Exactly. How many hand wringing articles have we seen in the past few years about roving bands of shoplifters vs how many about wage theft?

Most companies dont pay many taxes either.

any proof of this? Every company I've worked for pays lots in taxes.

1$ is lots of taxes.

Mist companies dont pay what theyre supposed to as there are countless loopholes.

> Wage theft utterly eclipses every other form of larceny in the United States at least

If you define being late with payments as theft, then I'd bet that rent theft is way larger than wage theft. I don't see why you would say that it is theft when you are late with payments to a worker but not theft when you are late with payments to a company.

If being late with payments isn't theft, then "wage theft" isn't theft, just like you missing to pay your rent one month isn't theft.

Agreed, and not sure why you're being downvoted for this.

Maybe because if you redefine things that aren't theft as theft you can make any number of things more prevalent than wage theft, or maybe because it confused paying someone late with paying someone never, or maybe because it equated people who are unable to pay due to not having enough money for their basic needs with corporations who most often have plenty of money and assets but still refuse to pay their employees, or for any number of other reasons that it was a terrible argument.

I don't understand the chord this opinion strikes. Unless you're letting your personal bias get in the way, there's not a distinct difference between the two.

If you can't find a difference between the walmart employee late on rent because he doesn't have enough money to pay it until friday comes around, and walmart who has literal billions in profits, but has been repeatedly caught stealing money from workers you'd have to be keeping your eyes shut. Zero personal bias is required to see that those situations aren't even close the same thing.

That you're relying on "if you can't find the difference you must be blind!" as an argument proves my point; it's an emotional argument, not a rational one, and there is no functional difference between the two.

The difference is power imbalance. A landlord has distinct and easily accessible power over their tenants: they own the tenants home. An employee, conversely, has very little power against their employer. Even a small business has a great deal of power over their employees, and most wage theft occurs at larger ones anyway. Employees can pursue cases of wage theft, sure. But:

- They must use the court system, and do so probably without legal representation unless they can find a lawyer willing to work pro-bono. This requires time and money

- At the same time they’re almost certainly job hunting because while retaliation is (sometimes) illegal, it’s trivially easy for businesses to cite other bullshit reasons for firing people and be entirely in the clear, because that’s even harder to prove in court than wage theft

- If they do manage both of those, they now have a documented history of fighting for their rights as workers, and bosses do not like that. It makes them inherently riskier to hire.

Power imbalance is an emotional response, not a rational one; there is no functional difference between the two.

Tell me youve never worked in service industry without telling me youve never worked in the service industries.

This isnt "being late with payments" that is as you have correctly pointed out, not theft. "late" implies that eventually the wages are in fact paid. This is not what people are talking about when they are talking about wage theft.

Tell me you have never rented out without telling me you have never rented out something.

People refuse to pay rent all the time unless you start to threaten legal action over it. We call that late payment, but they would never pay unless you went after them, just like these companies.

> This isnt "being late with payments"

"Being late with payments" doesn't mean they are late, it means they haven't paid you yet. That is equivalent to wage theft, we just call it "late" to make it seem like a lesser evil, and "theft" when corporations do it to make it seem worse than it is.

Of course some companies will never pay and will take you to court over it, but I don't see why you should lump all of that into a giant number alongside the very benign cases.

I have actually worked in property management. It was incredibly educational. I learned a lot about how "landlords" are really the single greediest, laziest class of individuals one is ever likely to encounter. Eternally lamenting over how they're so under-appreciated and taken advantage of. There are always exceptions to any rule, sure but for the most part "professional landlords" are parasites. Anyway you clearly arent understanding the point here.

If you rent an apartment and agreed to pay 3000 a month for it and instead only pay 2500 a month you would be taken to court and lose the case. If an employer did the same it would be "a civil matter" having seen this firsthand I can attest to the truth of this.

> If you rent an apartment and agreed to pay 3000 a month for it and instead only pay 2500 a month you would be taken to court and lose the case. If an employer did the same it would be "a civil matter" having seen this firsthand I can attest to the truth of this.

Both of those are decided in civil court, I don't see the difference.

Police will forcefully evict you from a home. They will not guard the entrance to a restaurant and refuse entry to the owners until they pay their servers stolen wages/tips.

> There are always exceptions to any rule

We had what we thought were the dream landlords. They kept our rent low because we kept their property in good condition and we were tenants for literally a decade. I mowed both sides of the property, too, so they wouldn't need to service it. I replaced outlets, I was on-time with rent every single month.

Then they wanted out of the business. We were harangued constantly by their real estate agent to arrange tours of the property, oftentimes without the requisite 24-hour notice by our states law. We had to allow strangers THROUGH OUR HOME routinely for a month. Then they sold the property, and the new owners increased rent by the maximum legal amount the next month, almost $400 at the time, fully intending to continue increasing it until it was at "market rate" which essentially doubled our rent over the course of the next few months.

Thankfully my parents were in a particularly great position having had a windfall from a family member passing away, and they helped us a great deal in completing our savings for a down payment several years ahead of schedule, and helping us pay off some ancillary debt to give our credit score a shot in the arm. We managed to buy a home thanks to them and I will live in a fucking cardboard box before I kiss some landlord's ring again.

Fuck em.

> Tell me you have never rented out without telling me you have never rented out something.

Ah. You're a landlord. That explains a lot.

All the bemoaning and bitching I've ever heard from you lot has one answer: If it's so fucking bad, then sell your excess properties to people who actually want to live in them and leave the business. No one forced you to buy more housing/commercial space than you needed. You did that, because you wanted to profit from it while doing no work. In that lens, I hope it sucks for you. I hope you have problems every day from your tenants, from your buildings. I hope they hold you feet to the fire over every last problem they have with every ounce of legal leeway given them. I hope you're miserable.

And I hope all of this because nobody made you get into that business and you're free to leave it at any time.

> Tell me you have never rented out without telling me you have never rented out something.

To suffer the indignity of collecting rent by sitting on property. How do you live like that?

"If this thing was an entirely different situation then the stakes would be different." Well, glad we got that part worked out.

It is the same situation, entity A didn't pay entity B the money they agreed to pay.

Even looking past the time aspect which you slipped in (rent late, wages unpaid are definitionally different: unpaid is not, by necessity, late, and late is not necessarily "never going to arrive") wages are the payment of labor performed and rent is the payment of use of private property. Rent-seeking is derided behavior (by economists!) for this exact reason: A landlord does not (in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases) add value to a property: they merely own a thing, and charge people who need access to it, to access it. It's the free-market version of wind-drag: you aren't contributing anything, you're just taking a slice of production you haven't earned because you own a thing that's necessary for the larger system to operate.

> rent late, wages unpaid

Those two are the same, a person who is late would typically never pay if they didn't get threatening mail to "remind" them.

Citation: Dude trust me

Hot, hot, hot fucking garbage. When I was in college and broke, and struggled to make rent, I was KEENLY FUCKING AWARE I owed it. It was a fact that was on my mind 24 hours a day, including inducing stress nightmares about losing my place to live.

Just absolute, 100%, shit from a bull's ass. Bullshit, you might say. I dunno where in the world you got this notion, but as someone who spent a youth in the poverty grinder, allow me to dispel you of it. Fuck no. Rent NEVER left my mind, even when it WAS paid. Making my rent payment every month was what kept me going to work when sick, what kept me at work when my boss treated me like shit, etc. etc. etc. This notion that people "forget" rent is some of the most ludicrous bullshit I've ever heard in my fucking life.

I don't mean to personally attack, I don't know you, but I cannot fathom how you got this idea in your head if you've ever rented a place before that you had to personally pay for.

You don't think that the people who run companies that makes negative profits and thus can't pay workers since they lack the money doesn't feel the same? Just because some do that doesn't mean it is the norm.

Edit: You see plenty of stories from company owners who worry if they can pay salaries next month and it is all they can think about, that is the kind of person you are calling a "wage thief" here, even though they just like you are just struggling and trying to make ends meet.

It's laughable that you think the only companies committing wage theft are those that are not profitable and are struggling to keep the lights on.

And even if they are, remind me where your constitutional right to a profitable business is? If paying your workers means you can't keep the lights on, then you can't keep the lights on. Too many even in this situation think the answer is "keep the lights on, before paying workers".

But highly profitable businesses (up to and including Apple) also commit wage theft. So please don't try to turn this into yet another "poor small business owners" trope.

Rent is a contractual obligation and the remedy for late payment is built into the contract. Hardly comparable.

If being late with payments was theft then by far, far the largest form of larceny would be B2B. Late payments from businesses to vendors eclipses late rent. That's why there's an entire industry built around collecting payments, called factoring companies. That's why there are people hired as credit controllers to chase late payments.

Source: wife worked as a credit controller.

Considering most rentals require a first, last, and deposit there is no theft. There is only failure to meet the terms of the lease.

If you're late with rent, the police will show up when called.