Maybe because if you redefine things that aren't theft as theft you can make any number of things more prevalent than wage theft, or maybe because it confused paying someone late with paying someone never, or maybe because it equated people who are unable to pay due to not having enough money for their basic needs with corporations who most often have plenty of money and assets but still refuse to pay their employees, or for any number of other reasons that it was a terrible argument.
I don't understand the chord this opinion strikes. Unless you're letting your personal bias get in the way, there's not a distinct difference between the two.
If you can't find a difference between the walmart employee late on rent because he doesn't have enough money to pay it until friday comes around, and walmart who has literal billions in profits, but has been repeatedly caught stealing money from workers you'd have to be keeping your eyes shut. Zero personal bias is required to see that those situations aren't even close the same thing.
That you're relying on "if you can't find the difference you must be blind!" as an argument proves my point; it's an emotional argument, not a rational one, and there is no functional difference between the two.
The difference is power imbalance. A landlord has distinct and easily accessible power over their tenants: they own the tenants home. An employee, conversely, has very little power against their employer. Even a small business has a great deal of power over their employees, and most wage theft occurs at larger ones anyway. Employees can pursue cases of wage theft, sure. But:
- They must use the court system, and do so probably without legal representation unless they can find a lawyer willing to work pro-bono. This requires time and money
- At the same time they’re almost certainly job hunting because while retaliation is (sometimes) illegal, it’s trivially easy for businesses to cite other bullshit reasons for firing people and be entirely in the clear, because that’s even harder to prove in court than wage theft
- If they do manage both of those, they now have a documented history of fighting for their rights as workers, and bosses do not like that. It makes them inherently riskier to hire.
