Ethical Matters: Wage Theft

An extra 15 minutes work here, another 20 minutes there: wage theft has been described as a silent epidemic blighting the global workforce.

And it’s on the rise – in the UK and US alone millions of workers put in billions of unpaid hours amounting to tens of billions in wage theft. But what if wage theft, rather than being a modern bug, is a feature of capitalism itself? There are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them. But rather than attribute these practices to the actions of a few nefarious employers, political economist Matthew Cole shows how wage theft is baked into the very working of the economy. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The modern economy has a history, and we can change it. In this Ethical Matters talk, Matthew explains why wage theft occurs, how employers get away with it, and what we can do to fight back. Dr Matthew Cole is a Lecturer on Technology, Work and Employment at the University of Sussex, researching wage theft and technological change. He is an Associate Fellow of the Oxford internet Institute working on the Fairwork Project and the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit). His work has been published in Tribune, Novara, Vice, OpenDemocracy, The Independent, Salvage, and in various academic journals.