alt Hacker NewsSo it goes. Wage theft dwarfs the amount lost to street-level theft, robbery, burglary, etc., combined. The economic stimulus from correcting even a portion of annual wage theft would represent complete coverage of those violent thefts - economically-speaking, there would be no reason for criminals to carry them out. Why rob a gas station to get your drug money? Everyone around you is making enough extra at work that bumming a dollar here and there covers it. That sort of thing.
But good forbid we actually correct a major social ill at the expense of the people who profit from it.
Exactly. And even worse is that crime itself is firmly rooted in politics.
Example: You work at walmart, as a cashier. You drop a $100 bill on the floor and pocket it from the till. You're caught, cops called, and you are arrested.
Example: You work as a manager at the same walmart. Store manager says labor costs are too damned high. So you go in on 10 employees, and edit their timecards to cut $100 from each of them, totaling $1000. IF you are caught, police will not respond. Instead, it is a "civil matter".
This is a bit dated chart, but its still very much correct. https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... But notice the wage theft types are all "civil matters", and the non-eage theft are heavily criminally prosecuted. And who does those? Predominantly poorer people.
We also see this with dumping trash, being criminal and severe to the individual, but companies (read: Musk) can dump thousands of gallons of toxic sludge per day. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/inspection-texas-drainag...
We also see criminality differences between charges of freebase cocaine versus crack cocaine. Crack was what black people smoked, so sentencing was like 10x of freebase.
When you start looking at how laws are apllied, its almost always the same pattern: those at the top are a civil matter. Those who report to the top are a criminal matter. Those at the bottom are "charged with the fullest maximum punishment".