Or being a really big opioid dealer.
Please read the whole article.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/07/want-to-be-a-criminal-in-america-stealing-billions-is-your-best-bet-to-go-scot-free
Judd Legum
Tue 7 Dec 2021 09.31 EST
In the United States, only certain types of theft are newsworthy.
For example, on 14 June 2021, a reporter for KGO-TV in San Francisco tweeted a cellphone video of a man in Walgreens filling a garbage bag with stolen items and riding his bicycle out of the store. According to San Francisco’s crime database, the value of the merchandise stolen in the incident was between $200 and $950.
According to an analysis by Fair, a media watchdog, this single incident generated 309 stories between 14 June and 12 July. A search by Popular Information reveals that, since 12 July, there have been dozens of additional stories mentioning the incident. The theft has been covered in a slew of major publications including the New York Times, USA Today and CNN.
In most coverage, the video is presented as proof that there are no consequences for shoplifting in San Francisco. But the man in the video, Jean Lugo-Romero, was arrested about a week later and faces 15 charges, including “grand theft, second-degree burglary and shoplifting”. He was recently transferred to county jail where he is being held without bond.
Just a few months earlier, in November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5m settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The lawsuit alleged that Walgreens “rounded down employees’ hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks”.
Walgreens’ settlement includes attorney’s fees and other penalties, but $2,830,000 went to Walgreens employees to compensate them for the wages that the company had stolen. And, because it is a settlement, that amount represents a small fraction of the total liability. According to the order approving the settlement, it represents “approximately 22% of the potential damages”.
So this is a story of a corporation that stole millions of dollars from its own employees. How much news coverage did it generate? There was a single 221-word story in Bloomberg Law, an industry publication. And that’s it. There has been no coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, or the dozens of other publications that covered the story of a man stealing a few hundred dollars of merchandise.
While Lugo-Romero has been behind bars since June on allegations that he stole several thousand dollars in a series of shoplifting incidents, no one at Walgreens has had to take personal responsibility for stealing millions from its employees. Stefano Pessina, who served as Walgreens’ CEO during the majority of the alleged wage theft, saw his compensation rise from $7,133,155 in 2015 to $17,483,187 in 2020. In 2021, Pessina transitioned from CEO to executive chairman. Pessina’s 2021 compensation is not yet available, but the previous executive chairman made $8,797,713 last year. Needless to say, neither Pessina nor any Walgreens employee has had to spend any time in jail as a result of millions in wage theft.
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The only way in which Walgreens is an aberration, unfortunately, is that it had to pay some of its employees back. Numerous companies steal billions in wages from workers in the United States each year. It is a crime that is seldom prosecuted – or covered in the media.
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According to a report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP), “75.75m workers in the United States earning less than $13 per hour ... were subject to forced arbitration in 2019”. Millions of these workers are victims of wage theft. But the “employer-imposed collective and class-action waiver” prohibits them from joining forces to take on employers who cheat. Instead, disputes are pushed into private arbitration, a forum that is notoriously friendly for corporations.
This means the only way to recover stolen wages would be for each employee to individually file a complaint. This is something most employees will never have the time or knowledge to do. With few exceptions, they cannot afford legal representation. And even if everyone were able to figure out how to challenge their employer themselves, “public agencies, operating at their current capacity, could recover less than 4%” of wages stolen from employees locked out of class action lawsuits.
A piece of federal legislation, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, would prohibit companies from forcing employees to forfeit access to the legal system. This would allow victims of wage theft to join forces and seek recovery in court. And, perhaps, it could pressure more employers to follow the law in the first place.
