Unpaid

How capitalism steals our time and our labour, and how we can fight back.

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. The problem pervades throughout the world, in every sector of every country, though it is often worse in low and middle-income countries. But what if wage theft, rather than being a modern bug, is a feature of capitalism itself?

In this original conceptual and empirical work, political economist Matthew Cole uncovers the long history of wage theft, its contemporary machinations and how to overcome it. 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, 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. Unpaid explains why wage theft occurs, how employers get away with it, and what we can do to fight back.