January 25th 2022
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When I learned I would be joining the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s (HLAB) Wage-and-Hour practice, I was thrilled. HLAB is a student-staffed legal aid clinic, and the wage practice represents workers who have experienced wage theft or retaliation for asserting their...
Thanks to Ben Sachs for allowing me space for a reply and to Terri Gerstein and David Seligman for taking the time to respond to my post. While I appreciate Gerstein and Seligman’s perspective, and I agree with them about the need to stop wage theft and protect...
In his recent post, “Rethinking Wage Theft Criminalization,” Ben Levin argues that “the impulse to use criminal law for ‘progressive’ ends”—like combatting wage theft—“is dangerous; it serves to bolster the carceral state and all of its deep structural flaws.” We...
“Wage theft” is an evocative turn of phrase, but how literally should we take it?
Used to refer to employers underpaying workers or denying them compensation to which they are entitled, the phrase increasingly crops up in conversations about work law and policy. Scholars, activists, and politicians have leveraged its powerful rhetorical force: theft is a crime and thus invokes issues of moral culpability and wrongdoing.