Maroon Weekly

Before anyone gets up-in-arms, this is not a call for you to steal from work. It’s an article saying that most of you already steal from work. It is a piece attempting to shine a light on why such a large percentage of the workforce breaks the law in such a socially unacceptable manner. Acceptable methods of breaking the law are running red lights and refusing to vaccinate children.

Steal Something from Work Day is a small movement. Its Facebook group has little more than five hundred members and, regardless of how many are anonymous participants are out there, it would be naïve to think of SSWD as a mass movement. People that actually steal from work are the mass movement.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce, over 75 percent of employees steal from their workplace. And National Retail Security shows that almost 50 percent of lost retail merchandise can be traced back to employees. This raises the question:

Are workers in the United States just a bunch of thankless thieves?

CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective is trying to answer that question by spearheading an awareness movement through this new holiday. While, for some, the goal is to get their own few proverbial miles out of the corporate jet, for others, it is simply a symbol. It is a statement aimed at employers that are stealing from their labor pool by refusing to pay them a fair amount.

Why is this necessary? It’s necessary because many of you have forgotten that labor is a voluntary service and that a job interview is just as much an assessment of the employer as it is of the employee. It’s a mutual relationship that has been bastardized by bare-bones wages in a market where there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around. In a culture that prides itself on soul-sucking, endless labor that makes everyone feel guilty for every day that they don’t produce, produce, produce, employers know that you need the job more than they need to hire you. So, you get paid dirt and treated like eels.

Actually, eels get better treatment. They don’t have to work.

For example, Best Buy, as a whole, makes over $300,000 per employee every year. If one of those employees makes $20,000 a year, working 160 hours a month, they are not only getting less than 10 percent return on their labor, but they’re really only being paid for about ten to twenty minutes of the time they work each day, depending on how many hours they put into each shift. When it is acceptable for someone to work an eight hour shift and get paid for ten minutes of it, it’s pretty obvious that every day at Best Buy is Steal from Your Employees Day. While they’re not the only offenders, they are particularly egregious in their constant hunt for impressionable teenage minds that lack any knowledge of labor rights and legal consent.

On the other hand, there are good employers, a beneficent few that don’t see their workers as desperate half-wits or needy miscreants, but those places are as precious as they are scarce. These gallant few provide generous healthcare benefits and include their employees without brainwashing them into wage slavery. I know that it sounds like a dream, but they are there. Stealing from those would be like stealing from yourself.

My advice is, if you’re going to steal, aim high. While it might pay a little to get out the door at Wal-Mart with an armful of CDs, it’s just not smart to go to jail for a pittance when the real money is in legal theft. Try becoming a corporate banker. If you get into financial trouble, you can legally hold an entire nation hostage until its citizens pay you ransom. Start a hate group. The amount of money spent to stop gay marriage numbers in the tens of millions in California alone. Go into marketing for civilian defense contractors. You can make money by recruiting the next generation of non-military personnel that can murder without all those pesky laws and rules to stop them.

Take your pick.