There is a saying that when something is punishable by a fine, it really means “legal, for a price”. Rogue UK employers seem to take this to heart. A shocking investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published this month shows the penalty system has barely been enforced: out of more than 4,800 firms fined since […]
Tag: Wage theft
Executive director of New York Taxi Workers Alliance Bhairavi Desai speaks as Uber drivers participate in a rally outside of the Uber headquarters on January 5, 2023 in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images) Originally published by Jacobin. There are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them. […]
The original post on Brave New Europe. The gig economy is often talked about as ‘the future of work’, but if we look at history we find that its wage model – paying per output, rather than per hour – actually goes back hundreds of years. In the 19th century, this was called ‘piece wages’, […]
Cloudwork is absorbing an increasing proportion of the world’s labour and has been significantly boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic (ILO, 2021). We use cloudwork to refer to remotely performed labour mediated by digital labour platforms – companies that connect workers with clients through a digital interface, exert control over and extract value through the labour process […]
On the Trade Union Congress’ (TUC, 2019) 15th annual ‘Work Your Proper Hours Day’, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady asserted, ‘It’s not okay for bosses to steal their workers’ time’, pointing to the chronic theft of workers’ time and money in the United Kingdom (UK). Over five million UK workers laboured a total of two […]
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The Wage Theft Epidemic
Originally published for Tribune. Every society with a concept of property also has a concept of theft. They are mutually constitutive, as Proudhon argued in 1840. To privatise public land is a form of theft; to alienate an object from its rightful owner is a form of theft; to plagiarise another person’s idea is a […]
Matthew Cole 