Ted Soqui/Sipa USA via AP Images
Wage theft is arguably the most broad-based crime in the nation—almost two million workers in the United States are paid less than the minimum wage.
Despite “defund the police” slogans, progressives actually have a robust policing agenda. We want the EPA to crack down on polluters who kill an estimated 100,000 Americans each year. We want to prevent financial firms from repeating the mass fraud that crashed the economy in 2008. We want to stop employers from killing their employees through unsafe work conditions. We want wealthy individuals and corporations prosecuted for the estimated half-trillion dollars in tax evasion each year. And we want victims of wage theft to get justice for the estimated $50 billion in wages stolen from them by employers annually.
Yet the mass of corporate crime—dwarfing “conventional” crime in both its body count and financial impact—is largely excluded from the “crime debate.” This exclusion is so ideologically pervasive that Donald Trump could run on a “law and order” platform even as he oversaw a massive decline in white-collar prosecutions and a 75 percent decline in penalties for corporate criminals.
Indeed, the Department of Justice doesn’t even track white-collar crime consistently in its crime statistics. In fact, there is no way to track enforcement actions against individual or organizational defendants over time or to see the aggregate number of penalties assessed by criminal, civil, and regulatory justice systems in the white-collar crime areas. If the Biden administration mandates the collection of systematic statistics on white-collar crime victimization rates, as many have argued for years, to be published in the same way as “traditional” crime statistics, that would be one way to begin to change the crime debate.
Most people reflexively see corporate crime as a civil, not a criminal, matter.
But that’s only a baby step. These issues are fractured across a host of individual policy silos that deal with regulatory enforcement. The Biden administration, states, and local governments need to develop a more comprehensive message and strategy on combating corporate crime—and need to ramp up indictments and prosecutions, which would make it easier for the public to realize that these are criminal acts.
Most people reflexively see corporate crime as a civil, not a criminal, matter. It’s precisely that which needs to change. “Everyone understands very clearly that if an employee embezzles from an employer, that is criminal,” argues Terri Gerstein at Harvard Law’s Labor and Worklife Program. “When the employer doesn’t pay their workers, that is a crime as well.”
Decades ago, Ralph Nader noted that our language lacks active verbs for killings that result from corporate crime like pollution. Sure enough, when VW executives were arrested for rigging emissions tests for 11 million cars with illegal software to evade emissions limits worldwide, The New York Times referred to it as an “emissions scandal” in a headline—an incredible euphemism for an act of mass murder of more than 1,000 people, according to estimates by scientists.
All of this feeds the idea that corporate malfeasance is not “real” crime. In the movie The Big Short, an only slightly fictionalized narrative of the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, after a sleazy Florida mortgage broker details the various illegal tactics he uses, one character asks, “Why are they confessing?” and another responds, “They’re not confessing. They’re bragging.” This exchange reflects how enforcement is so lax, and lawbreaking so pervasive, that no one even recognizes the existence of lines of illegality.
One reason for this is that Congress has stripped the nation of federal investigators needed to crack down on corporate crime. OSHA’s inspection resources are so limited that it would take the agency more than 150 years to visit every workplace under its jurisdiction just once. After they took control of Congress in 2010, Republicans repeatedly cut the IRS’s budget, forcing the agency to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. The Department of Labor had only 894 investigators by 2018, fewer than it did in 1948 when the workforce was one-seventh the size of today’s. State agencies have even fewer and often no investigators for whole swaths of corporate crime.
Which is why the Biden administration should massively expand the budgets of enforcement agencies. That action would have a tremendous impact—and can be done through budget reconciliation without a single Republican vote required. Given the large fines that can be assessed for corporate convictions, such budget increases would pay for themselves many times over.
But the key to changing the debate on crime is bringing corporate crime enforcement to the local police and prosecutor beat. Some specialized areas of financial and corporate fraud enforcement will inevitably stay in the hands of federal agencies, but much of day-to-day corporate crime should be the focus of local governments—and nothing fits that category more than the pervasive wage theft that happens in nearly every precinct in the nation.
The key to changing the debate on crime is bringing corporate crime enforcement to the local police and prosecutor beat.
Wage theft is arguably the most broad-based crime in the nation—almost two million workers in the United States are paid less than the minimum wage, notwithstanding current minimum-wage laws. As legal analyst Nicole Hallet argues, “the probability of being caught for wage theft is so low that it makes economic sense for employers to commit wage theft on a massive scale.”
Local investigators are far better suited than their state and federal counterparts to identify daily abuses and victims of wage theft, but aside from a few model policies like El Paso’s Wage Theft Task Force and San Jose’s Workers Exploitation Task Force, few local forces have even tried to do this on the scale needed.
In 2011, the Austin-based Workers Defense Project successfully lobbied for a bill that amended the state’s wage theft code to make it harder for employers to get away with stealing workers’ wages. As a result, WDP’s co-executive director, Emily Timm, says, “Now, a detective would call an employer and say, ‘You want to fix this before it goes farther.’”
Still, as Timm admits, getting police to cooperate isn’t easy. “It took us sitting down with DAs, with sheriffs, and police heads. You have to sit down with everyone to commit to investigate and prosecute the wage claims cases. And you have to have police willing to investigate—who won’t do it if DA won’t prosecute.” And always, advocates want the focus on restitution of the victims far more than just punitive treatment of the employers.
Activists popularizing the term “wage theft”—as opposed to “minimum-wage violations”—is one of the more successful examples of progressives giving corporate crime the language and profile that it’s often lacked in the past. Still, the reality remains that there are relatively few criminal prosecutions of wage theft: One study found only 11 wage theft prosecutions in a two-year period across the entire country.
But things are beginning to change, particularly with the new wave of progressive elected district attorneys. In Minnesota, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman has brought multiple felony wage theft charges, and in Philadelphia, DA Larry Krassner created a task force focused on crimes against workers. In Austin, the Workers Defense Project managed to get a former co-director of their organization, José Garza, elected as Travis County district attorney in 2020. There are close to 2,400 elected prosecutors in the United States, and, as Diana Florence, a candidate running for Manhattan district attorney, argues, “prosecutors [need to] stop viewing the enforcement of these crimes as optional and start investigating them like other crimes.”
This process can be accelerated if the federal government creates major incentives to encourage local governments to focus more on corporate crime like wage theft. The politics of crime has always been about more than rhetoric, but also about funding programs to remake what people understand crime to be.
This process can be accelerated if the federal government creates major incentives to encourage local governments to focus more on corporate crime like wage theft.
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, detailed how it was incentives for the drug war, from federal grants to civil-forfeiture rules, that encouraged police forces to adopt abusive policing strategies like stop-and-frisk to generate drug busts. In fact, when President Reagan launched his War on Drugs in the 1980s, most cops resisted it and, outside of narcotics divisions, had disdain for the project. This changed only when funding rewarded shifts in departments’ priorities. The Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program was designed to specifically reward police departments for drug busts; Alexander cites a statistic that each arrest netted a given city or county $153 in state and federal funding, while no other crimes were rewarded in a similar way per arrest. Civil-forfeiture rules also enriched cities’ treasuries from the seized assets of drug dealers.
Similar financial incentives to fight wage theft, including giving police departments a share of fines generated from enforcement, could shift police priorities just as dramatically. Such a focus would reward departments that build trust and long-term relationships with the most economically exploited communities in their jurisdiction. As Diana Florence describes her experience prosecuting wage theft cases in the past, to win these cases, investigators need to go “to workers centers, immigration centers, and talk to union organizers, since they have the information to bring the cases.” With clear economic incentives for cities, it would become in their institutional interest to build relationships with those groups and even help fund them in neighborhoods without strong organizations already in place.
The biggest challenge will be changing the mindset of police who, as Emily Timm at the Workers Defense Project argues, “don’t see themselves going after corporations, they go after people.” Diana Florence argues it’s more a question of training. “I found police weren’t trained that way. Most of them were thrilled to do it, but someone needs to tell them it’s a priority.”
Timm describes the difference it made when they would protest at the home of an employer, who would call the police. “When the police showed up, we would file an immediate theft-of-services complaint—and the police would knock on the employer’s door and say, ‘I have a report you haven’t paid your workers.’ It has immense potential to shift relationships and power dynamics.”
Funding local police to take on corporate crime can remake police culture much as the War on Drugs did—but in a positive direction. If we want to change the culture of policing and the national debate on “crime,” giving local police a new mission that aligns their economic self-interest with the needs of communities victimized by corporate crime is possibly the most powerful tool we have.
