Key takeaways:

• Wage theft—which happens when employers fail to pay workers the full wages they are legally owed—is widespread across sectors and affects millions of workers every year.
• Enforcement efforts at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as class action settlements, recovered nearly $1 billion in stolen wages for workers in 2025.
• These recovered wages represent a small fraction of the total amount stolen every year; we estimate that employers rob low-wage workers of more than $50 billion annually.
• Policymakers can combat wage theft by strengthening the right to form unions, establishing greater wage payment transparency, bolstering enforcement capacities, and increasing penalties for perpetrators.

Affordability—or the lack thereof—has dominated the recent political debate in the U.S. Much of the affordability debate has focused narrowly on prices. But the true underlying driver of today’s affordability squeeze is suppressed pay—the result of decades of policy decisions that have weakened workers’ bargaining power. Weakened bargaining power not only suppresses workers’ wages but also makes workers more vulnerable to exploitation. Among the most pervasive forms is wage theft, which robs millions of workers of billions of dollars each year (Cooper and Kroeger 2017; Poydock and Zhang 2024). Wage theft occurs anytime an employer fails to pay a worker the amount they are legally owed for their labor. This can take many forms, including not paying overtime to...

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