The Paycheck: Texas White-Collar Crime · SOCL 4733 · Crime Lab 13 · Midwestern State University

What the eight have in common. None of them involves an employer stealing a paycheck. Every one is a design: a cash wage set at the tip-credit floor without checking whether tips fill the gap; a bonus left out of the regular rate; a title and a salary set just under the line; a schedule that starts before the clock; a deduction policy; an automatic meal deduction; a 1099 form; a rule about returning uniforms. The record on which the worker would have to prove the theft is the employer's record, and in several of the eight it is designed to show nothing. That is why the readings treat wage theft as an organizational practice rather than a series of individual acts, and why the enforcement system on the fourth tab recovers so small a share of it.

Across the ten states: 2.4 million workers, $8 billion a year, $3,300 each, 23.9 percent of their pay; 17 percent of low-wage workers affected; a poverty rate among victims of 21.4 percent against 6.9 percent for all minimum-wage-eligible workers; a third receiving public assistance. Florida, with no state enforcement body, had the highest violation rate. The national extrapolation, more than $15 billion a year for minimum wage violations alone, is the figure usually quoted; Barnes, Fine, Galvin, and colleagues put it at more than $13 billion for at least 4 million workers in 2025. The survey cannot see overtime, off-the-clock time, tips, or deductions, so the eight records on the previous tab would mostly be invisible to it.

Source: Cooper, D., and Kroeger, T. (2017). Employers Steal Billions from Workers' Paychecks Each Year. Economic Policy Institute, May 10, 2017 (summary and key findings, state table).

26.8 percent overall, 31.3 percent of women and 20.4 percent of men (Table 1, p. 380). Among the workers who had a violation, women lost $79 a week and men $58, and because women earned less, the theft was a larger share of their pay: 22 percent against 14 percent, or $4,120 a year against $3,037 at full-time, full-year work (Table 2, p. 381). The gap is not spread evenly. Among U.S.-born workers there is no significant gender difference; the gap is concentrated among the foreign-born and is largest among undocumented workers (pp. 381-382). And when the authors add job and employer characteristics, occupation, and worker characteristics to the model, the direct gender-by-status effect falls by 83 percent, with job and employer characteristics doing more of the work than education or other worker traits (Table 4, p. 390). Their reading: "the stronger determinants of workplace violations are on the demand side" (p. 391). Where a woman works, and what her employer has set up, predicts whether she is stolen from better than who she is.

Source: Petrescu-Prahova, M., and Spiller, M. W. (2016). Women's wage theft: Explaining gender differences in violations of wage and hour laws. Work and Occupations, 43(4), 371-400, at the pages cited.

Read the ratio. $259 million against $13 billion is about two cents on the dollar, and that is for the one kind of theft the estimate can see. The recovery was up from $202 million in FY2024 while the number of cases concluded fell, which means larger cases and fewer of them. The report's other comparison: the 2024 federal budget for Wage and Hour enforcement was $315 million, and for immigration enforcement $4.5 billion, about fifteen times more, in a labor market where the workers most stolen from are the ones with the most reason not to complain. Four states have no federal investigator at all; in Maine, Maryland, and Washington there is one for every 500,000 workers. Galvin's article, your other Meeting A reading, shows that where the state fills the gap, with its own penalties, its own investigators, and worker organizations that bring cases, compliance rises; where it does not, the federal floor is the ceiling.

Sources: Barnes, J., Fine, J., Galvin, D. J., Round, J., and Shepherd, H. (2025). Labor investigator staffing hits 52-year low, raising the risk of wage theft. Workplace Justice Lab, Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, and Northwestern University, May 2025. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, fiscal year 2025 enforcement data as reported by Bloomberg Law, January 8, 2026 ($259 million back wages, $58.7 million penalties; FY2024: $202 million and $35.9 million). Galvin, D. J. (2016). Deterring wage theft. Perspectives on Politics, 14(2), 324-350.

Back wages found in Texas, by industry (the ten largest)

Read the penalty rate. In 94 percent of the Texas cases that found workers were owed money, the Division assessed no civil money penalty. In those cases the employer faced no penalty from the Division beyond repaying what it owed. Restaurants and bars lead the state in both the number of cases and the dollars found, but construction and oil and gas produce large sums from fewer cases: on average, an oil and gas case found about eight times as much as a restaurant case. In Wichita Falls the Division concluded 696 cases; 266 found back wages, $1.33 million owed to 2,268 workers, and 7 drew a penalty. Lab 5's question applies here: what does an employer learn from these numbers about the expected cost of not paying overtime?

Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, Compliance Actions dataset (whd_whisard), downloaded from enforcedata.dol.gov on September 28, 2026; Texas cases tabulated for this lab. Back wages are Fair Labor Standards Act back wages the employer agreed to pay. Industries are grouped from the employer's NAICS code. The file covers cases the Division investigated, not all wage theft in Texas, and it records the period the investigator examined rather than the date a case closed.