https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
"If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year."
http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-w...
Contrary to popular belief, wage theft is a criminal act rather than a contractual dispute. Wrongfully withholding or sequestering a person's property is just as illegal as taking it from their hands.
> This failure to pay what workers are legally entitled to can be called wage theft;
That is totally dumb. If a legal entitlement is denied it is a violation of law but not necessarily violation of a person's private property. I have happily worked more than 8 hours for my employer so many times and done unpaid internships happily even though the employer likely broke several labor laws. I think I gained from it.
Even more importantly those people who think they are getting a raw deal can leave immediately or sue the employer.
I think he's choosing to go by a different definition -- namely where "theft" is when you're deprived of what's justly yours by whatever unethical means; not simply when the law proscribes it as such. Or in other word: based more on an intuitive sense of fairness (or "natural law"), rather than what's on the books.
Granted, it's a fuzzier definition, and you may not particularly like it. But I'm just saying, it's a different one.
