Wage theft is quite a vitriolic term (and so might only be reasonably applicable to actual breach of contract), but I think I can reasonably make the claim that this is essentially a thing that happens to all workers. A lucky few upper middle class folks might be outside of this.<p>Examples:<p>Downtown minimum wage job. Impossible to afford downtown rent, resulting in a non-optional hour long unpaid commute.<p>Business travel staying overnight. Direct expenses dealt with, but no compensation for the hours spent away from family stuck in front of a hotel TV.<p>Retail job. Shift ends at store closing time. Shuffling off the last customer and closing and locking up ends possibly 20 minutes later.<p>I could go on. Most people I know basically think this stuff is 'normal' and that you are just being lazy or finicky if you refuse to do so (maybe you 'deserve' to lose your job).<p>This is basically what poverty is here... an extreme lack of time and state of stress or tiredness cauaed by ridiculous employment. Many minwage workers would genuinely be better off camping under bridges and reading books, if they didn't have families and social connections.<p>The bottom end of the labour scale really is a horrible place to be at. I think that wealthy right wing folk don't often really understand it in the correct way. I think the idea these people have is that the poor have, or at least have the option of, a life that is just like being rich but with less fun stuff. e.g. a bike instead of a car, a flat instead of a house, and so on.<p>The reality is that there exists a qualitative difference between being working and middle class in the sense that you are spending most of your mental cycles just trying to make ends meet at all.
This is how employees get free stuff. The only thing that stopped them before was morality. When employers steal their tips, don't pay them, etc it makes stealing so much more justified to the employee.
They left out the most egregious form of wage theft: taxes! Taxes (often called income taxes) steal wages from the hard working middle class on scale orders of magnitude larger!