Wage theft is saving them tens of billions in the US every year. So they are hardly spending all of that for this!

I doubt it's close to everything they saved.

$1.5B is roughly the wage theft recovered between 2021-2023. It's estimated that more than $15B in wage theft occurs annually just from minimum wage shortfalls.

See: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/

Keep in mind that wage theft is narrowly defined to include only blatantly illegal actions such as underpaying minimum wage, failing to pay overtime, requiring off-the-clock work, denying meal breaks, etc. It that doesn't even get into more general wage suppression via abusing visas, anti-poaching collusion with competitors (a favorite pastime of FANNG), and at-or-below inflation raise policies, among other things, which have caused wages to diverge from productivity over the last half century.