Some More News - SMN: Wage Theft Is A Much Bigger Problem Than Retail Theft

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Hi. In today's episode, we look at the offensive amount of money that employers steal from their workers, and how it's a much bigger problem than the "crisis" of retail theft. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1roc-o2THxdbJ82ZMTaqVyWA_tisWIGi6XqRber-AY5s/edit?usp=sharing  Take the first step to visibly thicker, healthier hair. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners and viewers ten dollars off your first month’s subscription and free shipping when you go to https://Nutrafol.com/men and enter the promo code MORENEWS.If you want to take ownership of your health, start with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase exclusively at https://drinkAG1.com/morenews.Right now, Hungryroot is offering Some More News viewers 40% off your first delivery and free veggies for life. Just go to https://Hungryroot.com/MORENEWS to get 40% off your first delivery and get your free veggies.Leave oil behind and start the year with more effective and fast-acting CBD from NextEvo Naturals.Get 25% off any order or up to 60% off as a new subscriber by using code MORENEWS at

Welcome to the broadcast. Panic in the streets tonight as America's crime spree continues. That's right, folks, I am correct. An organized cabal of criminals have brazenly brought the heartland of the fabric of the soul of our society to its knees by snatching billions of dollars

from the pockets of innocent, hardworking citizens. They're in our Walmarts, our pharmacies, even our banks, threatening our very way of life and the sanctity of our shopping centers, our groves, Americanas, Rosemary, and Times Squares, and the shops at the Creek. These animals have siphoned too much from our society, and we here at the More News Network say, enough.

Is anybody brave enough to stand against this horde of thugs blatantly criming in broad daylight? Why haven't our politicians done something to prevent this? I'll tell you why. Because they don't give a sloppy hoot. They are complicit. Too scared to take a stand against this thieving mob because society says that's politically bad for them to do.

Ha ha, politically bad, ha ha! It disgusts me and it should disgust you too. I'm talking of course about corporate wage theft. Why, what do you think I was talking about? Wage theft is a huge problem in America. Oh yeah, we did a goof. We are so clever and funny like Carrot Top. Anyway, it's me, regular Cody.

I'm so thankful I don't host that other show we were just doing a parody of. My life, oh, it'd be so much more cynical and dark and angry and I'd be so much wealthier. Oh my God, can you imagine some kind of richer, more terrible version of me? Anyway, today we're gonna crack open the sour nut that is wage theft, which is actually a much bigger problem

than retail crime, don't you know? Don't ya? No, no? Don't you know? I ask it weirdly like that because if you watch a lot of news, you might not know. Yeah, Neil, you just look at the list of retail companies, whether it's Home Depot, Lowe's, Macy's, Dick's, and then you look at Target. They're now projecting $1.2 billion. Again, the polite word is shrink. The reality is it's theft.

And you look at that Nordstrom video that's out there where one of the thieves actually is pulling the display set up, right, trying to get it through the door. It's cabled to a purse or something. So this is adding, again, this—and who's going to pay for all this, Neil? Somebody's got to pay. It's you and I and the average consumer are gonna pay higher prices for goods to offset the cost of people stealing. That's Bob Nardelli, a former CEO of Chrysler and Home Depot,

who fears that America is becoming a lawless society under one President Joe Biden. He cited Target's projection that theft will cost the store $1.2 billion in the 2023 fiscal year. And he points out that crime isn't just scary to witness, but it further exacerbates inflation as retailers have no choice but to pass on their catastrophic losses to you, the consumer. And like, listen, I'm not gonna sit here in my fancy outfit and pretty mouth

and say that shoplifting is cool or rad or fat with a P, but according to the National Retail Federation, the largest retail trade association in the world, only 37% of retail shrink, aka loss of inventory, is from external sources such as shoplifting. The majority of losses actually come from employees themselves or cashier errors or damaged products, meaning that theft isn't actually the problem

the media makes it out to be. We actually covered this several times on the show and you can go watch those episodes. They're great episodes, I'm sure. Haven't seen them, won't see them. The broad strokes though, being that external theft hasn't actually been rising in recent years.

Again, that's according to data from the Retail Industries Own Trade Association. And other recent research has borne this out. The shoplifting rate has actually decreased in most major cities in the last five years and smash and grabs remain rare with the rate not increasing from 2019 to 2021. And yet reporting on these incidents skyrocketed between 2018 and 2022.

Here's what the NRF had to say about this supposed crisis. Quote, Selective reporting of retail theft incidents by retailers and skewed media coverage of retail theft has fostered misperceptions regarding the overall role of violence in organized retail crime operations. Media coverage of retail theft tended to focus on sensational incidents that feature violence or brazen daytime theft operations.

But to be fair and the rest of the phrase, that's according to the libcucks at the National Retail Federation and their woke board of directors, the CEO of Walmart, the CEO of Macy's, and frequent Fox Business guest Matthew Shea. Take that shit and bring it back to Berkeley, you beatniks. But despite these lefty facts,

retailers have managed to pressure lawmakers to dump tons of money into fixing this drummed up problem. According to one retail association, theft costs $70 billion annually. But again, that number includes all employee theft and other fraud and mistakes, not exclusively shoplifting, and certainly not organized theft, which the NRF now admits makes up a much,

much lower percentage than they originally said. And so going by that National Retail Federation estimate of 37% of all shrink, theft would actually make up about 26 billion of that 70 billion figure, right? Of course, the NRF actually puts the overall number lower at around $45 billion in total losses, which again includes everything and not just theft. I wanted to do that math because wage theft,

the thing this episode is about, totals an estimated $50 billion every year. The same as the highest reasonable estimate of all retail shrink, including inventory mistakes and damaged Star Wars action figures. Oh no, Commander Poofblotto! Oh, I had to look, it makes, Poofblotto. Commander Poofblotto, God, Star Wars is perfect.

To put this into perspective, the problem could be up to $15 billion a year in minimum wage violations alone. You could have made 30 Force Awakens with that money. No variations, 30 versions of the same script. So that means wage theft is at least as big of a problem, if not a much bigger problem than shoplifting and other retail crime,

especially since most of that money is not being stolen from big corporations, but from workers, otherwise known as you. And you love you. We love you. Everybody loves you. The very corporations weeping into their silk handkerchiefs whenever a package of Pampers is ripped off from a CVS

are responsible for more theft than they're complaining about. And it's coming out of the pockets of their own workers. Remember that former Home Depot CEO we showed you a few minutes ago? I hope so, it was not that long ago. Well, gee golly nuts, that very company just agreed to a $72.5 million settlement with former workers

who were underpaid in various ways, such as being forced to wait off the clock after their shifts were over, or not being paid for doing prep work at the start of their shifts, or who lost money when Home Depot rounded down their clock in and clock out times. Tens of millions of dollars stolen

from the very people who worked for them. Home Depot, more saving, more doing, but the saving is money they owe their workers and the doing is illegal class warfare. So after the break, we're going to look closer at how big a problem wage theft really is, how companies often do it legally and out in the open, and why it should be covered with the same

breathless intensity as daytime Beverly Hills jewelry store robberies. And while you watch these ads, I'm going to go rinse off the cologne that I put on for the Fox News parody. I've spent this entire episode so far smelling like Brian Kilmeade. I know you can't smell it through the screen,

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How are those ads for you? Mine were... Okay, I scrubbed myself with the dial during the break. The dial of destiny. Now I smell like the siege of Syracuse. I don't know what I'm saying. Okay, so before the break, we handsomely pointed out that retail theft is equal to,

if not less of a problem than wage theft. And yet despite this, wage theft is rarely covered on the news. So now we're going to look at the many different ways employers steal from their workers and why cumulatively it's a much bigger deal than people realize. Like we said, companies steal from workers

in a number of ways, like not paying required overtime, taking tips, denying meal breaks, paying less than the minimum wage, and selling my teeth on eBay. Although that last one might be specific to me. I really hope it's specific to me and that it stops for me too. These kinds of things are so common in hourly wage jobs

that it's probably happened to you and you may not have even noticed. You might be wondering why there aren't like laws about this stuff. And the short answer is that there absolutely are. The long answer is that most of these places do it anyway because they know they can get away with it. After all, it's not like Redditor Pineapple Express 1010

who was denied breaks at Chipotle has the time to find a lawyer and threaten a lawsuit to get a 30 minute break. It's hard to complain about your shitty life preserver when you're too busy treading water, you know? This kind of thing is particularly prevalent in low wage jobs often done by people who are not native English speakers. For example, this shine and bright car wash in Inglewood, California paid workers a flat rate of $70 a day while requiring 8 to 10 hours a day

of work and denying overtime and breaks. That means the business was paying $7 an hour at a time when the California minimum wage was already double that. Workers would complain to the owner, who ignored them, or in some cases, fired them. They got away with this for years until finally the state paid attention to this case. And ultimately the labor commissioner's office ordered the car wash to produce $900,000 in back pay. But the fact that they found any justice there is the exception. These workers were immigrants

who spoke little to no English. It took a nonprofit to recognize their case and bring it to the state's attention. You can imagine how many cases go completely unnoticed. And this also highlights part of the inherent racism in many cases of wage theft. Immigrant workers are already more likely to be in low-wage jobs,

and employers too often feel perfectly justified in ripping them off. That's Asael Espinosa, who told CBS News that he makes $4 per pizza delivery plus tips. And of course, if it's a slow night with no deliveries, he gets paid nothing at all. The Chicago restaurant he delivers for, Natty's Pizza, claims that it doesn't owe Espinosa an hourly wage as he is an independent contractor

who also delivers for other companies and doesn't have set hours. But Espinosa says this isn't true, that he's never delivered for an app, has to work a regular schedule, and is often required to clean bathrooms or stock shelves, for which he is not paid. No doubt if you've delivered pizzas, you may have gotten a similar deal. Delivery drivers are tipped employees and therefore don't have to get minimum wage, which is wild when you realize they still often have to pay for gas and car maintenance.

But I'm highlighting his case because it's an especially egregious example of something that's become very commonplace in the gig economy, where employers argue that the low pay is legal because of how they're classifying their workers. It's a fun little loophole, like how I'm technically married to Warmbo

so I can be on his insurance plan. We've talked about this before, but remember California Prop 22? Voters were tricked into approving it in 2020, and it exempted ride share and food delivery apps from having to classify their drivers as employees, and thus allowed them to pay on a per delivery basis. This is a form of wage theft.

The legal standard for being an independent contractor and not an employee varies from state to state, but generally it means that you're performing work that is outside of the hiring entity's regular business and that you aren't under the entity's direct control as to how that work is done. Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and others may allow their drivers to choose their own hours,

but they can't argue that the work they perform is not part of their overall business or that they don't exert control over them. That's absurd. The delivery driver for a delivery app or a taxi driver for a taxi service is literally doing the only thing that business provides. If they aren't employees, then who is?

What is the point of these services otherwise? What, does Grubhub want us to think they're just a middleman connecting hungry parties with eager delivery enthusiasts? They're employees, of course they are. But misclassifying employees as independent contractors has become an easy way for companies to steal from them and deny them employee protections.

So Espinosa and other drivers protesting outside of Natty's Pizza, it's really indicative of a much larger problem with much larger companies. And while it's actually really difficult to determine how much these shameless crooks are stealing from their workers, the state of California says that this misclassification results in a loss of $7 billion each year

of payroll tax revenue. The Midwest Economic Policy Institute says that misclassification in the construction industry alone costs Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois $362 million in tax revenue. So they're not only stealing from their own employees, they're stealing from Unky Sam by not paying taxes, which in turn steals from us, and also, I guess, Lockheed Martin. The Wage The theft coalition estimates Massachusetts workers are owed a billion dollars in pay a year. That translates into a hundred million dollars in lost revenue for the state.

Again, weird that this isn't a bigger concern. Like sure, that $50 billion number from the Economic Policy Institute is just an estimate, but when have estimates stopped the media from freaking out about something? According to the FBI, all US robberies in 2019 amounted to an estimated $482 million, less than 1% of the annual wage theft number.

That's all robberies of banks, convenience stores, liquor stores, residences, people on the street, and Barnes and Nobles. And if you don't believe that anyone would rob a Barnes and Noble, the writer of this episode was robbed as a cashier at a Barnes and Noble. And even he agrees that it pales in comparison to wage theft as an overall problem.

The fuck did they steal, books? Those are worthless. Get out of here, books. And speaking of worthless stuff, let's do another ad. After that, we're gonna look at the sheer scale of this problem, because while 50 billion might be an estimate, we do have some hard, throbbing numbers for you.

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Welcome back, number sluts. Before the break, I was talking about how the crime of wage theft goes far beyond a few anecdotes and an estimate of money stolen. How do I know this? With my giant grotesque brain? Well, you just have to look at all the settled lawsuits and watch these numbers pile up.

96 million from Wells Fargo, two and a half million from FedEx, potentially up to 1.5 billion from Walmart this century, 12 million from Rite Aid, some random welding company that tried to settle a wage theft suit with $23,500 in coins, and 11.5 million from BOFA. BOFA what, you ask?

BOFA what, you ask? Bofa what you ask? These nuts? Took you long enough, you lazy jerk. See you at dinner, love you. Bank of America, testicles, Bofa, money, the money place, the nut store. Now it's time to talk about why this keeps happening. Because even when low wage workers get advocates

on their side, many can't get back pay. The Center for Public Integrity found that the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division rarely penalizes companies that chronically steal wages, and only find a quarter of repeat offenders between 2005 and 2020. And only 14% of those companies had to pay additional cash damages. A senior fellow from Rutgers University who works on labor standards says, these companies know what they're doing,

that they've realized it's quote, "'Cheaper to violate the law even if you get caught.'" Because of course, why pay fairly when it costs you less money to pay the eventual fine? And that's if you get caught, which you probably won't. The federal agency responsible for rectifying this is underfunded and outmatched, and state labor agencies have been performing,

let's say, ungood. Our data team submitted public records requests to nearly every state labor department in the nation and built this first of its kind database of more than 650,000 wage theft complaints. We learned that of those complaints, state agencies ruled in favor of employees half the time. You're fired state agencies.

It's a new catchphrase I just made up. Do you like it? So how can we fix this? Well, good news. A lot of these companies have fixed the problem with the solution called not having employees in the first place and outsourcing to contractors.

Oh, okay. Then bad news. That's bad news, correction, bad news. Who wrote this? Maybe you should go back to Barnes and Noble, learn how to fucking read. Remember that gig economy stuff from before the break? As described by economist David Thunderscroat Weil,

this model is now expanding to companies like Marriott, Hershey, Time Warner, and Walmart. Basically, instead of companies hiring employees and treating them like humans, they use a middleman to avoid responsibility. Now everything functions like an Uber, where the company dealing with the customer isn't technically the same company providing the labor.

And by fragmenting those two pieces, you can get away with rampant abuses. Pablo Ramirez hired a group of construction workers from Texas and Mexico to come help. For over three weeks the men say they work without getting paid by Ramirez or Blue Sky which had estimated revenues last year of a hundred million dollars. By the end of the month they'd run out of food. In a statement to NBC News Blue Sky says their labor broker was the problem. The issue in Cedar Rapids arose because Mr. Ramirez failed to pay the people he personally hired, despite Blue Sky having paid Mr. Ramirez for that same work.

Blue Sky says you're the one who messed this up. Yeah, they can say whatever they want, but they know the truth. Hey, what's the point of hiring a construction company that just hires a second construction company? This construction company was hired to rebuild homes after a storm, but hired another contractor to do the work, who himself hired workers as independent contractors, brought them to another state, and then proceeded to not pay them or give them food. and then proceeded to not pay them or give them food. This shit apparently happens all the time, and it can take a while for the workers to even sort out who the hell they're working for in the first place, let alone which of these parties owes them money.

The workers in that case eventually won and got back pay. But again, that's the exception. So, QUICQ, which stands for query, which is short for quit yappapping, hear my question, ah! What, and might I add, the balls, is going on here? Why does our system allow for massive profits for people who aren't doing any actual work? Well, I'd argue it's because most of the people in power

either don't care or perhaps even like that this is happening. The corporations obviously love this. We already talked about how it saves them money to violate wage laws even if they're caught. And politicians, the people who make the laws that those corporations ignore, don't really have much incentive to change things either.

Low wage workers aren't big campaign donors after all. They don't vote as much as the richies. And anyway, politicians and political appointees have their hands full dealing with this horrible epidemic of too many people having jobs. Terrifying. So it will be an uphill battle to demand change from these old sacks of corn flour.

I mean, Mitch McConnell hasn't made minimum wage since he was a teenager mowing lawns on his ancestors' slave plantation. But at least there is a blueprint for what we would need to change to get justice for victims of wage theft. The first step would be to enforce the laws on the books and increase penalties for violators.

New York State recently updated its laws to do just that, classifying wage theft as a form of criminal larceny and empowering prosecutors to go after offenders. It'll take some time to see if that really happens though. In California, felony wage theft is punishable by up to three years in jail, but offenders rarely face those charges. I won't harp on this too much

since it's pretty well established that the threat of jail time is not a great crime deterrent. But that conclusion is based on the current makeup of our prisons, which is of course disproportionately poor. So maybe threatening rich business owners with prison time is good and warranted and funny, and might just persuade them not to steal from their employees.

Though there are certainly some perks to being a rich guy in prison as well. Albert Brooks might play you in a movie. Was that an out of sight reference? For our one title monkey screen wipe, we had just one in the whole episode and we used it to make an out of sight reference? Okay.

Anyway, we should also stigmatize wage theft the way we do petty theft. In Chillicothe, Ohio, there's a judge who allows shoplifters to avoid jail time if they walk around wearing a sandwich board that says, I am a thief, because that'll definitely fix the underlying issues that cause shoplifting.

To quote one woman who chose the sign, "'This is really embarrassing. "'I can't do 10 days in jail. She was arrested for stealing a bunch of household items from Walmart, and the reason she can't go to jail for 10 days is because she has five kids to take care of. Real cool country. But perhaps we could at least make corporate criminals who steal from their employees wear these signs as well.

Or you know, maybe let's not do any sign-based punishments and instead just reform our justice system. Or the sign thing. Either way, the next piece would be to properly fund the Labor Department's wage in our division, whose job it is to go after offenders at the federal level. The Biden administration has requested a 25% budget increase for the division.

But as of this writing, that's all stalled as part of this whole will they, won't they government shutdown thing, which I guess is just always happening now, like every year forever, we're just always gonna do that. That's awesome. It's also important that the wage and hour division have a chief administrator who understands the scope of the problem and is motivated to act.

Biden's earlier nominee for the position, David Weil, was voted down by the Senate because of his strong criticism of gig economy companies like Uber. If that name sounds familiar, it's because I super duper just said it earlier. Remember, I said thunder scrote in the middle of it for fun? He's the guy who literally wrote the book on this stuff and it would have been great to have him running the wage and hour division like he did during the Obama administration. Republicans were united against him

because he was anti-business, which is code for pro worker basically. And the Democrats were all united in support of him except for, I'm just gonna check here. I'm sure it's some low profile politicians I've never heard of before. Yeah, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Mark Kelly. Straight up, none of whom have thunder genitalia

of any kind. Manchin called Weil a risk. Kelly said there were concerns about how he'd interpret things from business owners. And Sinema announced the 74th annual Hunger Games, which feels like she was avoiding the question a little bit, but she's a shrewd politician. So maybe we all needed her to announce the Hunger Games

instead of answer the question. Now, all that isn't to say that the person who ultimately got the post, Jessica Luhmann, isn't qualified. Unions seem down with her. But for whatever reason, she didn't scare the business interests who apparently get to decide how much they are regulated. And what scared them is a guy who said he'd go after Uber,

which is literally the job, presumably because every business wants to treat their employees like Uber does. Like, you all understand this is the desired end result. The gig app economy created a handful of corporate middlemen who only collect profit while providing nothing of actual value. And now that's every company's dream.

You know how when you were a kid and you imagined being a professional candy tester, this is their candy testing. Because of course it is. Everybody wants money for nothing, and somehow they are getting it. And that's why we finally desperately need the media to help us out here. Because this is unacceptable. So it's come to this. Walmart, America's biggest bricks and mortar retailer, has issued a warning about shoplifting. It's so bad that they may have to close stores Walmart closing stores and raising prices. We're all gonna pay for this.

Poor Walmart you know? Shame on us. We deserve to pay greatly for their slight loss of profit. This shit needs to stop. We need the media to talk about the actual crime of wage theft, a massive, racist, and often hidden fraud on American workers. And when this is more prominent in the public consciousness, we'll finally be able to achieve the myriad goals that groups like the National Employment Law Project lay out,

such as making it safer for workers to come forward and stopping the misclassification of employees by gig economy companies. I don't know, maybe we shouldn't have a gig economy altogether because money is fake. Did you know that? And so if we're gonna use this fake money, maybe we should at least make sure

everybody gets paid a living wage because everybody deserves a living wage. Even mommies? Puppets don't count, you know that. I say it all the time, puppets do not count, okay? Get back in your hole. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Get back in your hole, okay?

Do you want a divorce? I didn't think so. Back in the hole. Marriage, am I right? Oh, just kidding. We're, oh, it was a bit, We just... we were... it's... right? It was a bit, right? Say it was a bit. It was a bit.

It was a bit. What's up, fuckos and unfuckos? How's it going? Thanks for watching. Obviously, Warmbo's fine. That's a whole bit thing. You know that. You know that.

Like and subscribe. We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got a podcast called Even More News. We've got this show as a podcast called some more news go where the podcasts live give an old knockaroo be like give me your podcast and then listen

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