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54 UC Davis L. Rev. 1429 (2020-2021)
Wage Theft Criminalization

handle is hein.journals/davlr54 and id is 1435 raw text is: Wage Theft Criminalization Benjamin Levin* Over the past decade, workers' rights activists and legal scholars have embraced the language of wage theft in describing the abuses of the contemporary workplace. The phrase invokes a certain moral clarity: theft is wrong. The phrase is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Increasingly, it has a specific content for activists, politicians, advocates, and academics: wage theft speaks the language of criminal law, and wage theft is a crime that should be punished. Harshly. Self-proclaimed progressive prosecutors have made wage theft cases a priority, and left-leaning politicians in the United States and abroad have begun to propose more criminal statutes to reach wage theft. In this Article, I examine the drive to criminalize wage theft. In the literature on workers' rights, wage theft has been accepted uncritically as a distinct problem. But the literature fails to grapple with what makes wage theft clearly distinguishable from other abusive practices endemic to capitalism. For scholars concerned about worker power and economic Copyright © 2021 Benjamin Levin. Associate Professor, University of Colorado Law School. For helpful comments and conversations, thanks to Amna Akbar, Jenny Braun, Darryl Brown, Jenny Carroll, Jack Chin, Erin Collins, Andrew Crespo, Veena Dubal, Avlana Eisenberg, Dan Epps, Dan Farbman, Barbara Fedders, Thomas Frampton, Kristelia Garcia, Cynthia Godsoe, Aya Gruber, Hiba Hafiz, Eve Hanan, Rachel Harmon, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Sam Kamin, Margot Kaminski, Craig Konnoth, Alex Kreit, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Kate Levine, Cesar Rosado Marzan, Eric Miller, Jamelia Morgan, Adele Morrison, Zach Mountin, Prianka Nair, Ngozi Okidegbe, Maria Ontiveros, Will Ortman, Brian Richardson, Anna Roberts, Addie Rolnick, Nantiya Ruan, Ben Sachs, Joan Segal, Jocelyn Simonson, Scott-Skinner Thompson, Seth Stoughton, David Tannenhaus, Will Thomas, India Thusi, Susannah Barton Tobin, Anne Traum, Kate Weisburd, Ahmed White, and participants at the 2019 Southwest Criminal Legal Scholarship Conference, CrimFest 2019, the 2019 Climenko Fellows Reunion, and the 2020 Decarceration Law Profs Virtual Works-in-Progress Series. I also benefitted from conversations on related topics at the January 2019 Discussion on Criminal Prosecution & Workplace Violations sponsored by the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the JOURNAL OF LAW IN SoCETYs 2020 symposium, Bad Bosses: Turning the Tables on Wage Theft at Wayne Law School. Finally, many thanks to Amber Paoloemilio, Neil Sandhu, and Sara Yates for terrific research assistance. 1429

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