12/19/2017
Wage theft is epidemic, and low-wage workers are more likely than others to be victims. Wage theft happens when, for example, employers refuse to pay promised wages or pay employees for only some of the hours worked. A new EPI report finds that at least $2 billion in stolen wages were recovered for workers in 2015 and 2016. But the report notes that the wages recovered represent only a fraction of total wages stolen from workers—the authors estimate that low-wage workers in the United States lost more than $50 billion to all forms of wage theft in 2016.