There are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them. From unpaid overtime to unauthorized wage deductions, workers have long wizened up to the ingenious ways that bosses have developed to shortchange them. Wage theft, the general term for these practices, refers to the myriad legal, quasi-legal, and illegal ways in which employers seek to manipulate the formal boundary between paid and unpaid working hours.
Through a combination of union power and a protracted legal battle, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) has clawed back $328 million in stolen wages from Uber and Lyft for over eighty thousand drivers throughout the city.
Founded in 1998, NYTWA, which has over twenty-one thousand members, began fighting this campaign in 2015. Their struggles took off slowly until they sued the state and won unemployment benefits for their drivers in 2016 and again in 2020. These previous legal victories, as well as the most recent fine against the two biggest platform ride-hailing companies, is indicative of a broader trend in the US labor movement.
Platform work, exemplified by Uber, refers to a wide range of labor processes that are typically mediated through app-based tools. Wage theft is all too common in platform work, but across the globe workers have mounted legal battles from California to Amsterdam, Rajasthan to Brasília. One former driver and NYTWA member named Malang Gassama calculated that Uber and Lyft stole at least $25,000 from their...
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