Wage theft a problem

Dear Editor:

I have seen a disturbing trend lately, where people who shoplift from local, billionaire-owned establishments are posted online, looked for and wished ill upon. There is general agreement that stealing is bad. Understood. It’s clearly stealing when someone puts unpaid merchandise in their backpack or backs their truck up to a loading dock, but I assure you, your fight is elsewhere.

In Canada the most common type of theft is wage-theft; wealthy business owners not paying wages owed to hard working people. In Ontario alone, $200 million is owed to workers, according to Wage Theft Ontario; and those numbers reflect only the theft reported. 

Wage theft is much less obvious, much less demonized, but I would argue it is considerably worse than a private citizen stealing from a company who makes their money on the backs of minimum wage workers, while they pad the pockets of wealthy shareholders.

In this country the cost of food has gone up 25% in the last five years, at the exact same time Galen Weston Jr., the owner of Loblaws, has more than doubled his fortune from $8 billion in 2020 to over $18 billion (McLeans). 

We are told over and over “supply chain issues” are being passed down to the consumer, but my guess would be that those $10 billion dollars passed down to the consumer would make a considerable difference in food prices.

Your fight isn’t with a dude in a pickup truck or his girlfriend in sweat pants; it’s with politicians who continue to allow corporations to steal wages from workers and allow rich people to get richer on your basic necessities. 

Your fight is with billionaires who don’t care if you eat or not, they are more interested in their next yacht. Stop demonizing small-time criminals; start calling your MPs.

Tiffany Burtch,
Fergus