoes: who would you contact to report this behavior? And how quickly would you expect this to be addressed?

This example helps show that wage theft is all about tactical abuses of power. Employers engage in this unlawful behavior because they know that the chances that they’ll be faced with enforcement are low. This dynamic is further exposed by the fact that victims of wage theft are often undocumented immigrants or workers who speak English as a second language; people that are either unequipped or actively discouraged from reaching out to law enforcement for support.

Union-Busting

“Employees have the right to unionize, to join together to advance their interests as employees, and to refrain from such activity. It is unlawful for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of their rights.” -National Labor Relations Board

Indulge me again and say this aloud: union busting is illegal. Unions are the governing bodies explicitly designed to aid workers experiencing unlawful workplace actions like wage theft. Yet the 21st century has been marked by a precipitous decline in union membership with 2022 marking a record low for Americans’ union participation. However, recent strike action has exposed that this dwindling membership is not because Americans hold negative opinions of unions, but moreso because companies have routinely engaged in deceptive union-busting tactics for decades.

Let’s start with the obvious offenders: Walmart and Starbucks. Starbucks is currently a leading offender of federal labor laws as there are over 100 outstanding lawsuits by regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board against the company. These lawsuits collectively allege over 1,000 workplace violations, many of which involve the company’s tactics to intimidate or outright close branches that show signs of unionization. Meanwhile, Walmart’s attempted a more clandestine approach to union busting that (ironically) has been so well documented that it inspired an entire TV show: Superstore. The show’s main storyline over its six-season arc surrounds workers at a big-box store attempting to unionize as corporate management deploys union-busting tactics seemingly modeled after Wal-Mart’s real-world tactics for fighting unionization.

“Starbucks has figured out an ingenious plan to get around labor law, which is: break so many labor laws so fast that the National Labor Relations Board simply can’t keep up in enforcing the law”

-Jaz Brisack, a former Starbucks barista

Target Closures: ‘Crime’ or Union-Busting?

Target has been making national headlines recently for closing several urban stores due to “theft and organized retail crime.” Yet researchers have been fact-checking Target’s claims by comparing the closing locations to publicly available crime data and have proven that the stores chosen for closure are not experiencing the most crime or theft in their respective regions. (In other words, for most of the branches slated to close due to crime/theft, there’s a nearby Target branch experiencing more documented crime/theft that is staying open.) With this line of logic breaking down, many are noticing the similarities between the soon-to-be closed branches and are alleging that this is simply a tactic to close stores where unionization is likely. All of the locations were in left-leaning, progressive cities (Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and New York) and Target was just caught red-handed last year encouraging its store managers to engage in union-busting. While these allegations are still unconfirmed, they follow a similar pattern to Starbucks’ approach to store closures that’s been dubbed the “union-busting playbook.”

Corruption

This one I don’t need you to repeat, I expect you fully understand that political corruption and outright fraud are illegal. Yet enforcement of these large-scale crimes often amounts to a slap on the wrist and exposes our country’s unequal justice system.

Let’s start by addressing Senator Bob Menendez’s cartoonish case of corruption. The facets of the case read like a prestige HBO crime drama: gold bars, piles of cash stuffed in jackets and a Mercedes-Benz; all gifts from foreign businessmen in exchange for political influence. Despite clear photo evidence of all of these kickbacks, Menendez still refuses to resign. Even worse, many of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate refuse to call for his ouster and are essentially relying on him to be his own enforcement. To be sure, he is under federal investigation for his alleged crimes but the fact that Menendez has not been swiftly removed from his position of power underscores our country’s two-tiered justice system. Let’s seriously reflect on this for a second: if you committed theft at one of those NYC Target stores slated for closure you’d likely lose your job while being detained on the infamously inhumane Rikers Island while you awaited trial. (Just a reminder, over 85% of the ~5,500 detainees held in Rikers are pretrial detainees, i.e. people who have not been officially convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial, much like Menendez.)

This type of political corruption is more common than you may think, precisely because of the long, winding judicial processes used to hold powerful people accountable. As I mentioned in an earlier post, several of Ohio’s top Republicans were implicated in a bribery scheme back in 2019 but didn’t actually receive a prison sentence until a couple of months ago. Then there’s the case of North Carolina’s former Republican Party Chair, Robin Hayes. Hayes was found to be a part of a $1.5 million bribery scheme where he worked with local businessman Greg Lindberg to use illegal campaign donations to elect a candidate of their choice. The goal was to allow for the passage of business regulations that benefited Lindberg’s business. Despite his involvement, Hayes received a sentence that included no jail time, one year probation and a measly $9,500 fine. (If he didn’t get enough grace from law enforcement, Trump pardoned him shortly before leaving office.)

To reiterate, it is true that we’re seeing a rising wave of crime across America, it’s just not the kind of crime that law enforcement and media headlines like to point toward. It is estimated that up to 90% of white collar crime goes unreported and federal prosecutions of white collar crimes have decreased by half in the decade between 2011 and 2021. Meanwhile, 8,500 employers were found to have committed wage theft in 2019 yet studies have shown that only 1-in-4 repeat wage theft offenders actually receive fines. Simply put, enforcement systems designed to crack down on white collar crimes are woefully inadequate and allow this bad behavior to be viewed as just another cost of doing business under capitalism.

Leftover Links

• Just because you won a lawsuit proving your wages were stolen doesn’t mean that you’ll receive back-pay in a timely manner. Some wait months, even years, to receive what was always rightfully theirs.

• Employees at many companies believe that recent return-to-office mandates are being used as a method of union busting. Gay messaging app Grindr has been making headlines for practicing this alleged illegal behavior.