also even if you don't believe profit is actually theft, wage theft in its purest form(stealing earned wages from workers) is incredibly common and is a
MASSIVE problem in the world. it's one of the most common forms of breaking the law ever, there are literally thousands of minimum wage violation cases every year in the united states alone.
not only that, but people get denied their wages in illegal ways so much that it's a huge amount
worse than the total losses to robbery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theftFor an example of minimum wage violations:
Minimum wage is enforced by the Wage and Hour Division (WHD). WHD is generally contacted by 25,000 people a year in regards to concerns and violations of minimum wage pay. A common form of wage theft for tipped employees is to receive no standard pay ($2.13 an hour) along with tips.
Companies misclassify jobs as independent contractors so that they don't have to pay minimum wager/healtcare/etc.:
The difference between the two classifications depends on the permanency of the employment, opportunity for profit and loss, the worker's level of self-employment along with their degree of control. An independent contractor is not entitled to minimum wage, overtime, insurance, protection, or other employee rights. Attempts are sometimes made to define ordinary employees as independent contractors[...]
Misclassification in the United States is extensive. In New York state, for example, it was found in a 2007 study that approximately 704,785 workers, or 10.3% of the state's private sector workforce, was misclassified each year. For the industries covered in the study, average unemployment insurance taxable wages underreported due to misclassification was on average $4.3 billion for the year and unemployment insurance tax underreported in these industries was $176 million.
These don't include, illegal deductions, literal blatant wage theft, and other forms of wage theft that exist.
If you want a total summary of all of it you can see that:
Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed workers experienced at least one pay-related violation in the week prior to the survey. On average the workers in the three cities lost a total of $2,634 annually due to workplace violations, out of an average income of $17,616, which translates into wage theft of fifteen percent of income. Extrapolating from these figures, low wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City lost more than $2.9 billion due to employment and labor law violations. Nationally it is estimated that workers are not paid at least $19 billion every year in overtime and that in the US $40 billion to $60 billion in total are lost annually due to all forms of wage theft. This compares to national annual losses of $340 million due to robbery, $4.1 billion due to burglary, $5.3 billion due to larceny, and $3.8 billion due to auto theft in 2012.
The exact numbers depend on the study you read, but each of them places wage theft from average Americans at
billions of dollars stolen every year.