For the past 50 years western society has been transitioning from a high-trust, long-term model of employment to a low-trust, immediate payout model. Once that transition starts everyone involved frequently (rightfully) feels betrayed as the sliding trust-reality falls short of their trust-expectation. This presents as abuse and leads everyone to feel justified to commit further abuses. It takes a rarely strong leader to punch through that and re-establish a higher trust baseline and as society continues to move towards zero-trust the strength requirement to maintain that baseline increases.

As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust.

Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it.

I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.

My point is that the abuse goes two ways. I do not believe this is a recent phenomenon. One of my historical interests is crime, and there's nothing, nothing new about that under the sun.

My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal.

BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders.

A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.

Sometimes a manager will tolerate a certain level of theft by an employee, for various reasons. But they'll never promote the thief to a position of trust, and the thief will never realize why he doesn't get promoted.