Systems and Wage Theft

Wage theft accounts for about 50 billion dollars a year. It involves the largest companies in the world, such as Amazon and Walmart. It dwarfs almost all other kinds of theft, at least in the US. When caught, companies pay restitution, if the workers are lucky, and fines. No one ever goes to jail.

I think in systems. My job consists, in part, of being asked to solve a puzzle that crosses department and tool boundaries, seeing the how piece of that puzzle could possibly fit together, and choosing a configuration that solves the problem while not losing or damaging any of the individual pieces. Thinking in systems, how things fit together and the implications of changes here to pieces over there is the only way to do my job well.

Kroeger and Albertsons, two massive grocery stores, are trying to merge. the government are fighting the merger on antitrust grounds. Discovery in that case seems to have highlighted an illegal scheme to not hire workers between grocery chains. This is similar to the case in when the CEOs of Google, Apple, and others were caught in an illegal agreement to not hire each others employees. No one went to jail, even as the emails showed the CEOs themselves were in on the scheme. The Washington State Attorney General who uncovered the grocery chain scheme is asking only for a million-dollar fine.

I also think that my appreciation for systems comes from appreciating history. If you pay any attention to history, you can see that most of the time, it moves because of systematic issues. Revolutions happen not because of fiery oratory but because the system has ground people down so long and so hard they have nothing left to lose. This is not to say that people don’t matter — they do. Napolean’s quote “I found the crown of France lying on the ground and picked it up with a sword.” describes my view of history well. Napoleon picked the crown up — an individual action — but it was on the ground because French governance had completely collapsed due to systematic issues they did not change or overcome.

Embracer, a video game company, went on a massive purchasing spree, led by its current CEO, during COVID. Even at the time, there were analysts who stated that the debt load would be unbearable when people were able to leave their homes regularly and thus play fewer video games. In the last year, Embracer has shuttered studios and laid off almost one thousand employees. The CEO remains the CEO and since Wall Street is wired to raise the stock price of companies that fire people, he is likely richer than before the layoffs.

In each of the examples above, the system guarantees that the abuse and damage will continue. None of the people who committed the crimes were jailed or lost their jobs. The Embracer CEO has not been fired and might even be richer. A fine is a price, and rewarding CEOs for firing people is the opposite of punishment. The system ensures that they, or others like them, will continue to break the law. If Steve Jobs had gone to jail for his role in the tech wage suppression scheme, do you think that the CEO of Albertsons would have tried a similar scheme?

You cannot save the world as it is. If you want to make the world a better place, you must make the systems that control the world better and more humane. The world doesn’t need heroes — it needs people good at putting puzzles together in the right way.