ABSTRACT
Wage theft involves the non-payment of wages due under law and contract, and which is recognized in federal and state laws as a crime punishable by imprisonment. It tends to be resolved as a civil matter, with weak regulatory policing, and is largely absent from the criminological literature. This chapter contextualizes wage theft as the neglected aspect of “workplace theft,” which is treated much differently in the media than employee theft. It reviews 17 respected mainstream and critical criminology journals to demonstrate the absence of criminological literature about wage theft, which even applies to some white-collar crime textbooks. This chapter also discusses how wage theft applies to the idea of an “imaginary social order” that Pearce develops in Crimes of the Powerful and his analysis of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The chapter closes with four reasons why there is no criminology of wage theft, which are also the four reasons it should be developed so that criminology no longer mindlessly mimics bourgeois values.
