Wage Theft

So my independent research in Sociology is on how the American Dream, as a cultural narrative, foregrounds everyone in American society, and how that foregrounding is even present in the meaning making and motivations of activists involved in the fight against Wage Theft. Wage Theft is a buzzword created by the labor movement to describe a set of exploitative labor practices including failing to pay workers minimum wage, failing to properly compensate workers for overtime, misclassifying workers as "independent contractors," which places the tax burden on the worker, and worst of all, complete failure to pay workers at all. Wage theft is bad all on its own, but when we think of it through the Marxist lens, it becomes all the more horrifying.

For Marx, the labor process is inherently alienating because work is always forced. Workers must choose between work and starvation, and when they choose work, they are forced to self –alienate; they must put themselves into an object from which they, by the very nature of capitalism (i.e. surplus value), will never receive their just compensation. Furthermore, because their labor creates an object which, is, and will always be, alien, they become alienated from not only their own labor, but also the object and nature. In the hostile and hierarchical relationship between the worker and the capitalist and in the competitive struggle against their fellow workers to find jobs they become alienated form their fellow human beings. Finally, in existing not as an end in themselves, but merely as someone else’s' means, while still seeing oneself as a human universal, one is alienated from one's specifies being.

Marx assumes that workers have a certain value, use value; they are allowed to remain alive because they are useful to the capitalists, and their wages are set by capitalists to allow for subsistence and the creation of a future workforce (workers' children). We have gotten to a point today in which there are so many people available to work, that low-wage workers have perhaps even lost their use value. With the loss of the manufacturing sector in the United States and a full scale shift to the services, even more than ever, low-wage workers, working in low skill service jobs, are almost entirely expendable to employers.

If you are familiar with ideas about "rape culture," you may know that many theorists understand the rape as the ultimate representation of an underlying culture of masculinity. It is not that rapists are "crazy people" hiding in the bushes, but rather they are simply men who represent a deep socialization and extreme externalization of an underlying masculine culture which lionizes male power, and devalues women. I understand wage theft in a very similar manner. We have an underlying culture of exploitation, and in its extremes, it is manifested as wage theft. We operate under the assumption that we live in some sort of meritocracy, and that the hierarchical relationship of employers and employees is somehow natural and just. Ultimately, the embedded nature of that hierarchical power structure finds expression in all businesses, but because it is a continuum of sorts, it finds its most extreme expressions in instances of Wage Theft.

Understood thought he Marxist idea of the super-structure, this is merely an example of capitalism’s influence on our culture. However, the superstructure is even more clearly defined in the wage theft example, in the lack of enforcement for labor laws. For many employers, the threat of being caught is so low, and the profits to be made so high, that they can exploit workers with impunity.  Many states, including Tennessee, do not have minimum wage laws, and so much of the enforcement burden falls on the incredibly overworked and understaffed federal department of labor, which represents a legal system in which a worker who steals from his or her employer goes to jail, yet an employer who steals merely has to pay a fine and agree not to do it again. Wage theft does not simply represent "a few bad apples," but instead a culture of exploitation, infect a study by the National Employment Law Project has estimated that as many as 2 out of 3 low wage workers suffers some form of wage theft every week! That seems pretty cultural to me…

NELP study: http://www.unprotectedworkers.org/index.php/broken_laws/index