For the people at the top, wage theft is helping them a lot. It's helping them directly if they are in the companies engaging in the practice, it's increasing profitability and having an effect on stock prices. And for people at the bottom, it's disastrous. Wage rates are stagnant to begin with. When you add this kind of chiseling on top of that, it depresses living standards all the more.

Corporate finance researcher Philip Mattera examines the large-scale wage theft by American corporations - as a pervasive practice built in to the policies of the country's largest employers, an opportunistic scheme targeting precarious workers, and a multi-billion dollar crimewave being pulled off by the already rich every day, hour by hour.

Philip is author of the report Grand Theft Paycheck: The Large Corporations Shortchanging Their Workers' Wages from Good Jobs First.