![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/15/1.jpg\")
Jason Scott of Internet Archive speaking at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. “Steal from work,” he advised a crowd of game industry professionals. “Workplace theft is the future of game history.”
\nFor many years, we have joined others around the world in observing April 15 as worldwide Steal Something from Work Day. Last year, we prophesied that the arrival of a new cast of kleptocrats at the head of the federal government of the United States would only intensify the factors that give rise to workplace theft. In fact, the first fifteen months of the second Trump administration have seen workers around the country rapidly radicalizing and escalating their efforts to counter the ongoing plunder of our society. In 2026, when Large Language Models are pillaging the intellectual heritage of humanity in order to steal everyone’s jobs while underpaid workers are burning down warehouses and carrying out direct attacks on employers, Steal Something from Work Day is the moderate option.
\n\n Jason Scott of Internet Archive speaking at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. “Steal from work,” he advised a crowd of game industry professionals. “Workplace theft is the future of game history.”
\nThis year, we present two accounts from nurses who steal for the common good. In honor of the fight that people in the Twin Cities have put up against the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement occupation of their communities, we share testimony from a nurse in Minnesota who reappropriates medical supplies from the workplace to equip those who are confronting ICE in the street.
\n\nTo learn more about other ways that nurses have helped to rescue people from the clutches of ICE, you could read this.
\n\nEveryone assumes that nurses are “good.” We get treated like God’s little soldiers. Nurses often feel a sense of moral high ground. People who aren’t nurses adopt this tone when they are talking about us, too.
\n\nThis shouldn’t be the point. Often, people who see themselves as “good” do a great deal of harm in the world, while people who are behaving badly actually help people. No one should be so focused on proving that they are “good” that they miss a chance to help someone.
\n\nThere are four general categories of workplace theft at the hospital:
\n\nIf you’re a patient in a hospital and a nurse is caring for you, chances are, some element of the care they are providing you is reaching you in defiance of the system that exists to exploit both nurses and patients. When it comes to being good, don’t be afraid to be bad.
\n\nWhen Metro Surge came to Minneapolis, it felt like a hammer falling—a hammer that had been hanging over us since election day. As January got underway, we could feel the pressure rising in the administration’s increasingly violent rhetoric—while the temperature continued to drop, setting the stage for one of the coldest and snowiest winters in recent memory. Still, none of us anticipated what was to come just a few days after the new year.
\n\nIn response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who was also a nurse, so many of us felt compelled to do something. This is one of the stories about what people did.
\n\nIf you were to ask me why I became I nurse, I would say because I want to help people. I know what it’s like to be in pain, to feel that nobody is around to help you, that all of your time and resources are going to something you cannot control, all while watching the oligarchic government and hospital CEOs slowly chip away at your life savings.
\n\nOn average, big hospital chain systems pay their CEOs between one and seven million dollars a year—while nurses are doing the real work at the bedside, risking our lives for a barely living wage. (Don’t get me started on the insurance CEOs who make between $20-30 million a year.) Manufacturing a one-liter bag of normal saline costs two dollars on average. Yet hospitals on occupied Turtle Island sell the bags at upwards of $700. Individuals who need to stay in the hospital incur costs for the room, with nursing staff and doctors adding another $2600 to $3000 a day to this cost.
\n\nAs of 2023, some 80% of the nursing workforce reported workplace violence impacting their ability to do their job. Does nobody see the correlation between this violence, the widening wealth gap, our patients’ inability to afford the care they need to survive, and the ever-growing greed of the few who want everything all to themselves? There are no beds to spare at the hospital and patients sleep in the hallways and ambulance bay, yet both rural and inner-city hospitals continue to close for lack of resources.
\n\nIn 2020, the city of Saint Paul closed St. Joes, the oldest hospital in the state of Minnesota. The community lost 253 beds at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst pandemic in modern history. In 2023, Fairview filed to sell the medical complex system that sits on both sides of the Mississippi to Stanford Health, seeking to merge the healthcare companies; if Fairview didn’t get someone to pay them out, they would have to file for bankruptcy. The CEO of Fairview, James Hereford, makes $4.3 million a year, which makes him one of the highest-earning healthcare CEOs in the Midwest. Yet the people who rely on the medical and Medicare system are the ones who are blamed.
\n\nThe “trickle-down system” is bleeding backwards, against gravity, up the pyramid to the top where the wealthy few are positioned. How can you claim to be a nonprofit company while the people at the top of the pyramid are making several millions of dollars in a year—and then nonetheless claim that the company is unable to stay afloat without a buyout?
\n\nRemember, nobody questions a nurse that looks busy.
\n\nSupply liberation and time exploitation should never come before bedside patient care. Ensure that your efforts to hold both identities as a nurse and a comrade don’t conflict with the ethical reasons you chose both sides of this work. Your goal is to decrease harm and pain: you are exploiting an unfair healthcare system while working directly with people who are in pain, many of whom understand that the system is exploiting them, too.
\n\nI liberate out of love, I expropriate in the name of harm reduction, I “steal” in the name of all of the people killed by the state of so-called Minnesota. I take in hope that these medical items can help to save or ease the lives of community members, so we don’t have to experience once again the trauma we experienced when we lost Alex, Nicole, Amir Locke, Winston Boogie Smith, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. Death at the hands of the state is so pervasive and the price of medical supplies is just too damn high.
\n\nTime theft is complicated when you’re a nurse. You work for the healthcare company, but you care for the patients; if you forget that and no longer see those you care for as human, you become part of the problem. The healthcare system is not human, and in any case, you will hurt your workplace very little by stealing things. But if you engage in time theft carelessly, you can strain the care that someone else is dependent on you for.
\n\nYou can take a longer break than your allotted time IF
\n\nYou can clock out a little late so that you can take the time to care for yourself between caring for patients and not have to rush your charting.
\n\nIf the hospital pays for your continuing education credits, you can use these to learn things that you can pass on to others in a community setting, such as diabetes education, CPR, and wound care. Rephrase the education you receive as a nurse when you present it as public-health community education: you’re not giving medical advice, but simply explaining how a body process or disease works.
\n\nFor many years, we have joined others around the world in observing April 15 as worldwide Steal Something from Work Day. Last year, we prophesied that the arrival of a new cast of kleptocrats at the head of the federal government of the United States would only intensify the factors that give rise to workplace theft. In fact, the first fifteen months of the second Trump administration have seen workers around the country rapidly radicalizing and escalating their efforts to counter the ongoing plunder of our society. In 2026, when Large Language Models are pillaging the intellectual heritage of humanity in order to steal everyone’s jobs while underpaid workers are burning down warehouses and carrying out direct attacks on employers, Steal Something from Work Day is the moderate option.
\n\n Jason Scott of Internet Archive speaking at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. “Steal from work,” he advised a crowd of game industry professionals. “Workplace theft is the future of game history.”
\nThis year, we present two accounts from nurses who steal for the common good. In honor of the fight that people in the Twin Cities have put up against the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement occupation of their communities, we share testimony from a nurse in Minnesota who reappropriates medical supplies from the workplace to equip those who are confronting ICE in the street.
\n\nTo learn more about other ways that nurses have helped to rescue people from the clutches of ICE, you could read this.
\n\nEveryone assumes that nurses are “good.” We get treated like God’s little soldiers. Nurses often feel a sense of moral high ground. People who aren’t nurses adopt this tone when they are talking about us, too.
\n\nThis shouldn’t be the point. Often, people who see themselves as “good” do a great deal of harm in the world, while people who are behaving badly actually help people. No one should be so focused on proving that they are “good” that they miss a chance to help someone.
\n\nThere are four general categories of workplace theft at the hospital:
\n\nIf you’re a patient in a hospital and a nurse is caring for you, chances are, some element of the care they are providing you is reaching you in defiance of the system that exists to exploit both nurses and patients. When it comes to being good, don’t be afraid to be bad.
\n\nWhen Metro Surge came to Minneapolis, it felt like a hammer falling—a hammer that had been hanging over us since election day. As January got underway, we could feel the pressure rising in the administration’s increasingly violent rhetoric—while the temperature continued to drop, setting the stage for one of the coldest and snowiest winters in recent memory. Still, none of us anticipated what was to come just a few days after the new year.
\n\nIn response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who was also a nurse, so many of us felt compelled to do something. This is one of the stories about what people did.
\n\nIf you were to ask me why I became I nurse, I would say because I want to help people. I know what it’s like to be in pain, to feel that nobody is around to help you, that all of your time and resources are going to something you cannot control, all while watching the oligarchic government and hospital CEOs slowly chip away at your life savings.
\n\nOn average, big hospital chain systems pay their CEOs between one and seven million dollars a year—while nurses are doing the real work at the bedside, risking our lives for a barely living wage. (Don’t get me started on the insurance CEOs who make between $20-30 million a year.) Manufacturing a one-liter bag of normal saline costs two dollars on average. Yet hospitals on occupied Turtle Island sell the bags at upwards of $700. Individuals who need to stay in the hospital incur costs for the room, with nursing staff and doctors adding another $2600 to $3000 a day to this cost.
\n\nAs of 2023, some 80% of the nursing workforce reported workplace violence impacting their ability to do their job. Does nobody see the correlation between this violence, the widening wealth gap, our patients’ inability to afford the care they need to survive, and the ever-growing greed of the few who want everything all to themselves? There are no beds to spare at the hospital and patients sleep in the hallways and ambulance bay, yet both rural and inner-city hospitals continue to close for lack of resources.
\n\nIn 2020, the city of Saint Paul closed St. Joes, the oldest hospital in the state of Minnesota. The community lost 253 beds at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst pandemic in modern history. In 2023, Fairview filed to sell the medical complex system that sits on both sides of the Mississippi to Stanford Health, seeking to merge the healthcare companies; if Fairview didn’t get someone to pay them out, they would have to file for bankruptcy. The CEO of Fairview, James Hereford, makes $4.3 million a year, which makes him one of the highest-earning healthcare CEOs in the Midwest. Yet the people who rely on the medical and Medicare system are the ones who are blamed.
\n\nThe “trickle-down system” is bleeding backwards, against gravity, up the pyramid to the top where the wealthy few are positioned. How can you claim to be a nonprofit company while the people at the top of the pyramid are making several millions of dollars in a year—and then nonetheless claim that the company is unable to stay afloat without a buyout?
\n\nRemember, nobody questions a nurse that looks busy.
\n\nSupply liberation and time exploitation should never come before bedside patient care. Ensure that your efforts to hold both identities as a nurse and a comrade don’t conflict with the ethical reasons you chose both sides of this work. Your goal is to decrease harm and pain: you are exploiting an unfair healthcare system while working directly with people who are in pain, many of whom understand that the system is exploiting them, too.
\n\nI liberate out of love, I expropriate in the name of harm reduction, I “steal” in the name of all of the people killed by the state of so-called Minnesota. I take in hope that these medical items can help to save or ease the lives of community members, so we don’t have to experience once again the trauma we experienced when we lost Alex, Nicole, Amir Locke, Winston Boogie Smith, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. Death at the hands of the state is so pervasive and the price of medical supplies is just too damn high.
\n\nTime theft is complicated when you’re a nurse. You work for the healthcare company, but you care for the patients; if you forget that and no longer see those you care for as human, you become part of the problem. The healthcare system is not human, and in any case, you will hurt your workplace very little by stealing things. But if you engage in time theft carelessly, you can strain the care that someone else is dependent on you for.
\n\nYou can take a longer break than your allotted time IF
\n\nYou can clock out a little late so that you can take the time to care for yourself between caring for patients and not have to rush your charting.
\n\nIf the hospital pays for your continuing education credits, you can use these to learn things that you can pass on to others in a community setting, such as diabetes education, CPR, and wound care. Rephrase the education you receive as a nurse when you present it as public-health community education: you’re not giving medical advice, but simply explaining how a body process or disease works.
\n\nEvery year, like many other people, we observe April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day. This year, April 15 finds a new cast of authoritarians in control of the United States government, recklessly overhauling it to spread terror and fill their pockets. But this will not put an end to workplace theft. On the contrary, it only intensifies the factors that give rise to it.
\n\nConsequently, this year, in hopes of promoting good behavior, we celebrate “Robin Hood employees”—those who steal from their workplaces in order to share with others.
\n\nEvery year, employers rip off their employees to the tune of $50 billion in wage theft—and then the government swoops in to collect taxes, which are disproportionately put towards purposes that tend to benefit employers more than employees.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/3.jpg\")
Through the eyes of loss prevention, we are all just obstacles to profit.
\nAll this was true before Donald Trump returned to the White House determined to loot everything in sight. Now, as Elon Musk guts every government program that doesn’t benefit him personally while setting his sights on lucrative state contracts, it is laughable to pretend that capitalism is anything other than highway robbery. Forget insider trading—at this point, the entire United States government and the economy it presides over are the equivalent of a Trump-owned casino in which the house always wins.
\n\nMeanwhile, Silicon Valley has been hard at work coming up with new ways to rip off ordinary human beings. Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, for example, functions by plagiarizing human creative activity—with the intent of making human authors superfluous. This is just the latest innovation in the longstanding field of profiting on others’ labor.
\n\nMind you, it has always been true that—like the Large Language Models—every individual human being benefits immeasurably from the effort and innovations of the countless human beings who preceded them. As Peter Kropotkin wrote in The Conquest of Bread,
\n\n\n\n\nThere is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines… every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
\n\nScience and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle—all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
\n\nBy what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say—This is mine, not yours?
\n
The solution is not to figure out a system via which every single person who has ever done something that someone else later benefitted from can be paid precisely in proportion to their labor. Most of those people are long dead, and any system for appraising and compensating them for the value of their contributions would be hopelessly arbitrary. The point is that the system of attribution and intellectual property itself has always existed in order to serve a small number of beneficiaries at everyone else’s expense. Rather than quixotically trying to make the system fair, it would be easier to abolish the various forms of gatekeeping that impose artificial scarcity in the first place.
\n\nIf that’s not something we can do on the scale of society as a whole yet, we can take immediate, concrete steps to redistribute wealth in our workplaces whenever our oppressors are not watching.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/1.jpg\")
Steal Something from Work Day: Discouraging retail security consultants from hiring employees since at least 2012.
\nA few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, a Home Depot employee was arrested after allegedly admitting that she had been permitting customers to take commodities from the store without paying. Because she had not accepted money for the goods herself, there was no way to ascertain the value of the items that had reached people thanks to her.
\n\nLet’s put this in context. It was a time of tremendous financial uncertainty; the first stimulus checks had gone out, but $1200 per taxpayer (or just $500 per child) is hardly enough to sustain anyone through months of unemployment. It was a time of tremendous danger; the first vaccines against COVID-19 were more than six months away, and by the time they were available, hundreds of thousands of people had died. From the safety of their homes, middle-class people were hypocritically celebrating “essential workers” at precisely the moment that those workers were being treated as expendable. Rather than the working class, one could speak simply of the endangered class.
\n\nIn these conditions, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Home Depot employee was risking her life as well as her freedom to ensure that people got access to the resources they needed regardless of whether they could afford to pay for them.
\n\nThe news report about this courageous employee appeared on May 29, 2020, a day after protesters burned down the Third Precinct in Minneapolis in retaliation for the gruesome and senseless murder of George Floyd. If the mass resignations of the pandemic era can be read as an expression of anti-work sentiment, we should also understand this lone employee’s risk-tolerant generosity as a part of the George Floyd revolt.
\n\nThe band Godspeed You! Black Emperor once described this as “slow rioting”: repudiating the premises of capitalism, even in the heart of conquered territory. When an employee does this on the job by refusing to charge for essentials, we might call it retailiation.
\n\nIn an article about the upstanding Home Depot employee for Loss Prevention Magazine, the publication of choice for security guards, the author acknowledged that most human beings are more inclined to foster equality than to abide by rules that arbitrarily benefit some people over others:
\n\n\n\n\nJames Fowler, a political scientist at University of California at San Diego, tested if there were such a thing as a “Robin Hood Impulse.” He tested 120 participants to determine if they were inclined to take from the rich to give to the poor, finding that humans’ “taste for equality” is a driving reason why we cooperate with one another. In his money experiment, he discovered that over 70% of participants at some point would take from the richest players and donate to the poorest players, in an attempt to equalize the income among all participants. Fowler’s team said that even players whose own money had been lost in previous rounds of play were willing to redistribute the money in an egalitarian manner.
\n
For most human beings, this is something to be proud of—evidence that our species has a deep-seated capacity for empathy and solidarity. For security guards and other mercenaries, however, it is a problem to be solved.
\n\nThe author asserts that so-called “Robin Hood” employees are often among the best workers at an establishment:
\n\n\n\n\nIn today’s world, we’re seeing everyday “Robin Hoods” in the actions of trusted retail employees. The same people who work overtime, through the snow and rain, and during a global pandemic to serve retail customers are becoming “social bandits” like Robin Hood. We are seeing signs that many of these essential and dedicated employees are taking sides in situations they feel are more moral than practical.
\n
The Loss Prevention article goes on to point out that Robin Hood employees can inflict losses on a corporation much more efficiently than ordinary shoplifters or employees who only steal for their own benefit. In other words, when it comes to redistributing wealth, the most effective approach is not to take things for yourself, but to share them with everyone.
\n\nYou, too, can be a Robin Hood at work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/2.jpg\")
A diagram in Loss Prevention Magazine alleging that “in one hour, a Robin Hood employee can generate a massive amount of shrinkage vs. more traditional forms of theft/fraud.”
\nIn a society founded on violence and theft, in which violence and theft are becoming more and more pervasive, we need a new ethical framework to evaluate them.
\n\nIn the case of violence, when violence is everywhere and being “non-violent” is often little more than an alibi for doing nothing to interrupt the violence that is already taking place, it is of little use to appraise the value of a given action according to whether it is violent or not. We might do better to ask a more interesting and instructive question: does the action in question reinforce existing power disparities, or counteract them?
\n\nLikewise, in a world in which laws are profoundly biased in favor of the owning class, the judiciary is increasingly subservient to autocrats, and top-down theft is par for the course, it is absurd to fixate on the question of whether a given action constitutes theft as if that were sufficient to reveal its ethical value. We might ask, instead—how does a given theft distribute power? Does it reinforce existing power disparities, or counteract them?
\n\nWorkplace Theft in the Age of “Essential” and “Remote” Labor
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/4.jpg\")
\n Once again, it’s April 15—Steal Something from Work Day! Every April, millions of workers around the world observe this day as a chance to settle accounts with those who are profiting off their labor. For us, it represents an opportunity to reflect on why so many people steal from their workplaces and what it would take to create a world in which that was unnecessary.
\n\nFeared by right-wing hacks like Glen Beck, Steal Something from Work Day is celebrated from Bulgaria to Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. You can learn about Steal Something from Work Day on the official site, or listen to this podcast about it, or watch this charming video.
\n\nOr just, you know, participate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/1.jpg\")
A dishwasher uses a sink as a shield during clashes with police in Santiago, Chile on November 8, 2019. Let’s turn the roles that capitalism forces upon us into weapons against the system itself.
\nThe United States Department of Commerce estimates that every year, “businesses lose $50 billion as a result of employee theft.” Let’s zoom in on that word, “lose.” They aren’t saying that $50 billion just disappears; it isn’t simply mislaid, nor willfully destroyed. They mean that $50 billion ends up in the pockets of the workers, rather than in the bank accounts of corporate executives. In other words, the problem is that the money ends up in the hands of the people who are doing the work that produces it.
\n\nIs this a problem, really? Even if you are an avowed proponent of capitalism, the market needs people spending money to function. Workers who are struggling just to pay their rent and put food on the table are going to put that money right back into the economy. Corporate executives would more likely sit on it, or use it to buy up more real estate, making it even harder for the rest of us to afford rent.
\n\nOf course, if you’re not invested in capitalism as a good in and of itself, if you value equality and human life above the “health” of the market, there are even stronger arguments as to why the workers should be the ones to go home with this money, not executives and investors.
\n\nLet’s be clear that when we talk about workplace theft, we’re not talking about a self-seeking criminal minority enriching itself at everyone’s expense. Apparently, three quarters of all employees have stolen from their employer at least once. Workplace theft is arguably the most widely practiced form of wealth redistribution. It might also be the most effective—though we can aspire to come up with even more effective models.
\n\nWhat if workers in the United States took home $50 billion less every year? The richest 1% of United States citizens now own more wealth than the entire middle class. The top 10% control more wealth than everyone else added together. The combined wealth of the billionaires in the United States has almost doubled over the past half decade, reaching $5.529 trillion—that’s all money that they have accumulated from other people’s labor.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/2.jpg\")
This chart from 2017 tells a different story about who is committing the most theft in the workplace. Even according to the laws that are currently on the books, which overwhelmingly favor employers over employees, it is employers who commit the majority of theft in this society, both in the workplace and outside of it.
\nNow imagine taking another $50 billion away from workers in the United States every year. Imagine plunging families further into poverty, making it even harder to afford groceries, rent, utilities bills, car insurance, tuition. In fact, employers aim to do precisely that—that’s why they are investing in surveillance technology, security guards, and new inventory systems rather than paying the people whose labor enriches them. If there is a self-seeking villainous minority out there, it is not those who steal from their employers, but the capitalists who want to hoard even more of the wealth of our society in their hands.
\n\nThis is why a growing anti-work movement has begun to question the foundational premises of capitalism and exchange economics. Labor unrest is ramping up, but the majority of workers in North America lack labor organizations that are capable of asserting their interests with the firmness that they deserve. It’s time to reimagine what the tactics of a previous era, such as the general strike, could look like today in our current conditions. At the same time, we can look at the activities that the vast majority of workers already engage in—including workplace theft and other informal or clandestine forms of resistance—as points of departure for new strategies.
\n\nIn the following narratives, two authors from different parts of the Midwest recount their experiments with stealing from their employers—one individual, one collective.
\n\n(Yes, the header photograph at the top of this page is a real stock photograph about workplace theft. The horror!)
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/4.jpg\")
From 1830 to today, we must weaponize the ordinary conditions of our daily lives if we are to defend ourselves against our oppressors.
\nDuring the last few months of my senior year of high school, when I stopped attending class, a friend got me a job at a gas station convenience store after my car went on strike and refused to deliver any more pizzas. The morning after graduation day, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends.
\n\nA two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends. In other words, I was staying on the couch in the living room.
\n\nAt the time, I cared about very little besides hanging out with my friends, riding bikes, reading fantasy novels, and drinking beer. I needed money to pay my rent, pay for food and beer, pay for gas and car insurance, and so on, but it was possible to squeeze by with a terrible minimum wage job.
\n\nThe gas station was owned by a typical franchise owner. He was mostly hands off, except when he was hands on. We all worked five ten-hour shifts by ourselves every week. Working alone meant that we had to take bathroom breaks as fast as possible, between customers. At that time, it was possible to pump gas without paying for it, so we had to hope that someone didn’t pull up and pump gas while we were in the bathroom. It wasn’t as if I cared if someone stole gas, but gas was one of the few items that was actually tracked by the inventory system, and we would catch hell if the gas numbers were off.
\n\nThe upside to this situation was that tons of other merchandise was not tracked in the inventory, and the CCTV surveillance system didn’t work. I’ve worked dozens of jobs in my life, and I don’t think a single job I’ve ever worked has succeeded in preventing me from stealing something from them while I was on the clock. But this job failed to prevent me from stealing a whole lot of shit while I was on the clock.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/5.jpg\")
\nFor most of each of my ten-hour shifts, I had nothing to do. There is only so much time you can spend stocking and straightening the shelves, making pots of foul coffee, and staring out the window at gas pumps. I started eating and drinking the stock solely in order to pass the time. Pretty soon, every shift, I was drinking several bottles of juice and eating countless snack cakes, bags of chips, packs of cookies, candy bars, and terrible deli sandwiches.
\n\nThen I started taking food and beer home to share with my roommates. It wasn’t like there was good food available at a Midwest gas station, but we were in a thieves-can’t-be-choosers kind of situation. While one of my roommates had a regular manual labor job, the other had no job at all; he was surviving off of small-scale weed dealing and the kindness and generosity of his roommates. At the end of pretty much every shift, I would load up my car with a grocery bag or two of food and a couple boxes of beer. I tried to take a variety of stuff in the course of each week in order to make it less obvious what was being stolen, but ultimately, I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was.
\n\nAll of my underage friends and acquaintances started coming in, hoping to get beer without being carded. I saw another opportunity here. Beer was another item that wasn’t easily tracked by the primitive inventory system, so it was easy to avoid ringing the beer up in the register and just let people hand me cash for the beer at a steep discount. After I realized this, I put it together that pretty much any item that was likely to be paid for in exact change (like a 50 cent newspaper) didn’t need to be entered in the cash register. I would wait to ring them up until I could see whether the customer had exact change. Soon, I was taking home between $50 and $100 at the end of every shift, at a time when I paid $125 a month for rent.
\n\nOne day, the friend and co-worker who had gotten me the job told me that the manager had asked him if he knew whether I was stealing from them. Apparently, they didn’t realize that he was my close friend. He told them that he was positive that I would never do such a thing, and they left it alone. Looking back, I’m sure that the vague inventory numbers must have looked incredibly suspicious, but they had no way to confirm what was happening.
\n\nEventually, I wound up quitting that job to take another job that was less horrible in some ways but nowhere near as lucrative—aside from the free late-night access to the office photocopier. A couple weeks later, that gas station went out of business. I was sure that my efforts had something to do with it. If a full accounting were to be done, the owner of that place probably stole more hours of my life than I stole from him, but I did my best to even the score.
\n\nIn the years since then, my politics have become more sophisticated, and so have my ways of striking back at the employing class. You could say I’ve become more ambitious. But just as every prisoner is a political prisoner, every cashier in every gas station is a fighter in the class war. People steal from work because it is demeaning, because their workplaces don’t engage their creativity, because they want to share things with others, because it’s bullshit to have to waste time just to turn a profit for a boss.
\n\nAnd lots of people steal from work because they need to. If more advanced inventory systems have made it more difficult for cashiers to steal from their employers, that only means that life is even harder for workers and those who depend on them. Better anti-theft technology is one of the factors that are contributing to escalating inequality, as capitalists concentrate more and more wealth in their hands relative to the rest of us. Stealing from our employers is the very least we ought to do in this situation. Attack every gas station.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/3.jpg\")
\nI live in a second-tier Midwestern rust belt city with a deep legacy of poverty and segregation. Historically, there has been a lot of lawlessness and social rebellion here. This city is busted, broke, and broken.
\n\nDespite the challenges, we built a network of anarchists here, an informal community cultivating an ethos of rebellion. A gang of aspirational dreamers, scrappy squatters, and profound thinkers who took the question of how to create and push social struggles seriously. One advantage of this city is that it is possible to live very cheaply here, compared to other parts of the country. This afforded us the chance to experiment with different forms of daily life.
\n\nAt the time this story took place, most of us were service industry workers: cooks, servers, bakers, bartenders, cab drivers, baristas, home care workers, grocery store clerks, things like that. We often found ourselves on the lower rungs of the job ladder. We would work the tedious and unpleasant jobs that offered us some degree of flexibility and the freedom to live our weird lives.
\n\nWe set out to make the road by walking. We believed that we could build with those around us, drawing on our shared interests and common anguish to create the conditions for rebellion on a broader scale. Many of us shoplifted and stole from our workplaces. Someone in our community had the idea to try to make these secret individual acts into a point of connection.
\n\nI don’t remember exactly how it first started. A photocopied flier titled “The Team is Real” circulated, presenting a proposal. A small button accompanied each flier, like the buttons you get at punk shows. Someone in the punk scene had a button maker and was putting it to use.
\n\nThe flier set out the proposal:
\n\n\n\n\nStep one: Wear the button when you’re at work. Hook people up (discounts, freebies, extras, etc.).
\n\nStep two: Wear the button when you go out. Get hooked up. Remember to ask your teammates where they work.
\n\nStep three: Build the team. Talk to your friends and trusted co-workers. The more people on the team, the better.
\n
You can read the whole manifesto here.
\n\nThe proposal was basically to make a union of thieves that could expand beyond the limits of camaraderie, political alliance, and friendship, as a way to widen our connections with others based on our mutual material conditions and needs. It was a very simple system. If you don’t have access to the kind of button maker we used, you could use other types of pins, patches, shirts, hats—any type of common identifier. Of course, you have to be careful that word does not get out to anyone who can’t be trusted.
\n\nThe idea spread through our subcultural community and across the lines that separated us from other scenes. It reached our peers and co-workers.
\n\nAt the high point of our experiment, I could go out and visit a variety of establishments without ever spending money. I could get sandwiches, coffee, ice cream and gelato, and sometimes groceries from one of the fancy local grocery stores. Sometimes the people hooking me up were people I didn’t even know.
\n\nThat was good. But the flier described bigger ambitions:
\n\n\n\n\nIn our fantastical visions of the near future, we see ourselves reclining on patio furniture while savoring lattes, stocking our larders with the finest of produce from local markets. We are enveloped in sensations of pleasure foreign to our proletarian tongues as we drink freely of the bourgeoisie’s wine. When we travel, we are greeted by friends and strangers with gifts of bounty and luxury. And when guests are received by us in turn, we show them a night on the town like no other. A cornucopia of goods, freely taken and given, all at the expense of those who would exploit our lives, all in the spirit of the negation of capitalist relations.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/6.jpg\")
\nOur experiment could have gone further. It didn’t end up reaching far enough or lasting long enough to make a really deep impact on the tangible conditions of our daily lives. It did generate some conversations among coworkers, and that fostered a spirit of solidarity, or least insubordination. But materially, it was limited by what each of us was able to get away with in the workplace; we only had access to small quantities of what was available to us in our immediate environments. The real stockpiles of wealth are stored far from the outlets of the service economy.
\n\nI think this model could be more effective in a geographically smaller place—for example, a college town where there is a central concentration of cafés and stores. It also could be interesting to try it out in a place that is experiencing active rebellion, or in a time of widespread unrest like during the George Floyd uprising. In a situation like that, it could be way to extend the energy in the streets into other forms of experimental resistance. When we’ve experienced rebellions like that here, we’ve often wondered how we could expand and extend them into ongoing social and class war. The “great resignation” that followed the COVID-19 pandemic saw anti-work sentiment reach new heights; some people interpreted that as a continuation of the uprising. Maybe something like “the team” could have opened up a new front then.
\n\nWe are all fundamentally exploited in our daily experiences as workers under capitalism. We need new ways to experiment and spread class struggle outside of formal structures like unions, which aren’t available to some of us. Any gift shared freely heartens and encourages us, but if it is stolen back, it’s all the sweeter. Everything for everyone!
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2023/04/15/steal-something-from-work-day-2023-take-matters-in-your-own-hands-in-praise-of-those-who-leak", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2023/04/15/steal-something-from-work-day-2023-take-matters-in-your-own-hands-in-praise-of-those-who-leak", "title": "Steal Something from Work Day 2023 : Take Matters in Your Own Hands", "summary": "There are many things you can reclaim from work: money, time, goods, raw materials. Here, we discuss the advantages of taking and leaking information.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/04/15/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/04/15/header.jpg", "date_published": "2023-04-15T12:10:53Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:57Z", "tags": [ "Steal Something from Work Day", "theft", "whistleblowing" ], "content_html": "“The routine of robbing banks is no replacement for the carnival of storming them en masse. Something that holds true for many “survival” acts: better to loot than shoplift, to ambush than to snipe, to walk out than to phone in a bomb threat, to strike than to call in sick, to riot than to vandalize… Increasingly collective and coordinated acts against this world of coercion and isolation aren’t solely a matter of effectivity, but equally a matter of sociality—of community and fun.”
\n\n-War on Misery #3, summer 2008
\n
Welcome to Steal Something from Work Day 2023! Every year, we observe this day as an opportunity to reflect on the individualized forms of anti-capitalist resistance that millions upon millions of employees engage in on a daily basis, and to imagine forms of collective action that could take that resistance as their point of departure.
\n\nToday, we’ll zoom in on a particular variant of workplace theft: the leak.
\n\nCheers to Yugoslavian film director Dušan Makavejev and hip-hop duo Test Their Logik.
\nThere are many things you can steal from work. You could steal money, time, goods, raw materials, access to specialized equipment. Another thing you could steal is information. For this year’s Steal Something from Work Day, let’s talk about the last of these.
\n\nIn the information age, knowledge is power. The circulation of classified information is integral to the lattice of repressive institutions that maintain the prevailing order. Information is the blood in the bloodstream of the beast.
\n\nControlling which information circulates and which does not has always been central to statecraft. But in the heyday of social media, this is arguably the most determinant aspect of rule itself, even more so than military force.
\n\n\n\n\n“In a digitally interconnected world, whoever has the most robust networks, the right relationship between visible and opaque channels, and the most persuasive narrative will triumph. Communication and coordination trump brute force when any clash can draw in a potentially infinite number of participants on either side.”
\n\n-Canary in the Coal Mine: Twitter and the End of Social Media
\n
In a globalized economy in which work has penetrated into every corner of our lives, practically every worker is accustomed to inhabiting multiple identities and being subject to conflicting loyalties. The battle lines of social conflict now cut directly through the heart of every ordinary civilian. One weapon in these battles is the information leak.
\n\nInformation leaks can serve a variety of agendas. On the one hand, they can destabilize established power. For example, embassy cables published by Wikileaks played a role in catalyzing the revolution that brought down president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, sparking a global wave of uprisings that lasted from 2011 through 2014. On the other hand, defenders of the prevailing order can use leaks to circulate cherry-picked information, as well. Intentionally or not, the advance leak of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade arguably served to defuse resistance, giving the general public a chance to get used to the bad news before it was confirmed and ensuring that those who might otherwise have been shocked into action joined predictable liberal demonstrations.
\n\nStill, as a persistent strategy aimed at the reigning power structure, leaking information has considerable advantages. The less that the various institutions of repression can trust each other and their own employees, the more difficult it becomes for them to respond rapidly and coordinate with each other. We saw this in the administration of Donald Trump in 2017, when a series of leaks eroded trust within the regime. If information is the blood in the bloodstream of the security state, persistent leaks coagulate that blood.
\n\nToday, it is widely understood that our society is headed directly for economic and ecological disaster, but the authorities have yet to take meaningful steps to change course. When millions are complicit in structures that they know to be destructive and doomed, this creates the conditions in which formerly complacent employees may choose to carry out individual acts of subversion from within the halls of power.
\n\nThis is not the first time that such conditions have developed in the American workplace. At the end of the 1960s, the Vietnam War contributed to an erosion of faith in the United States government and associated corporations and industries. In late 1969, with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague Anthony Russo, Daniel Ellsberg secretly made photocopies of a number of classified documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg set out to reestablish contact with anarchist poet Gary Snyder, with whom he had previously debated US foreign policy, and put the Pentagon Papers into circulation.
\n\nInspired by by Daniel Ellsberg’s action, former National Security Agency employee Perry Fellwock revealed the existence of the NSA and its worldwide covert surveillance network. Peter Buxtun, an employee of the United States Public Health Service, revealed the existence of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1972. Many more revelations followed, impacting the nuclear power and petroleum industries as well as various government agencies.
\n\nThree decades later, the Iraq War created a similar erosion of faith. When US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning discovered that she was, in her words, “actively involved in something that [she] was completely against,” she began bringing rewritable CDs to her job:
\n\n\n\n\nI would come in with music on a CD-RW, labelled with something like “Lady Gaga”… erase the music… then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing. […]
\n\nYou had people working 14 hours a day… every single day… no weekends… no recreation… people stopped caring after three weeks.
\n
Exemplifying the spirit of Steal Something from Work Day, Manning “listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” Chiefly owing to faulty security culture, Manning was eventually caught and imprisoned. (To quote the aforementioned song, “I shoulda left my phone at home, ‘cause this is a disaster.”) Nonetheless, she set a precedent that was echoed by Edward Snowden, Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, and others, all of whom ultimately concluded, as Manning had, that “Information should be free—it belongs in the public domain.”
\n\nThese events still lingered in recent memory at the opening of the Trump administration, when government employee Reality Winner saw a document that she believed should be public information. She printed it off the classified server, hid it in her pantyhose, and sent it to The Intercept. Unfortunately, the printed document was digitally watermarked, The Intercept refused to take her safety seriously, and Winner caved in under the pressure of interrogation. All of those setbacks underscore the importance of proper operational security when it comes to carrying out workplace theft in the public interest.
\n\nOf course, leaks alone can only do so much. Unless it is accompanied by concrete opportunities to act, information can desensitize people, accustoming them to injustice and inactivity. One risk of celebrating whistleblowing in a vacuum is that it tends to position the same institutions it critiques as the solution to the problems it identifies; another is that it tends to frame those who hold privileged positions within the system as the agents of change, sidelining those who do not work for the NSA or the military.
\n\nIt follows that we need a more inclusive and engaged model for what could constitute employee information theft in the public interest. Our colleagues at Unicorn Riot have demonstrated some examples of what this might look like by publishing a series of smaller-scale leaks compromising fascist groups as well as government agencies. These hint at an approach to information leaks that could draw on the information that many ordinary workers have access to every day, eventually giving rise to an open-source intelligence ecosystem that could serve a broad range of movements for liberation.
\n\nSo here is our challenge to you, begrudging employee. It’s one thing to steal cash or toilet paper—it’s another thing to take steps to topple those who keep all the other resources we need to themselves. If we’re talking about Stealing Something from Work, the best thing you could do would be to take something that could equip us all to get free together. The same capitalist economy that keeps you chained to your work station runs on the information that passes before your eyes every day. The brutal mercenaries whose violence keeps you from creating a better life for yourself depend on that same information.
\n\nAt some point, something may cross your field of vision that could be useful to someone who is engaged in the struggle for a better world. It could be the location of a meeting, the address of a wealthy tycoon, the involvement of a corporation in a construction project, or the day job of a participant in fascist street violence. Make a note of it and figure out how to get it to those who can use it. Focus above all on actionable intelligence.
\n\nKeep your eyes open. If you see something, say something.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nIt’s that time of year again! This year, to observe Steal Something from Work Day, we present a handful of stories from workers who have turned the tables on their employers over the years. Enjoy reading and stay safe as you pull off your own Robin Hood operations.
\n\nAs usual, you can read a wide array of agitprop, theory, and personal narratives on the Steal Something from Work Day website. This year, we welcome new Steal Something from Work Day initiatives in Dutch and Hebrew.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/15/4.jpg\")
\nSometime in the 1990s, my friend from high school was working at a gigantic and direly evil corporate department store. One day, she injured her hand in the box crusher. Far from giving her any paid time off or workmen’s compensation or anything of the sort, her employer told her in so many words to shut up and get back to work if she wanted to keep her job. This angered my friend, whose family was not well off and who needed the income.
\n\nMy friend called me up one day and said, “I’ve got a plan. I’m certain that it will work.”
\n\nBefore I go any further, I would like to say that in general, I do not make a practice of incriminating myself or others, but that the statute of limitations pertaining to this affair has long since expired. Furthermore, I would like to stress that this particular caper would never work now. This story takes place before CCTV was widely in use, before most transactions were done via credit or debit card. Back then, payment with cash or check was much more common. At the time, this scheme was fairly risky. In 2022, it would be a certain trip to jail. Anyone currently in a similar situation will have to develop other techniques.
\n\n“OK,” she said. “At the start of the semester, the university always sends people into my store to make bulk purchases. They don’t give them cash. They come to the register and request this form where they fill out the account information for the order. I memorized it. So, this is all we have to do. We’ll think of everything we could possibly want that will fit in a shopping cart. You come in while I’m working and fill that cart to the brim. Come to my register and ask me for one of those forms. Fill it out correctly. I’ll ring everything up like normal, and you can stroll right out the door. Eventually, the university will get the bill. They’ll say, ‘Hell no, we didn’t order any of this bullshit,’ and the store will take the loss. That’s what they get for fucking up my hand. If they ever try to question me, I’ll say ‘Hell if I know what the problem is, I double-check all the account information any time I ring those orders up, what else do you want me to do?’”
\n\nAdding to the finesse of this scheme was the fact that my friend and I were of different racial and subcultural backgrounds, which if anything may have been more relevant in our town back then than it would be today. Looking at us in line at a store, most people probably would not have immediately assumed that we knew each other. This is one of the benefits of going to public school.
\n\n“You’re a goddamn genius,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
\n\nSo we did. My friend’s first request was that she wanted the nicest fishing pole in the store. We pulled the plan off without a hitch!
\n\nIn retrospect, the wise thing to do at this point would have been to call that a win and quit while we were ahead. That is not what we did. Instead, we ran this caper several more times over the next few months. We both put new stereos in our cars. It got to the point where neither of us really even wanted anything else that they were selling at that store.
\n\nBy this time, it was starting to get cold. We had another idea.
\n\n“You know who probably could use some of this shit?”
\n\nWe started ringing up large piles of hats, gloves, thermals, socks, and nice warm sweaters, which I would merrily take down to Food Not Bombs at the park on Saturdays. Many of the people who would gather in the park had no houses to sleep in and little access to resources. They were accustomed to seeing us show up with buckets of vaguely edible vegetarian slop; they know that we weren’t working with a tremendous amount of access to resources ourselves. It was easy enough for them to put two and two together when we suddenly started unloading truckloads of brand-new winter clothes.
\n\n“Damn, this shit is stolen, isn’t it?” people would ask me.
\n\n“Shit, I don’t know, probably,” I would say. “This guy keeps donating it to us.”
\n\n“Well, I don’t give a damn. Yeah, I’ll take some of those gloves. It’s colder than a motherfucker out here.”
\n\nIn retrospect, we were pushing the boundaries of what was advisable even during the analog era. But the company never caught on! Eventually, we decided to lay off for a while. Some time later, my friend got into a heated argument about unrelated matters with her supervisor, who fired her. End of story.
\n\nYears later, my friend and I reconnected to discuss our youthful artistry one last time.
\n\n“Damn, that shit was glorious,” she said. “But we got lucky.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/15/2.jpg\")
\nI got the café I worked at to cater a community kids’ lunch. I just told my boss that I had already told them and everyone in the café that we would donate the food. When the organizer called my boss about it, he felt too embarrassed to say no, so we got a sandwich, fruit, and milk for each child.
\n\nI also used to steal food from work every week to give to a kids’ breakfast program. I would add some stuff to the “day-olds” that I was told I absolutely could never give away. I put it out back by the dumpster like I was going to throw it out, and I would simply take it to my car at the end of my shift.
\n\nIt was so much food that the kids could never eat it all. I often had to take leftovers to the houseless camp.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/15/3.jpg\")
\nBy CrimethInc. operative Gregorious
\n\nOf all those who steal from work, have stolen from work, or might steal from work, I am possibly the worst at it of anyone in history. Do not do as I do, but be sure to do as I say.
\n\nWhen I was in high school, I worked at a small health food store in a sleepy little New England town. The job was part time, every week for a few hours. Still, the hours I spent there weren’t worth the money. After only a couple weeks, I started to concoct a plan.
\n\nI had a friend at the time with whom I was prone to getting into trouble, so I called him and let him know that I wanted to cast him in a starring role in a scheme involving theft and chaos. I knew that the cooler at the store was easily accessible from the outside of the building through a small entryway. I knew where the key to the cooler could be found. I knew that there was no security system at the store. And I knew when no one else would be around at night. I set a plan in motion which—to my mind—combined the complexity and grandeur of Ocean’s Eleven with the intensity of Heat.
\n\nThe plan was simple. We would wait until the middle of the night. My friend would have a getaway car running on the street. I would make my way around the back of the store to the cooler. I would break in, steal what I could, and escape back to the getaway vehicle. Then we would drive like bats out of hell to a secret location at which we could explore our newly acquired bounty. I was about to become the biggest criminal since Al Capone.
\n\nWhat if I was caught by the lone police officer who lived in the town? What if he happened to be awake—what if he was nearby, paying attention, and saw me? I would undoubtedly be sent to Alcatraz, the electric chair, and the firing squad, probably in that order. This was my one and only life we were talking about here. As the heist approached, my heart pounded faster and faster in anticipation of my new career path as a criminal.
\n\nThe night arrived. We drove to the store. I was wearing the customary black outfit of the malefactor—long before wearing such attire identified you as one of the good people. My friend parked out front across the street. I got out and ran around back. I made my way through the entryway and into the cooler.
\n\nI looked around at everything there. The possibilities were endless. Would I take something small so I could conceal it as I escaped? Could I figure out a way to take everything in there at once? Should I change my mind and walk out casually to meet my fate at the hands of the SWAT team that was undoubtedly gathering in the darkness, laser sights pointed directly at my heart? I split the difference. I looked to my right, grabbed a case of vegan yogurt, and walked out.
\n\nWith the case under my arm, I dashed back into the night, ready to dodge bullets and evade helicopter search beams. There were only crickets. It was a quiet New England night. The world was asleep, unaware of my heist. I could have crawled out on all fours over a span of several hours without anyone spotting me. All the same, just in case, I sprinted to the car. My friend and I drove off laughing maniacally into the night.
\n\nBut the story does not end there. We drove. Not just down the street—we drove at least two towns over. Our plan was to get far enough away that we could enjoy our case of yogurt out of the reach of law enforcement. Did we plan on eating twelve yogurts each? The world will never know.
\n\nBecause when we stopped the car and pulled the cardboard open to expose our riches—when we each took a spoon from the glovebox, selected a yogurt, tore it open, and took a bite—we realized that the case was expired. The yogurts were spoiled. They had the tongue-stinging taste of food gone bad: nature’s way of saying, “Stop eating this, you fools.”
\n\nDejectedly, we discarded the entire case. It didn’t even occur to me to go back to steal something else. For years afterwards, I wondered if I had grabbed something from a pile of food to be discarded. Was that why it was beside the cooler door? Or maybe it was simply bad luck?
\n\nYears later—many years, more than thirty to be exact, and specifically while I’ve been typing this—I finally realized what we’d accomplished by stealing that yogurt. We had done the store a favor. They probably came in the next day and wondered, “Wow, what industrious employee threw out that old yogurt after closing?” They couldn’t have sold it. If they had, they would have gotten in trouble. Same if the health department had showed up to inspect them. The managers probably noted with relief that the case was gone and went about their day. We had stolen their trash.
\n\nSo do not do as I do, but be sure to do as I say. If and when you steal, make it worthwhile. Make sure it means something, at least to you. Go for value first, symbolism second, and trash last. I’d love for you to end up with more than just a story. I’d like for you to end up with some kind of treasure, something representing your reclaimed agency, some example of direct action and revenge.
\n\nOr at the very least, something you can actually eat.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/15/3.jpg\")
\nIn a secret research lab, there was a day when everyone from machine operators to software engineers to executives was asked to donate a book to work. It was in peak quarantine, early 2020 and morale was low. The message wasn’t phrased with the word “donate,” but we all knew that’s what they meant. We were asked by a director of human resources to pick a book from our personal libraries that we would let go and donate it onto a bookshelf featured prominently upon entering the factory break room. We were asked to sign a dedication inside the cover of the book. Anonymity was not acceptable.
\n\nIt felt weird. They were paying us for our labor, not paying us to leave the company our personal property. It was not a coincidence that this message reached us only a month after a third of the company was fired… to cut costs. We could be next. There was an unspoken message implied about how we would never see this book again if we got fired.
\n\nOver the following week, the books began to arrive. They weren’t too interesting at first—some engineering manuals, texts on math and physics, a few pulpy genre bestsellers. The quality began to improve with science fiction and compilations of academic research. Then there were the cringe titles. Those written by the professional managerial class to motivate managers, under the disguise of improving worker productivity. Self-help titles. “Manuals” for effective strategies to improve as an employee of a corporation. Vague advice on how to succeed as a leader in corporate America.
\n\nAmong this trash was a single, unique-looking cartoon book titled simply, Work. At least, it looked like a cartoon book from the cover. Taking a closer look, it was a book about the class hierarchy in American society. It’s available on this website. It presents a good analysis of contemporary capitalist class hierarchies. This research lab employed nearly everyone in the pyramid featured on the book’s cover, from the top to the bottom, including military, lawyers, and captains of industry.
\n\nAfter two years moving on and off the shelf, Work (which was donated new) looked as worn as the other books, many of which were much older. In the break room, a machine shop worker approached the person who signed their name under the cover and thanked them. He said he took it home for a couple weeks (the first known use of this program as if it were a public library) and the contents were eye opening. He asked for some other similar recommendations to read. It felt like the program was working, though likely not the way the original corporate controller imagined.
\n\nWhile this might sound like the opposite of stealing something from work, think of it as reclaiming power in a contest of ideas. Sadly, the bosses are the least attentive but fastest to act when presented with a case of workers building power through solidarity. For example, the REI sports apparel corporation recently fought their workers after employees began to organize a union for higher wages and improved conditions. Corporate leaders see you as a threat to their wealth and want to punish you at every turn. Never forget that there are people whose only job is to protect the corporation from its employees.
\n\nCorporations steal from us every day through wage theft. This particular research lab had a bad reputation of not paying overtime. Fortunately, one thing they cannot steal from us is our ideas. Spread these ideas in secret. Spread these ideas in plain sight, but understand they might fire you if they feel like these ideas are too dangerous to them. Without a labor union, you have little defense other than litigation, at best. But just because you don’t have a union doesn’t mean you are powerless to take back what is rightfully yours, your time at work. Read books on the clock. Does your employer have an “unlimited PTO” policy? Take off more time, start at 12 weeks. In some parts of the world, it is expected to have that much vacation time.
\n\nIf you are ever in the position where an employer asks you to donate something to work, consider ideas that will encourage everyone to “donate their time” somewhere else. That’s a donation we can all believe in!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/15/1.jpg\")
Our dreams = their nightmares.
\nSince 2001, the collectively-run website Antijob.net has provided a “blacklist of employers,” offering a space for laborers in Russia to report on their negative experiences at work. As Russian media and labor organizing have come under increasing pressure, Antijob continues to provide a crucial resource for ordinary employees, even in an extremely repressive environment. Russian corporations and government agencies have repeatedly attempted to bribe the publishers or suppress the site, without success. The so-called “Great Resignation” and a popular Antiwork Reddit site have recently made waves in the United States; we conducted the following interview with Antijob to learn what anti-work agitation looks like in Russia.
\n\nAntijob has also played a role in supporting protests against the invasion of Ukraine, informing Russian workers of their legal rights on the job if they arrested while protesting.
\n\nAs appendixes, we’ve included the Antijob manifesto, the Antijob statement against the invasion of Ukraine, and some examples of the reports workers publish on the site.
\n\n\n\n\n“Remember and tell others: your interests are opposed to the interests of the employer. This is a struggle that has been going on for centuries. The struggle between those who are trying to make a living and those who want to buy a new yacht.”
\n\n-Antijob, “No loyalty to the employer!”
\n
\n\n\nEmployers always write about Antijob. They say this and that—they slander, they claim that they were slandered, they talk about the intrigues of their competitors. Come on, they say, remove the story about the next LLC “Lepyoshki and Matryoshki,” otherwise we will sue you. Or, on the contrary, they offer money for us to remove the material…
\n\nTo be honest, we don’t really want to make employers better. Conflict between employers and workers, whether acute or dormant, is an integral part of capitalism. It will be fully overcome only with the rejection of the wage labor system as such.
\n\n-Antijob, “The presumption of class guilt”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/2.jpg\")
“No loyalty to the employer!”
\nFirst, explain what Antijob.net is and what it does.
\n\nTechnically, we are a feedback web page where workers can leave negative feedback about their jobs. Also, we are a micro-media platform about work and labor.
\n\nPolitically, we are an anarchist project highlighting the problem of wage labor, calling for workers to organize to fight for better working conditions and, of course, against capital and the state.
\n\nWhat inspires you to maintain Antijob?
\n\nProbably the main reason for the continuation of the project and its constant regeneration (as most of the original team has changed) is the tangible result that we can feel from it. We know how many users use our server and we know that it helps put pressure on employers at a relatively low cost of effort from us. We give employees a pressure tool and they use it effectively. As far as we’re concerned, it’s a success.
\n\nTell us a bit about how the project has changed over time.
\n\nAntijob emerged in the early 2000s as a response to the emergence of job aggregators that targeted young people, who made up a large portion of Internet users at that time. These services romanticized the “careers” they promised, and then their users learned the hard way that these careers consisted of working temporary jobs for miserable wages, followed by being firing and cheated. That was the target of our criticism; the method was formed by direct statements from employees. Over time, the Internet expanded, but the problems remained the same. The audience of job search sites increased—and so did ours.
\n\nThe original version of the web page and message was more aggressive; now we are somewhat less radical. But we have not descended into orthodox Marxism, which is usually typical of groups dealing with the subject of the labor movement in Russia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/9.jpg\")
“Blacklist of employers—Antijob.net. Add yours.”
\nWhat impact has Antijob had among workers in Russia? How has the political environment changed since you got started?
\n\nYou could say that our web page has been a pioneer in the field of job reviews in Russia. Employers realized that opinions on the Internet could be a threat to their businesses, and the field of “reputation work” emerged, which has itself become a kind of business.
\n\nFor the authorities, we do not seem to be an obvious threat. There are lawsuits against us and the authorities even block the web site, but these problems were initiated by employers.
\n\nOf course, the situation has become worse as control over the Internet has increased. The political situation has gotten worse, too. The authorities and the police have started to write to us more often, and we are sure that sooner or later we will be blocked for good, the way it is in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
\n\nHow do you moderate submissions? Do you have a fact-checking process? How do you make decisions about what you publish?
\n\nAll the materials are moderated manually. We have several levels of validation; the highest level is given to those reviews in which proof of working for the company has been attached, such as correspondence or documents. Then there are reviews that are confirmed by the person leaving their email address; these are the majority.
\n\nWe filter out any positive reviews because they are not objective in principle. It is almost impossible to check the validity of a positive review.
\n\nWe also have an automatic review checker that alerts us to suspicious activity and allows us to identify people who are trying to misuse our web page.
\n\nWe don’t do detailed fact checking. It is technically impossible with 150+ reviews coming in every week. In any case, we are not trying to claim total objectivity. For us, there is an obvious disproportion of power in the relationship between the employee and the employer—so we trust the employee more, by default.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/5.jpg\")
“Labor against work.”
\nWe understand that there have been attempts to suppress Antijob.
\n\nThey often try to hack us, and from time to time, we experience brute force DDoS attacks on our web page. These attacks are organized by employers: they are either getting revenge for the reviews posted, or they are trying to remove the reviews or find out who the author is. We do not remove reviews for money, so an angry employer chooses between spending money on legal fees or hiring hackers.
\n\nThe second type of attack is from what we can call “competitors” in the field of commerce. They create copies of our site, buy similar domains, and try to hijack traffic in order to make money from skimming reviews. Recently, they began to act in a more sophisticated way and attack the behavioral factors of the site using bots, which reduce the average time of visits to the site and the rate of denials in order to reduce the visibility of our site in search engines.
\n\nA separate topic is the courts and RosComNadzor (the Russian digital control authority). Some companies go to court to claim that reviews about them are slanderous. If their effort in court is successful, then after a while we get a request from RosComNadzor to remove the information. If we do not remove it, we are blocked. This has happened several times.
\n\nNow we remove reviews at the request of the RCN, attaching an invoice and a link to the court decision, which often contains the text of the review. If we do not remove the feedback, we get blocked, the website traffic decreases by 70%, and search engine rankings drop, which accordingly makes the attack on the reputation of employers less effective. We are constantly looking for ways to circumvent this threat. Recently, we managed to change it so that the blocked reviews are hidden only for Russian IPs, while all others (including VPN/TOR users) can easily view them.
\n\nSometimes the police and other authorities write to us demanding that we provide the data of the authors. To these requests, we answer by sending the data of disposable emails and the IP of a TOR node. It is an incredible coincidence that everyone that the police are looking for is using TOR and utilizing a high level of digital security, isn’t it =). The police are not very eager to find out what’s up.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/3.jpg\")
“No salary—eat the bosses.”
\nCan you give advice to people who might try to start something similar elsewhere?
\n\nIt must be said that starting such projects from scratch can be difficult. The weapon of our web page is its high visibility in search engines and the fame it has accumulated. Those who want to start should be prepared to work for free, but at a higher level than commercial companies. The reputation market appeared long ago and there are a lot of people who want to make a profit in it and are ready to invest resources. For example, we have to contend with commercial feedback pages, competitors intercepting users by advertising, bot attacks on the web page, etc.
\n\nWe are inconvenient for our competitors and for employers because of our adherence to the principle of not removing reviews for money. However, if you have a team or a powerful movement, you need comrades who have technical knowledge in web development, who understand the basics of SEO [Search Engine Optimization] and security in the Internet, as companies are quite willing to pay hackers if you do not agree to withdraw feedback.
\n\nYou have to be prepared to regularly spend time on moderation and on communicating with users, as well as confrontations with the state and the courts. In the Western countries, problems with the law may be even heavier than in Russia and the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States].
\n\nAt the first stage, what is most important is not super-functionality, but publicity. In terms of distribution, stickers helped us a lot. This is a trivial method, and it often did not work well in other projects, but our stickers usually hang for a very long time. Shitty work is a very understandable problem for people of any political conviction. While the anarchist movement in Russia has been active, we have accumulated enough users from big cities thanks to stickers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/4.jpg\")
“Antijob.net—blacklist of employers.” These stickers have been essential to promoting the Antijob site as a resource.
\nHow do you see the connection between different forms of labor resistance such as labor unions, stealing from your workplace, public pressure campaigns, etc.? Which of these tactics are viable in Russia?
\n\nFor us, all methods are interconnected, and each has its pros and cons, as well as regional characteristics. Unions are a good organizational structure, but in Russia they can exist only in industries with large companies and are often overgrown with bureaucracy. Stealing is a good tactic for individual sabotage, but is not looked at well in the society and is unlikely to change the global problem of wage labor. Public pressure is effective on a big enough scale, but mobilizing people to fight thousands of small daily violations of rights involving hundreds of companies is impossible. Solidarity networks as an example of distributed pressure are good, but they require resources from regional activist groups (it is unlikely that anyone will initiate something like this in Russia except these kind of groups), and so far, we have not seen examples of such groups becoming sustainable.
\n\nAll of these tactics require mobilization and a degree of political freedom, which are both lacking in Russia, perhaps apart from passive sabotage (such as refusing to work effectively) or active sabotage (stealing and intentional damage), and perhaps hacktivism as well. In our opinion, the future lies in tactics that do not fall under the scrutiny of repressive structures and cannot be clearly attacked by the bosses, but which are capable of inflicting tangible targeted damage. Sooner or later, the political situation will change and the road will open up for the other tactics.
\n\nHow do you see the connections between labor resistance and other forms of political activity? Over the past 40 years, we have seen labor movements, unions, and workplace struggles grow weaker in the United States, while other fields of conflict (such as anti-police rioting) have intensified. Do you have an analysis about the ways that the terrain of labor struggles is changing and how workplace struggles can remain connected to other struggles?
\n\nWe see work as a central concept that will be zealously defended on all levels, from direct attacks by the police to conceptual criticism by right-wing intellectuals. Unions have been the answer before, but the neoliberal turn has provided a broad toolkit for fighting them. Struggles against police violence, like some other mass protests, are younger and more mobile in their choice of tactics that the state does not have an effective response to yet. In addition, unfortunately, in many ways, peaceful forms of resistance do not pose a concrete threat until they develop into occupations. An organized labor movement is not just about occasional rallies, but about the state having to spend money on social programs and businesses having to shell out on decent wages and offer guarantees to workers under the constant threat of strikes. This is probably more expensive than maintaining a few riot police units.
\n\nBut the labor movement is often very conservative, trade unions have their own structural problems, and new practices (like solidarity networks) have not yet become an effective instrument of struggle.
\n\nIt seems only natural for us that the problem of work remains relevant. The people who suffer the most from police brutality, racism, environmental crises, and other problems are rarely businessmen. They work—officially or illegally—and they suffer the toxicity of the market system. The only question is to what extent we (who are essentially part of the same workforce) can make this agenda relevant.
\n\nIn the United States, there has been a lot of news coverage of the so-called “Great Resignation,” discussing all the workers who have been quitting their jobs since the beginning of the pandemic. Has anything like this happened in Russia? Is quitting a job a form of resistance?
\n\nRussia has also had great resignations—even though these weren’t really resignations, it was more like businesses firing people to cut costs. Without benefits or any guarantees. The first lockdown made the atmosphere so tense that there were no more lockdowns afterwards. People were out of work, and since most Russians had no savings but did have credit debts, everything escalated. The state limited itself to a few cash handouts. If people were not allowed to go out to work and earn their bread, an uprising driven by hunger would have been unavoidable.
\n\nIn Russia, quitting a job as resistance is relevant only for those spheres where there is a shortage of personnel and a sense of their value. Mass resignations are very unlikely because there is no broad self-organization; the resignations of a few employees do not cause any damage. People often work unofficially, so they will receive no compensation, and the benefits to the unemployed are very small. More often, a visible form of struggle will be the continuation or sabotage of work as an individual practice. We are not seeing the opportunity for mass organized action just yet.
\n\nOne of several video shorts by Antijob.
\nHave you seen the Antiwork reddit page from the United States? How is it similar to your project, and how is it different?
\n\nNot only have we seen it, but we also have covered it, including a similar movement in China. In terms of its radical message, the movement is similar to the early Antijob, and we hope that at some point this will become more relevant in our country as well. For us, we see anti-work as a fatigue with the neoliberal work ethic (in the United States) and the pseudo-communist work ethic (in China). It seems that in our country, this ethic has not yet reached the peak after which a radical rejection of work will be perceived seriously.
\n\nAnother problem with this framework is our audience. Some of them work for something like $300-400 per month, while living with children and credit debts. It would be somewhat awkward to urge them to refuse to work.
\n\nWhat can you say about the invasion of Ukraine from where you are positioned?
\n\nBefore the war started, some of us doubted that such a turn of events was really possible. However, it did happen. We issued a statement condemning Russian aggression. Russia’s imperial policy is obvious to us. As usual, it is disguised as “security interests.” We have received several insults from patriotic users trying to prove to us that the war is being fought against “Nazis who spread LGBT propaganda,” but this is different from the patriotic frenzy of 2014 [when the Russian military seized Crimea from Ukraine].
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/10.jpg\")
“No salary—eat the bosses.” The sticker is in Ukrainian.
\nHow is the invasion of Ukraine affecting Russian workers? How are the sanctions affecting workers in Russia, and how do you think they will impact the working class in Russia in the future?
\n\nThere are definitely people in Russia who approve of the war, and there are quite a few of them. Many workers live in the information bubble of the state’s “fortress under siege” narrative. From their screens, they see the message “Everyone is against us.” This mobilizes them to support the invasion, shifting the focus to the idea that this is being done for the security of Russia.
\n\nPropaganda platforms use the international sanctions and condemnation to reinforce this narrative in order to draw support even among those who hesitated at first.
\n\nThis mobilization will not continue indefinitely, of course. In a few months, everyone will feel the economic consequences, and if the war is lost, the reputation of the government will be damaged. This will not necessarily lead to an uprising, but we can hope that the social agenda will be more successful in mobilizing for the overthrow of the regime.
\n\nWe plan to be ready for such a turn of events and, as a project directly related to labor issues, to support this process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/1.jpg\")
\nFinally, is there anything people can do to support your project?
\n\nThe easiest way is to support us financially. The development of a project like this always needs resources with which to pay for hosting, or someone else’s work on the project. In addition to this, you can help spread awareness of the project. This is especially important in the CIS countries. Also, we always need people with experience in penetration testing to help find and fix vulnerabilities, and SEO experts to advise us on promotion in different regions in order to increase pressure on employers.
\n\nAnd on the macro-level, you could create an analogue of our project in your area and contact us to create a network of services like ours in collaboration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/6.jpg\")
Antijob participated in publishing this book, “‘Work Sets You Free’—Stories about Workers and Employers.”
\nThis manifesto, which appeared on the Antijob site a decade ago, spells out their basic analysis and goals.
\n\nA significant part of life, we have to give work. Our capacity, time, ideas, successes and failures are reduced to rubles, dollars, and euros—empty bank notes that can never fulfill our desires and needs. Usually this work is accompanied by delays in paychecks, the machinations of employers, nervousness and humiliation from ridiculous rules and idiotic bosses.
\n\nWe do not believe that the existing system of “commodity-capital” relations, which put the exploitation and destruction of people and the planet on the conveyor, can somehow be reformed “from above.” Real change can only come about if people recognize their plight and begin to seek better conditions for their lives on their own—without begging for anything from party bureaucrats or crooks from the bureaucracy.
\n\nHistory shows many examples of rebellious people sweeping away exploiters and thieves overnight, administering true justice and distributing public goods fairly among those who need them most. In this sense, we are closest to the libertarian (anarchist) philosophy and principles of direct action. You can read more about this in the “Library” section of our website.
\n\nWe have no paid employees and no hierarchy. We focus on the use of a wide range of methods of struggle in labor conflicts. We deal with problems related to working conditions and payment, as well as problems that women, young people, and national, sexual, and religious minorities face at work.
\n\nThrough our actions and propaganda, we are trying to develop class consciousness among employees and an understanding that, as a class, we have an interest in social revolution, the victory of which will offer us the opportunity to control our lives.
\n\nWe see our site not only as a place where there is a black list of employers (and where you can leave feedback about employers), but also as a place for coordinating forces in the class struggle, promoting “direct action” in resolving labor conflicts—as opposed to the bureaucratic judicial system, which actually operates in the interests of our class enemies.
\n\nThis site was created over sixteen years ago by several members of the organization Autonomous Action and has been actively developing all this time. This year, Solidarity Networks were created in various cities of Russia, which have already helped people to reclaim stolen wages (Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, St. Petersburg). Thanks to antijob.net, more than a dozen employees received a salary after publishing a review on the site, because many employers are afraid to be included in such lists—and even more so on our site.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/7.jpg\")
“Labor against work.”
\nThis war is provoked by the stifled ambitions of the Russian elites. They try to disguise this by talking about the “national interest.” But the working people do not and cannot have any interests in the oppression of the people in Ukraine and the Donbas. Our interests are peace and decent work, not war with the Ukrainians.
\n\nThis is military aggression initiated from the top of the Russian Federation. Yet we will be the ones who bear the consequences of this decision. The oligarchs and the president will not bear the brunt of military spending. Their children will not go to the front, their salaries will not be eaten up by inflation and currency depreciation. You and I have been set up.
\n\nThe Putin regime is now taking revenge on the Ukrainian people for not wanting to live under the boot of the Russian Chekist [i.e., the Cheka, the Soviet secret police agency from 1917-1922, and its descendants, the NKVD, the KGB, and today, the FSB]. Tears and coffins await our mothers, too, but bombs will fall on the heads of our brothers and sisters, workers in Ukraine. We allowed this, but now our task is to stop it as soon as possible.
\n\nToday at 7 pm, anti-war actions will take place in Russian cities. Our antijob.net team calls on you to join them and demand an end to military aggression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/8.jpg\")
Antijob helped to publish a Russian translation of our book about capitalism, Work. Tragically, the artist who designed it took his own life this week in response to the dehumanizing experience of seeking asylum—first in Ukraine, then in Poland.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1505616538749050884\n\n\n
\n\n\nJSC RTK is the official retail chain of MTS. Why should it be blacklisted?
\n\n1) Management style: Feudalism with authoritarian and totalitarian methods of influence. That is: all retail is divided into divisions, regions, and sectors, at the head of each such division is a person who most often feels like the absolute ruler of the territory entrusted to him and thinks that he has the right to humiliate his subordinates, put strong psychological pressure on them, force his subordinates to deceive customers, without their consent, or assuring them that “It is mandatory” to add items to purchase receipts that: a) are very marginal, b) are absolutely useless for the client. All this is done under the fear of disciplinary action, fines, demotion, or dismissal.
\n\n2) Liability. Every month, inventories are carried out by the store and every three months—with the auditor. All employees must be present at these inventories, regardless of whether they have a work shift that day. Returning to work on the day of the inventory is paid only for those who have a scheduled shift. In case there is a shortage, the re-sorting most often does not overlap; in this case, the surplus is put on the balance, and the shortage is withheld from employees. The shortage is retained in full, and not at cost, as required by the labor code…
\n\n \n
\n\n\nAt work, they held a meeting at which they announced that the entire team was being transferred to minimum wage due to problems in the company… Naturally, I wrote a letter of resignation, but it turned out that none of the employees was going to quit anymore, everyone continued working as usual. While I was working for two weeks before my dismissal, I found a vacancy on hh.ru [headhunter, a popular job search site] for my own workplace, at the previous salary, and I was very surprised. Some time after my departure, the former director called me for a conversation and offered to let me return on the condition that I stop going to political pickets and covering my actions on social networks. Allegedly, there were complaints from my clients that I was against Putin. That was the reason for my removal. In fact, it turned out that no one’s salary had been reduced, everyone was quickly returned to their previous working conditions, but they decided not to inform me about this, so that I would quit of my own free will without scandal. And this whole performance was carried out in order to deceive me, one person, and force me to quit.
\n\n \n
This surprising story was confirmed with a photograph of the contract, which is available on the post on the Antijob site.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/04/15/what-work-steals-from-us-steal-something-from-work-day-2021", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/04/15/what-work-steals-from-us-steal-something-from-work-day-2021", "title": "What Work Steals from Us : Steal Something from Work Day 2021", "summary": "During the COVID-19 pandemic, stealing from work has become more difficult than ever. Let’s consider what this means for the future of humanity.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/15/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/15/header.jpg", "date_published": "2021-04-15T11:05:49Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:49Z", "tags": [ "employment", "Steal Something from Work Day", "pandemic", "work. covid-19", "precarity" ], "content_html": "Every year for over a decade, we have joined others around the world in observing April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day, a day to reflect on the reasons why workers steal from their workplaces.
\n\nOf course, during the COVID-19 pandemic, stealing from work has become more difficult than ever. Let’s consider what this means for the future of humanity.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1382743886204919809\n\n\n
From a young age, we are told that work is what provides for our needs.
\n\nYet everyone who has served as an employee—or who has labored, self-employed, at the mercy of the market—has had a very different experience: work steals from us.
\n\nIt steals the hours of our days, the time we would like to spend with our families and friends and lovers, the energy we would otherwise direct towards pleasurable, creative, unselfish pursuits. It steals our imaginations: even today’s most innovative employees and entrepreneurs are still inventing inside the very narrow frame of what can compete in the market rather than, for example, what might bring joy to human beings.
\n\nIt steals into our leisure hours, into our most intimate relationships: the work of competing for social capital, of performing unwanted emotional labor, of answering emails and text messages, of paying bills and taxes and insurance premiums and purchasing products in hopes that they will make us more employable (a power blouse, a ring light, a diploma)—and preparing ourselves, yet again, to go back to work.
\n\nWork—the aggregate labor of all humanity since the Industrial Revolution—has already done permanent harm to the biosphere we all depend upon for the air, water, and nourishment we need to stay alive. What hasn’t work stolen from us?
\n\nAnother century like this—another century of work—and our species will be done for, along with countless others. Work—which is to say, all activity that is determined by the necessity to make a profit for someone, rather than chosen on account of its intrinsic value—is precisely what prevents us from fulfilling our needs.
\n\n\n\n\n“What does it really mean to be useful? Today’s world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: the highest morality consists in being useless.”
\n\n-Milan Kundera, Immortality
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/15/1.jpg\")
A tip of the hat to phryk.net.
\nNot long ago, the workplace was a clearly distinguished zone in which capitalists paid workers a wage to operate the privately owned means of production. In those conditions—which still prevail in many places, though they are fewer and better policed than before—a rebel worker could surreptitiously hunt and gather resources belonging to the boss, acting in a rash moment of freedom the way her nomadic ancestors might have acted at all times. Pilfered by wage laborers, a tub of ice cream could reenter the gift economy that sustained our species for over 200,000 years. Workers were compelled to sell their labor for a pittance, but they could sometimes fight back in ways that rejected the logic of the market.
\n\nBut as the emergencies of late capitalism grow ever direr, even that situation is eroding.
\n\n\n\n\n“Today, rather than speaking of the working class, it might be more precise to speak of the endangered class.”
\n\n-“All We Have Is Us: A Call from a Delivery Driver in Manhattan”
\n
The COVID-19 era has normalized stark class relations between the vulnerable and the protected. Last year’s celebration of the “essential worker” served to frame work itself as essential while treating the laborers who perform it as expendable. Rather than basing our economics on the premise that society is divided into those who work and those who profit, today we could begin from a different distinction, implying a different politics: there are those who profit and those who die.
\n\nFor hundreds of years, workplace theft has helped workers to survive. Think how many more people from the laboring classes would have died of malnutrition or other avoidable causes if they had not been sustained by the resources they were able to purloin in addition to their salaries! Yet a workforce of self-employed food delivery workers and Uber drivers can hardly steal from their workplaces. This is indicative of a larger shift towards precarity among all workers; it also indicates an expansion of the terrain of work, which is currently most visible in the ways it is impacting the middle class.
\n\nToday, for hundreds of millions of workers and students worldwide, the home itself is the workplace. A year ago, at the outset of the pandemic, we considered this development as it relates to the expansion of surveillance; in the year since, it has become clear just how far this can go. Fear of surveillance presumes an “authentic” and free self that can be stunted by too much scrutiny; but replacing the office with the zoom meeting and embodied social life with digitized social media is rendering it increasingly difficult to imagine such a self in the first place.
\n\nIf employers once feared that employees would smuggle resources from the workplace into their homes, now it is work itself that steals into our homes, narrowing the distance between the two meanings of “occupation”—employment and annexation—turning the bedroom into a factory churning out alienation in its pure form with hardly a physical product to show for it.
\n\nIn these conditions, time is almost the only thing left to steal. But it is not stealing that time back to wander TikTok or Amazon Prime when you’re supposed to be paying attention in class or delivering an order. Those activities still amass profits for the capitalist class while immiserating us. For time theft to steal from work, we have to be able to spend that time outside the logic of the workplace and the world it has reshaped in its image.
\n\nThe colonization of our homes, hearts, and fantasies by work perfectly illustrates the difference between what some Marxists call “formal subsumption” and “real subsumption,” though this distinction has become as redundant as the word “Kafkaesque.” When everything has been subsumed into the logic of capitalism, the only remaining question is what could lead us out of it. Transposing Hegel’s account of the development of ideas into an idealized historical progress narrative, Marx sought to solve this problem with barefaced accelerationism—the worse things get, the closer they are to changing. The idea that it’s always darkest before the dawn may make for good punk songs, but—like all Marxism—it’s bad science.
\n\nThe penetration of work into our homes doesn’t bring us any closer to a revolution that will supersede capitalism. If anything, it only brings us closer to extinction. But in rendering old forms of small-scale rebellion impossible, it forces us to put everything at stake if we want to resist at all. We should remember what was beautiful about workplace theft—honoring the petty courage of centuries of small-time thieves who stole from their employers when they could—while recognizing that, like many other elements of the tenuous rapport de force that existed between employers and employees in the 20th century, it is likely to become harder, not easier, from here. If we want to continue to act outside the logic of capitalism, in the 21st century the name of the game is double or nothing—and no guarantees.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1382642969136693256\n\n\n
\n\n\n“Looting is good but it’s only a small glimpse of what we can all share. If you think the retail stores are good, wait until you see the distribution centers. Hell, we could not only control what is already made—we could decide what is made.”
\n\n-Anonymous participant in the George Floyd Rebellion
\n
The looting of dozens of businesses in the Twin Cities in response to the police murdering Daunte Wright takes on additional dimensions when we view it in the context of precarity and unemployment and the increasing difficulty of previous forms of resistance that served as pressure valves. In the conflict between those who profit and those who die—between the murderers and the excluded—it is not a rearguard struggle, but an image of the future.
\n\nSome whose imaginations are still shaped by the 20th century want to see the unemployed return to the space of production to take over and self-manage the factories, in order to produce a slightly more ethical version of the current post-industrial global order. But our wildest dreams go far beyond the vision of “fully automated luxury communism,” understood as the communist fulfillment of all the consumer desires produced by capitalism and its enforced artificial scarcities. What we want most is to destroy the order that produced those desires, not to reorganize it. We want to create conditions that will produce different desires, to steal the world back from the logic of the market and from work itself, in order to create a society in which we can all explore our collective potential on our own terms.
\n\nAt base, workplace theft is not about acquiring objects. It’s about establishing a new relationship to our agency. It implies the possibility of a totally different way of living.
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/04/15/steal-something-from-work-day-2020-workplace-theft-in-the-age-of-essential-and-remote-labor", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/04/15/steal-something-from-work-day-2020-workplace-theft-in-the-age-of-essential-and-remote-labor", "title": "Steal Something from Work Day 2020 : Workplace Theft in the Age of \"Essential\" and \"Remote\" Labor", "summary": "For 10 years, we've observed April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day— But what does that look like in the era of surveillance and pandemic?", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-04-15T17:36:57Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:43Z", "tags": [ "employment", "Steal Something from Work Day", "Work", "theft" ], "content_html": "“Desertion begins as flight, but with practice, moves to retrieval.”
\n\n-Bernard Maszalek, introducing Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to Be Lazy.”
\n
For ten years now, we have observed April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day. Coinciding with tax day—when the government robs workers of a portion of their earnings to fund the police, the military, and various welfare programs for the ultra-rich—Steal Something from Work Day celebrates the creativity of workers who take a swipe at the economy that exploits them.
\n\nYet today, the consequences of the global rip-off called capitalism have gone so far that nearly a quarter of us have no employment or source of income whatsoever. Many of those who still have jobs are being forced to risk death on a daily basis just to bring home a paycheck, while more privileged workers have seen their jobs invade their very homes. Tax day is pushed back to July—it’s difficult to rob those who have no income, though our oppressors aim to squeeze it out of us sooner or later.
\n\nThe crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic should put things in proportion. While executives and loss prevention experts wring their hands about workplace theft, sticky-fingered employees are not the ones responsible for systematically draining resources from hospitals or accelerating catastrophic climate change. It’s not stealing from work that is outrageous—the outrageous thing is how much capitalism has stolen from us.
\n\nAs history accelerates, the humble little gesture of workplace theft, via which so many workers have asserted their autonomy and made ends meet, has almost become outmoded. In a global disaster that is just a taste of things to come, we have to become more ambitious about what we aim to seize.
\n\nThe workforce has been divided into “essential” workers, “remote” workers, and the unemployed. In many cases, “essential” simply means “disposable”—along with doctors and nurses, it describes a range of low-paid jobs that involve a high risk of exposure to COVID-19. Of course, if you are working one of these jobs, you still have access to material goods; you can still steal from a grocery store or warehouse.
\n\nWhen so many people have no access to resources whatsoever—while employers and the politicians above them are conspiring to force us to risk a million deaths to re-start the economy—stealing to support those who cannot buy products becomes a solemn duty to humanity.
\n\nWhat can “essential workers” do besides sneaking food, medical supplies, and cleaning products out of workplaces? Can we set our sights on something more systematic?
\n\nLast month, facing layoffs, General Electric employees demanded to be kept on to build ventilators for the treatment of COVID-19. This points to the possibilities for workers to steal back their entire workplaces. Yet making demands of corporations like General Electric will produce few results unless we are able to find ways to exert leverage on them.
\n\nIn Greece, unpaid workers in Thessaloniki went further, seizing the factory they had worked in and using it to manufacture their own line of ecological cleaning supplies. This is an example of workplace theft writ large, one we can aspire to emulate in the United States over the coming years.
\n\nCould we steal the existing infrastructure and use it to produce a different society? Should we aspire to take over the global supply chain and run it more efficiently than its current overlords do?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/4.jpg\")
\nThe quintessential 21st century work environment is the Amazon warehouse. Surveillance devices and software force humans to behave like robots. In some Amazon warehouses, gigantic screens display footage of employees who were caught stealing to terrorize workers into obedience. Cashing in on the pandemic, Amazon has added over 100,000 new positions, but all the profits are still concentrating at the top. Signs in Amazon warehouses instruct workers to remain three feet apart at all times as an anti-viral measure, when their work stations are actually two feet apart. Is there a place for such places in our dreams of the future?
\n\nBefore we decide what aspects of the global supply chain to keep, let’s look closer at the meaning of the word “essential.” Police in some parts of the US have explicitly stated that “protesting is not listed as an essential function”; they aim to take advantage of the pandemic to suppress any dissent, though dissent is the only means by which we can assert our needs and defend our safety. Freedom is inessential, along with the lives of frontline workers. Meanwhile, the governor of Florida has deemed professional wrestling an essential function along with all other “professional sports and media production[s] with a national audience.” As in ancient Rome, what is essential is bread and circuses.
\n\nSo we should not accept the concept of “essential workers” at face value. Capitalism has monopolized activities like food production that used to take place on a more decentralized basis. We are among the first human beings to be born into a society in which the only way to obtain food is to go to a grocery store staffed by employees. Most of us have no other option today; this monopoly is what makes grocery store workers “essential.” In almost any other model, these workers wouldn’t be the only line between us and starvation.
\n\nOn a fundamental level, Amazon warehouses and corporate grocery store chains are like police: they are essential to the maintenance of this social order, but they are not necessarily essential to life itself. We depend upon them because—through centuries of successive enclosures of the commons—we have been robbed of everything that sustained our species through the first million years of our existence.
\n\nWhen we are thinking about how to steal our lives back from work, this suggests another point of departure, alongside individual workplace theft and collective workplace occupations. We can begin to re-establish means of subsistence outside the economy—for example, via occupied urban and suburban gardens. Especially for those who are now unemployed, this is a way to steal the possibility of subsistence from a world optimized for employment alone. Perhaps, one day, where there are currently Amazon fulfillment centers, there can be community gardens complete with collective dining areas and childcare bungalows.
\n\nIn the age of surveillance technology, some of the differences are eroding between warehouse workers who are monitored by drones and white-collar workers who are monitored by technologies that take screenshots at random throughout the workday. All of us are being “optimized” according to capitalist control mechanisms and criteria. In remote or “smart” working, our employers invade our bedrooms, ruthlessly fixing our most intimate activities to the demands of the market. Middle-class workers have to worry about whether the décor of our bedrooms and the behavior of our children will be acceptable to our employers. Nothing is sacred.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/2.jpg\")
Camera-bearing drones maintain surveillance inside warehouses, just as the camera on the device you are using to read this article can be used to surveil you.
\nAt the same time, as more and more of our lives become dependent on digital technologies, some of the differences between the employed and the unemployed are also eroding. Among those of us who are unemployed, many of us also spend our days in Zoom meetings and clicking around on phones and computers. Our behaviors—paid or not—can be almost identical. Our online activity continues to provide income to corporations employing a profit model based on the attention economy, harvesting data, and the like.
\n\nPresciently, for Steal Something from Work Day 2013, one of our authors analyzed the ways that time theft alone can fail to take us beyond the regimes of capitalism:
\n\n\n\n\nWorkers who engage in tactics of la perruque [i.e., time theft], but use the reclaimed hours to participate in a digital capitalism that commodifies user attention, merely sneak from one job to do another. In 2013, we call it “social media”—in thirty years, it will have no name. […] We add stars and comments to Amazon products improving their sales; we self-surveil with Facebook; and we help search engines anticipate human desires by performing as a human test audience for them.
\n
So while time theft is the one ostensible remaining means of stealing something from work for an entire social class now under de facto house arrest, we should not assume that it will suffice to get us beyond the logic we are trying to escape. That goes for the unemployed as well as for those working remotely.
\n\nWhat is the solution? To return to the wisdom of our forebears, we should never use any tool produced by the capitalist system for its intended purpose. To quote “Deserting the Digital Utopia,”1
\n\n\n\n\n“There is an invisible world connected at the handle to every tool—use the tool as it is intended, and it fits you to the mold of all who do the same; disconnect the tool from that world, and you can set out to chart others.”
\n
For those confined to working or playing online from home, this offers a way to think about our little individual revolts. When you are engaging in time theft, don’t just click around on the internet, delivering additional information to the corporations and governments that are spying on all of us. We have to use this time creatively and effectively to prepare for the next phase of global collapse. Teach yourself a skill that you can use away from the computer, something that can help you heal or nourish people, whether biologically or psychologically. Create new connections and networks that can assume an untraceable offline form in the near future. Print out letters and deliver them to all the tenants around you inviting them to participate in the unfolding rent strike and offering them support. Remember, you must always have a secret plan.
\n\nNow more than ever, stealing something from work has to mean assaulting the system that forces work on us in the first place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/5.jpg\")
\nWe conclude with one employee’s narrative of a lifetime of workplace theft, a memoir of a simpler time when it was easier for many people to channel resources from the capitalist economy into joyous anti-capitalist creative activity. If the pandemic, automation, and surveillance technologies continue to transform our lives in the ways they have been, such stories may soon belong only to a comparatively idyllic past—but that only makes it more important to pass them on, so those who come after us can see everything that they have lost and whet their appetites to fight harder.
\n\nI’m writing this on company time under stay-at-home orders.
\n\nI want to share an incomplete list of all of the things I’ve stolen from work over the course of my two and half decades as part of the work force. I want to start by acknowledging that my situation is likely different than yours. When and where we grew up, where we are living now. The kind of work we do. The relative privilege that each of us benefits from.
\n\nThis is not a prescription or playbook. You might have access to opportunities I have not. The time and place and situation may be different, but the bosses are still the bosses and the fight is still the fight. Look for the cracks and squeeze through them.
\n\nWhen I was in junior high school, I had a paper route. I delivered the paper every day after school. Once a week, there was a coupon day. An extra stack of little papers arrived at my house with the bundle of newspapers. I was supposed to stuff these coupons into all the newspapers before delivering them. I was a good kid. At the beginning, I did what I was supposed to. It made the load of papers in my satchel weigh twice as much.
\n\nStill, I couldn’t help suspecting that most people didn’t care about the coupons. So I performed an experiment. I stopped stuffing the paper with coupons and waited to hear who complained. I made a mental list of the few houses at which people really wanted the coupons. I’d include the coupons in the papers I delivered to those houses. All the rest of them went straight into the recycle bin.
\n\nThis saved me a literal weight off of my shoulders. It also freed up an extra hour of precious post-school daylight hours to play with neighborhood friends. The paper route was supposed to teach me the value of a job well done—and it did.
\n\nIn high school, I was in a computer class. We students had free rein to use whatever we wanted, as long as we did tech support for teachers who were having issues. Jammed printer. Dead network. Missing mouse. We would come fix it.
\n\nMost of the time, though, I was in the corner using the high-speed audiocassette dubbing machine. It could transfer one tape to three others at the same time, at four times normal speed. I started a little do-it-yourself record label using that machine. This changed my life, connecting me to other young people around the world in the days when the internet was just getting off the ground.
\n\nI also designed, printed, and mass-produced countless zines on those high school computers, printers, and copiers.
\n\nAround the same time, I worked in a concession stand at a fancy pool serving upscale neighborhoods. I made minimum wage. I never paid for nachos or slushees, and neither did my coworkers, friends, or casual acquaintances.
\n\nIn subsequent years, I also worked at the admissions desk. I operated the cash register. People who came to swim paid me and went on their way. Dollar fifty for kids. Two dollars for adults. Fifty cents extra for the water slide. All day. Over and over.
\n\nOn hot summer days, the pool brought in several hundreds of dollars per day. Some days, a group would come in from a day care or camp. Those were big days.
\n\nIt’s hard to skim off the top of a $1.50 charge. If you’re keeping the change, your pockets get heavy and jingly. There’s also a paper trail of receipts.
\n\nBut not if the cash register is broken. Weirdly, every summer I worked there, the cash register would stop working the first or second week. In effect, this reduced the cash register to a money drawer, abolishing the paper trail of receipts. I would do the math in my head, pop the drawer open, make change, and keep a running count in my head. How many customers have come through the door today? How much can I skim without anyone noticing?
\n\nThe answer: I bought a new computer, printer, monitor, and scanner to take with me to college. And a lot of records!
\n\nLearning to do math in your head can be an important skill if you weren’t born with a silver spoon under your tongue.
\n\nEvery shift during my lunch break, I’d wander over to the juice aisle, pick out a bottle, then go to the hot foods bar and heap up a pile of French fries. If my friend was working the hot foods register, we talk for a bit, putting on a little performance for any potential spectators. If not, I’d just go sit down and start eating.
\n\nAs a cashier, I had a lot of discretion and prerogative. If something didn’t ring up properly, or lacked a barcode, or neither I nor the customer knew the produce code… they got it for free. Or, if I didn’t get the feeling that they were down, I’d ring it up for twenty-five cents. That way, they still saw me ring up something and weren’t forced to make a decision about the ethics of workplace theft.
\n\nAny time friends came through my checkout line, I pantomimed ringing up their groceries, turning each so the barcode was facing up, away from the scanner. I’d say “boop” out loud with my voice. We’d share a nod, a wink. Then I’d ask them to buy me a pack of gum. Total bill: twenty-five cents.
\n\nOnce, I made the mistake of trying to pass along those savings to my best friend’s dad. He was pretty cool on most accounts. For example, during Sunday church, rather than making them listen to sermons, he taught his kids algebra and other math that was advanced for their respective ages.
\n\nBut on this day, I grossly misread his sense of ethics. When he noticed that I was scanning items upside down, he started making a stink, raising his voice about his principles. Luckily, I was able to recover the situation before anyone figured out what was going on.
\n\nI was the slyest employee thief when taking food off the shelf; I always left with something tucked down my pants. A meal or two to tide me over from one shift to the next.
\n\nI also stole pantloads of film, processing, and prints. I would drop off a few rolls of photos from punk rock shows at the film developing desk, checking the boxes for all the upgrades: oversized prints, duplicates, fancy finish. When I picked them up, I’d say I had some other shopping to do before checking out. They just let me walk away with them. I never once paid for film, processing, or prints there. The good ol’ days.
\n\nIn college, I worked in the computer lab. The university had a really fancy computer sitting unused in storage. I took all its internal parts home with me one by one. Later, I bought a case and reassembled them into a new computer to serve the general public in a shared computer lab at a DIY collective space.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/3.jpg\")
Like many other things, stealing from work was easier in the 1990s.
\nIt turned out I was good at web design. I’d crank out the work really quickly, then spend the rest of the time designing zines and working on other creative projects.
\n\nI have always stolen time from office jobs. It was especially useful to be good at keyboard shortcuts in order to hide or destroy whatever I was up to when the bosses came around.
\n\nI also took all the normal office things: cables, paper, printouts, photocopies, staplers, staples, tape, keyboards, mice, laptop stands, chairs. I’ve stolen a few computers from jobs. Once, I traded a couple such computers for a car that I then drove around the country on a Great American Road Trip.
\n\nWhen it’s provided, I always load up on food. Snacks for myself now, snacks for myself later when I’m not in the office. If friends come visit me at work, they eat for free, too, but they should also load up their bags and pockets. I try to make a point of using office-provided food to channel meals, snacks, and drinks to the houseless.
\n\nThis trip down memoir lane is all fine and good, even if some of the particulars aren’t necessarily useful anymore. But what does it mean to steal something from work when many people are working from home or out of work entirely?
\n\nIf you still have a job at a physical place and still have access to physical stuff, you can continue to steal. Food, supplies… toilet paper! Take some for yourself, for your friends and family, for your mutual aid network. Don’t just hoard it—everything you pass on to those in need will be returned to you fourfold.
\n\nYou can also steal for others so that they don’t have to. Do it without them knowing, if you think knowing might make them anxious. Cashiers still have the prerogative to selectively miss ringing up items for customers buying supplies during the pandemic. People loading bags of food for delivery can slip in an extra of this or that.
\n\nIf your workplace is now your living room couch, dining room table, or bedroom, there are still ways you can steal something from work.
\n\nIf you’re lucky enough to have “unlimited” paid time off (PTO), then for goodness’ sake, take paid time off! Use it to focus on your physical and mental health. Use it to care for your friends and neighbors. Use it to volunteer in mutual aid projects.
\n\nIf you have flexibility to take some time away from the computer while on the clock, do it! Even if you don’t actually go anywhere, just step away from the computer for a while.
\n\nYou can steal time.
\n\nYou can take time during your workday, between Zoom meetings and Slack channel discussions, to do whatever you want. You can put some time on your calendar as “quiet working hours” to protect your calendar from meeting invitations. You can watch movies, educate yourself, or even write an article for an anarchist website about stealing from work! If you need it, take a nap or stare out the window.
\n\nIt’s OK not to be productive™ in this situation. This time is not simply working remotely. We are working remotely during a global pandemic that has already killed over 100,000 people, an ongoing fascist takeover, and large-scale economic failure. You have permission to forgive yourself for not writing the next King Lear, discovering the next calculus, learning another language, or mastering a musical instrument.
\n\nIf you want to do these things, you should. If not, that’s OK too. Just take care of yourself out there. Remember, your time is the most valuable non-renewable resource that you’ll ever have.
\n\n\n\n\nIf your heart is free, the time you spend is liberated territory. Defend it!
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nThe text continues, “The ideal capitalist product would derive its value from the ceaseless unpaid labor of the entire human race. We would be dispensable; it would be indispensable. It would integrate all human activity into a single unified terrain, accessible only via additional corporate products, in which sweatshop and marketplace merged.” Now we are seeing sweatshop, office, and even bedroom merged. ↩
\nThis year, to observe Steal Something from Work Day, we present three stories of ordinary workplace resistance. In the first, an employer seeking to cheat minimum-wage employees is outsmarted by an employee who secretly evens the score for the workers. In the second, a proponent of healthy eating smuggles a crucial implement out of a high-security situation. In the last one, a Steal Something from Work Day epic, two low-wage workers—one dressed as “McGruff the Crime Dog“—sneak into a hockey game in a surrealistic example of what our exploiters call “time theft.” We take great joy in celebrating the everyday heroism and good humor with which workers stand up for themselves and assert their dignity in the face of a dehumanizing system.
\n\nEmployers see workplace theft as a major threat to their profits, if not to the stability of the order that enables them to profit. Traditional doctrinaire socialists ignore it or regard it as a pressure valve that ensures the continued functioning of capitalism, alleging that rather than organizing for the revolutionary seizure of the means of production, employee thieves try to solve their problems on an individual basis.
\n\nBut we should approach workplace theft as a point of departure for a better world. This widespread phenomenon illustrates how many people don’t actually buy into the social constructs that sustain the current order. Even if theft does play a role in the continued functioning of capitalism—for example, by sustaining workers who could not subsist on their meager salaries alone—it can only serve that function if it takes place in secret, individualistically. When we celebrate it, when we create public forums in which to compare notes and reinforce the shared conviction that we all deserve better than this, we transform isolated acts of rebellion and survival into a basis for the kind of collective revolt that can never be reintegrated into the preservation of the status quo.
\n\nWe honor the courage of those who refuse to be exploited, of those who seek to even the score. Let’s find each other and take action together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/if-you-dont-steal-from-your-boss/if-you-dont-steal-from-your-boss_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image to download the PDF.
\nI live on the border of two states with extremely different minimum wage laws. I worked for a company that moved over the border from the state with the higher (though still not sufficient) minimum wage to the other state. We were able to keep our jobs but we had to take a pay cut. Meanwhile, the boss bought a new house in California and kept her house here as well.
\n\nDuring the process of the move, I happened to find a Post-It note with the admin credentials to the payroll system. Every week for the few months I stayed on after the move, I gave myself and my coworkers a few extra hours of pay to make up for the money they were trying to save.
\n\nNothing happened to me. And it felt like a good deed.
\n\nI just wanted to share my story for Steal Something from Work Day.
\n\n\nThe morning smoothie is an important tradition at our house. Some grocery stores in our town donate food they would otherwise throw away to the church up the street, and if you get there at the end of distribution process you can lay claim to whatever is left over before it becomes hog food. This gives us access to vast amounts of fruit, which is all well on its way out by the time we get our hands on it. To preserve what’s left, we dehydrate and freeze all we can salvage. The morning smoothie is a joyous celebration of this bounty.
\n\nOf course, this plan relies on one piece of essential equipment: the blender. And there came a time when our blender’s future was in question. It had served us dutifully and well; many a frozen banana had met a cruel fate in its gnashing maw. But its time had come to pass on to Valhalla, where it would chew strawberries thrice the size of those in our mortal realm all day and be lovingly soaped and rinsed by Valkyries all night. We all saw its end coming—we could hear the gears grinding. But miserly bunch that we were, we were leaving our next blender—and therefore the future of our house culture—to luck, the invisible hand of the Really Really Free market, or our own future cunning.
\n\nAt the time, I worked on a ship and was finishing a two-month stint away from home. The day I was leaving was chaotic: we were receiving a truckload of new supplies and preparing for the next voyage. Typically, when we load supplies, we form a human chain and pass boxes deep into the bowels of the ship. On this day, I was located in the part of the chain where I was passing thirty-pound boxes of engine parts past the door to the galley (that’s ship talk for kitchen).
\n\nIn plain view, on the counter, mere feet away, was the blender.
\n\nTo protect the identity of this machine, lets call it the NutriStir. I had watched this sleek example of engineering prowess do things our warrior back home could only dream of. At home, we’d present our blender with a daunting task and often it would need assistance to accomplish the feats we asked of it. We’d have to stop it, stir the contents around, fish them out, chop them finer, and generally give the old battle-scarred veteran a leg up. The NutriStir, by contrast, made quick work of everything thrown into it. I had never see it even twitch at a job, no matter how formidable. If we had a blender like that, I thought to myself, our lives would be revolutionized.
\n\nNow, it’s common knowledge in shoplifters’ lore that it isn’t a good idea to steal from a place you can’t escape from. Trains, airports, ferries, and the like don’t offer you a way out; you’re in a closed population of suspects if suspicions arise. I admit it: despite knowing that it’s a bad idea, I love stealing from these places. These closed environments enable our exploiters to charge us exorbitantly more than they could if we had alternatives. I’m offended by these case studies in capitalist logic.
\n\nThat said, it’s especially dangerous to steal on a boat. And a blender is not a small item: I couldn’t just pocket it and walk away. To get it to my room, for instance, I’d have to pass through many different spaces full of my coworkers, some of whom I knew I couldn’t trust, and into a room I shared with two other people. In only a few hours, I would leave the boat to catch my bus out. I thought about it all day, but no solution occurred to me. In my experience, a good theft demands either meticulous planning or a lightning flash of opportunity.
\n\nBut then I was tasked with taking care of a stack of dirty towels.
\n\nIn order to get to the laundry room, I had to pass by the galley. Looking through the doorway, I saw that it was empty. I ducked in and threw the towels over the coveted blender. Then I washed my hands in the sink so I would have an excuse if someone had seen me walk into the galley and happened to follow me in. In what felt like a slick move but probably looked extremely awkward, I picked up the towels and unplugged the blender underneath them. I carried my bounty to the laundry room and set down the heap in the corner, hoping to return before anyone else went to put them in the washer.
\n\nThen it was time to leave the boat. I packed my bags and said my goodbyes. My hidden treasure lay in the last room I would pass through on my way out. I was hoping to walk in, deftly put the blender in my backpack, and be on my way with no one the wiser.
\n\nAn empty room would have been ideal. But one of my coworkers, a notable slacker, was hiding in the laundry room watching videos on his phone to avoid working. I hadn’t really come with an excuse prepared, nor could I imagine one that would make sense. “Oh, just left a sock in this pile of dirty towels.” “I can’t find my charger, so I’m checking everywhere.” I could gamble on trusting my coworker, but it was a gamble I didn’t want to take.
\n\n“Hi,” I said. He had headphones in and didn’t lift his eyes from his phone.
\n\nOften on boats, there is very little privacy. To cope with those conditions, we create our own little bubbles and focus on whatever tiny spaces of mental freedom we can arrange. In the crew lounge, it’s not uncommon to see one person watching a loud movie while another is intently reading and yet another is having a phone conversation a few feet away. I walked in, sorted through the towels, stuffed the blender in my backpack, and walked out. I feel confident my coworker didn’t even register that I had entered the room.
\n\nI arrived home victorious and proud. We had the nicest blender on our block. It effortlessly minced concoctions that would have destroyed our previous blender. It’s been well over a year since I brought home this new addition to our family, and I get a tinge of joy every time I hear it grinding away.
\n\nSometimes I wonder what they thought when they discovered that the NutriStir was missing. There weren’t many places it could have gone. There really was no logical explanation other than what happened. Despite the fact that gossip on ships spreads fast and inflates fairly benign dramas to extraordinary levels, I never heard a word about it. I think the most likely answer is that they saw that it wasn’t there, pulled out a spare, and went on with the workday.
\n\nOur blender likely has a few years left in it. But if it starts to falter, the ship I work on now has an even nicer blender, waiting to be liberated.
\n\nWhen life gives you lemons… get revenge.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/15/2.jpg\")
\nThe National Museum of Crime and Punishment. I was an anarchist working at the National Museum of Crime and fucking Punishment.
\n\nDon’t let the name fool you. Though located in Washington, DC, it wasn’t a “national” museum in the same sense as the Smithsonian—it was a private collection of chintzy memorabilia and copaganda. The museum exhibited a life-size prison cell, a self-directed polygraph test, and a chronology of the evolution of crowd control weapons—cheap exhibits that could only fascinate a class of people entirely unacquainted with police and carceral violence… and as luck would have it, that’s precisely the class of people who could afford the $25 admission! The crime section of the museum actually had some cool stuff—daring prison breaks, bank robberies, piracy old and new, and no less than a dozen anarchists scattered throughout. But that’s not what the bootlicker clientele came for. The big hits were the police training simulators, “The Cop Shop” (the gift shop—apart from the lobby, the only part of the museum free to the public), and last but, by definition, not least, the America’s Most Wanted television studio.
\n\nSo what the fuck was an anarchist like myself doing there? It wasn’t because it paid well, that’s for sure.
\n\n\n\n\n“Actors! Looking to build your resume? Need a job with a flexible schedule? A new, one-of-a-kind museum is coming to Washington, DC and we are looking for ACTORS to help promote it. Commission bonuses available!”
\n
The Craigslist ad was for actors. I had recently aged out of a youth-empowerment/anti-oppression theater group1 that had changed my life and I was looking to fill the void its absence left in me.
\n\nI even did a half hour of diction exercises before the interview, not knowing if there would be a proper audition as well. As it turned out, the “acting” they needed was dressing up either in an orange prison jumpsuit or as McGruff the Crime Dog in order to draw tourists over to a coupon-monger. The coupons were for a discount of one dollar. One miserable dollar from the twenty-five dollar admission. In other words, touristy bullshit—definitely not acting. But hey, I needed the money, y’know, “until something better comes along.” Jobs are such shit. An endless impotent vow to myself to never again suffer that kind of humiliation just gives way to a readjustment (read: lowering) of expectations and self-worth. What else can one do? No, that’s not a rhetorical question. What else? That is the most important question our generation has to answer.2
\n\nBut hey, at least I wasn’t the only sucker. A friend of mine—who I’ll call Zoe—from the youth-empowerment theater group also showed up, thinking, like we all did, that it was a more dignified résumé-builder than dressing up as a prisoner or McGruff the fucking Crime Dog.
\n\nThe museum opened right before summer, which is the big tourist season in DC, but it was already sweltering. DC residents like to say the city was built on top of a swamp—hence the “drain the swamp” chant. That’s a myth, but it’s believable, given how insanely humid it gets.
\n\nOn one particularly moist and muggy afternoon, I was handing out coupons while Zoe, dressed as McGruff, worked the passing pedestrians on the street. There were legions of them because, just a block away, the hometown hockey team was playing in the Stanley Cup semifinals. White suburbanites, sweating in their Capitals jerseys, rushed past us to get to the game, without time or attention to spare for my half-hearted sales pitch. The few that did engage with us were mostly drunk and exclusively stopped to challenge McGruff to a fight.
\n\nWhy, you ask? During this time, there was a viral news story about an uptown MetroBus driver who, seeing a cop dressed as McGruff, stopped his bus, stepped out, and socked the crime-fighting mascot. The bizarre part of the story is that there wasn’t much more to it than that. No past grudges, not even much of an explanation—just plain old prole-on-police violence. What’s not to love?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nAs a result, when my coworker worked as McGruff (I unequivocally refused to ever do so), jokers would often approach and say something to the effect that “he oughta watch out.” Normally, it was easy enough to laugh this off and move on, but it was a different story when a crowd of drunken hockey goons began to form around my friend. Breaking character, Zoe took the head off: “I am so over this.”
\n\n“Yeah, I’m sorry about these bozos.”
\n\n“Nah, I don’t care about them. It’s this damn costume. I’m sweating like a bama up in here and I can’t even get the fan to work. I feel like I’m gonna faint.”
\n\nMcGruff’s head was wired with a fan that worked exactly 0% of the time that I was employed at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment.
\n\n“Damn. Yeah, just leave the head off. And if you want I could try getting you some ice from Chipot—”
\n\nStop. The air dropped out of my voice and my eyes went wild. The gears of scheming began to turn in my head. You could say I froze…like… ice.
\n\nIce. Cool. Cold. Ice. Rink. Hockey. Hockey! ICE. HOCKEY. Arena. Sitting. Cold cool sitting. Arena. Mascots. MASCOTS! MCGRUFF!!!
\n\n“No, wait, fuck that, I bet we could get into that hockey game with the McGruff costume.”
\n\nHad it been any other coworker, I don’t think I would have just come out with it. But Zoe and I had been through the theater group together. We came from really different backgrounds and parts of the city, but we had talked about deep shit together—race, oppression, growing up. Still, up to that point, we had never been bad together. My intuition told me that our shared capacity to communicate, both with and without words (for all good actors know that language is not just what we say, but how we say it), would make us good at being bad.
\n\n“Oh my god, you really think so?” She didn’t miss a beat. That’s how I knew she was down.
\n\n“Definitely. I mean, not legitimately, but…”
\n\n“Let’s do it.”
\n\n“The only thing is Matt and Laura…”
\n\nMatt and Laura. Matt and fucking Laura: our managers. About once per shift, one of them would find us on the street and “check up on us,” pretending like they were seeing if we “needed anything,” but both parties knew they were making sure we weren’t stealing back time while on the clock. If they rolled through and couldn’t find us, we’d have to sit through some patronizing interrogation. Fuck Matt and Laura.
\n\n“Fuck Matt and Laura. Oh wait, shit.”
\n\n“What?”
\n\nMatt’s voice startled me and I whipped around a little too fast. Did I betray our coworkerly conspiring? Is there a fucking YouTube channel or something where managers watch tutorials about how to creep up on you out of nowhere? They’re all so fucking good at it.
\n\n“Hey you two! Just wanted to check up and see if you needed anything!”
\n\nMy eyes blurred, tearing up with all the effort it took to keep them from rolling. Luckily, it was a bright day, and my look came off more like a sun-squint than a glower.
\n\n“Oh, yeah, we’re all good.”
\n\nLaura piped in: “Looks like you’re doing a great job out here. Zoe, one thing, the McGruff costume just doesn’t work without the head, I know it’s hot, but maybe you could just stand in the shade?”
\n\nWe were saving all the shade for you, Laura.
\n\nWhen my eyes came back into focus, I realized Matt and Laura were both wearing Capitals’ jerseys.
\n\n“So glad we bumped into you two. We won’t be back for a couple hours, so if you need anything just talk to Brock, ok? Keep up the great work!”
\n\nBrock, the security guard. Brock the Pet Rock, as we called him behind his back. The name had as much to do with his stone-cold demeanor as with the fact that the man barely ever moved. Neither before nor since have I met someone so apparently content to stare, for hours, straight across a gift shop lobby. We didn’t have to worry about Brock. And we no longer needed to worry about Matt or Laura—they’d be occupied… inside the very fucking place we were about to sneak into, oh shit!
\n\nZoe apparently just didn’t give a fuck. Reasonable, given that the stadium was full of thousands of other people to blend in with—and the job sucked. I was a little nervous now, though.
\n\n“Risky.”
\n\n“What?” Zoe asked.
\n\n“This feels risky, yo. Matt and Laura are going to be in there.”
\n\n“Yeah, but so are twenty thousand other people.”
\n\n“Still feels risky. Let’s take a break and think it over.”
\n\nWith a silent nod to Pet Brock, we were back in the museum soaking in the AC. It was slow inside. Barely any customers. Zoe hit the break room, but I took advantage of the empty museum to admire the crime exhibits on my own. Bandits, outlaws, escapees: I was surrounded by some of life’s greatest risk takers. Compared to their escapades, sneaking into a sports game was small potatoes. But what was the payoff? The criminals whose stories and memorabilia surrounded me (the ones I took inspiration from, at least) were after a life of riches and adventure, or else fighting for their freedom. Me, I was just trying to kill time.
\n\n“Maybe we shouldn’t…” I thought, “Zoe will be disappointed, but to be honest, I kind of need this job.” The pay was shit, but a couple of weeks without it, while searching for a new gig, would have really set me back.
\n\nFrom an enlarged mugshot, Emma Goldman abruptly butted in: “Puritanism is based on the Calvinistic idea that life is a curse, man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natural and healthy impulse, and turn his back on joy and beauty. Our life is stunted by Puritanism, and the latter is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses.”
\n\n“So, uh, what you’re saying is I should skip work and try sneaking into this game… because it could be joyous and beautiful?”
\n\nSilence. I walked on, glancing back at Emma’s motionless face. She was still icily staring down her captors. Calvinistic Puritanism?
\n\nAs I passed the “Great Trials in American History” section, Albert Parsons addressed me from the Haymarket panel:
\n\n“Break this two-fold yoke in twain!
\nBreak thy want’s enslaving chain!
\nBreak thy slavery’s want and dread;
\nBread is freedom, freedom bread!”
“Okaay… thanks Albert, but I’m all good on bread. Always plenty in the dumpster. But, uh, that was a very inspiring verse. Thanks. Though to be completely honest I’m not really deciding between freedom and slavery, I’m just trying to figure out whether to sneak into this hockey game.”
\n\nOn the gallows, next to Parsons, George Engel interjected, “As water and air are free to all, so should the inventions of scientific men be applied for the benefit of all!”
\n\n“Right… but, like, you mean hockey arenas?”
\n\nNo reply.
\n\nI ambled on through the museum, lost in contemplation. Was this decision so important that the legends of anarchist history felt the need to speak up from beyond the grave and compel me to disobedience and crime? As I mulled it over, I didn’t even realize I was wandering into the “punishment” part of the museum, until I bumped into the glass perimeter. It was the studio of America’s Most Wanted.
\n\nDisplayed behind the glass were the program’s biggest “busts.” The first one to catch my eye was Sarah Jane Olson. I recognized her immediately because we had celebrated the good news of her recent release at our infoshop’s last political prisoner letter-writing night. Olson did time for charges stemming from Symbionese Liberation Army actions in the 1970s, but she had lived underground for decades afterwards—even volunteering at the Arise! bookstore and infoshop in Minneapolis.
\n\n“There you are!”
\n\nZoe. Right. Shit.
\n\n“I’ve been looking all over for you, I even asked Brock. Come on, he’s gonna snitch us out if we stay on break much longer.”
\n\n“Right. So, back to work or…?”
\n\n“What? What about the game? Or are you starting to feel sketchy about it?”
\n\n“Well, I was just thinking…”
\n\nThe glass began to shake. Sarah Jane Olson’s voice broke through, shattering my inhibitions. “I’m with you, and we are with you!” The voices of all our freedom-loving, law-defying, boss-hating forebears rang out, filling the hall with an eerie, deafening hum. As the hum got louder, it filled me with determination. It wasn’t courage—for I was still scared of getting caught—but now I was determined not to live a life of fear, subjugated to the clock and the Sisyphean scam of earning commission. Then the janitor switched off the vacuum.
\n\n“Excuse me. I need to get that spot you’re standing in.”
\n\n“Oh, right, sorry. We were just leaving.”
\n\nOut of the television studio, back through the prison cell replica, past Parsons and the gang, past Emma Goldman, whose eyes, I swear, changed from icy refusal to pedagogical approval as we passed before them. Past Pet Brock, out of the air-conditioned lobby, into the sun. Too much sun and a flower will wilt, but the spell of a warm kiss after a long freeze will bring blossoms.
\n\nI come to life.
\n\n“Okay! Put your head on, don’t say a word, and just follow my lead,” I tell Zoe.
\n\n“Got it!”
\n\nWe walk up to the first open door with a ticket taker. We try just walking in naturally, but the ticket taker stops us: “Excuse me.”
\n\n“Yeah, uh, McGruff here, uh, for a promotional, yeah, you know?” It’s not even a full sentence. And what explanation do I have for accompanying McGruff? Like, this woman is an adult and understands that there is a person inside the costume—why would they need me to walk the mascot around?
\n\nBut the totality of the spectacle is powerful. She ignores McGruff and just speaks to me.
\n\n“The media check-in is at the loading dock.”
\n\n“Oh, right! Yeah, uh, where is that again? My boss forgot to tel—”
\n\n“Fifth Street.”
\n\n“Right, right, okay, cool! Thank you!”
\n\nZoe complains, “Man I gotta walk to Fifth Street in this?” Fifth Street is on the opposite side of the arena. “At least you got time to work on a better line than ‘promotional, yeah, you know?’”
\n\nAt the loading dock sits a bored security guard with a radio on his desk and a men’s fitness magazine in hand.
\n\nTo Zoe, quietly: “Okay remember, let me do the talking.”
\n\nTo the guard, after taking a second to breathe deep and muster all the improv skills I had honed through my years of theater: “Yeah, uh, here’s McGruff, uh, you know, for a um uh promotional, yeah…”
\n\nMy supernatural abilities are expanding today. Not only can I communicate with portraits, but I can sense, without even being able to see through McGruff’s big plush head, that Zoe is staring daggers at me with the sidest eyes ever.
\n\nWithout looking up from his magazine, “Sign here and see the media desk back there to find your registration.”
\n\nFind my registration? Fuck. Well, that definitely won’t be happening. I might have turned back at this point if I were by myself, but there isn’t really a way to discuss the situation with Zoe in front of this security guard. Best to just move forward, like everything is going as expected. I sign for both of us. I sign “McGruff McDogg” for Zoe. Dude doesn’t care, doesn’t even look.
\n\nThe media desk sits about 50 yards down into the bowels of the arena, in front of an elevator. As we walk closer to it, I whisper to Zoe, “Wait, is anybody even back there?”
\n\n“Man, I can’t see that far in this thing.”
\n\n“I don’t think there’s anyone there. Here, walk quickly with me.” But not too quick, lest the first security guard turn around and suspect something’s up.
\n\nWe get to the desk, and I scan the area—there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. There’s definitely some cameras pointed this way. But there are always cameras in places like this, right? Is this a part of the building they would prioritize during an event? It’s definitely a controlled access area, but…
\n\nThe chime of the elevator brings me back. Zoe didn’t hesitate when we got to the desk. She just sidestepped it and called the elevator. Go Zoe! The doors open to reveal a tall man with an ID badge, looking very grumpy, and I immediately offer a jumble of excuses: “Oh sorry we were just making sure our names were here in the book I don’t know what happened to them you see McGruff is doing a promotional, uh, you know, thing, and they told us to sign back here they had our names back there at the entrance so I don’t know where the breakdown in communication was but we’re definitely supposed to—”
\n\n“What floor?”
\n\nSweet relief—he’s the elevator operator! We rush past him into the elevator, before anyone actually shows up at the media desk.
\n\n“I said what floor?”
\n\n“Um…” I scan the numbers “Three?”
\n\nThe doors close. We are lifted into the belly of the beast. Doors open. We’re in.
\n\n“YO!”
\n\n“I know Zoe, I know. We fucking did it. But come on now we need to find a bathroom and get you out of this costume.”
\n\n“What?! No way, man, this shit’s funny. I always wanted to be on the Jumbotron!”
\n\n“Not today, you don’t. Remember, Matt and Laura are here!”
\n\n“Man, fuck them.”
\n\n“Come on, I don’t want to lose my job.”
\n\n“Aight fine.”
\n\nLooking back, I shouldn’t have protested against the costume. I don’t remember how I eventually quit that job, but I would have never forgotten if it had been by giving the bird to my bosses over the Jumbotron.
\n\nIn the bathroom, I think over what to do if we see Matt and Laura. Will I even recognize them? All white people in sports jerseys look the same to me. Maybe I can pass it off like we snuck in here to do some high-volume couponing. The halls are empty, though. It’s the middle of the second period, and the game is tied.
\n\nZoe changing didn’t actually make us less conspicuous. We still had to carry around a giant plush mascot head stuffed with a trench coat, and, worse, we are literally the only two people not wearing hockey jerseys. Everyone is wearing a jersey.
\n\nWe play it safe and go up to the nosebleed seats. But empty seats aren’t as easy to find as I expected. It’s fucking packed, even up here. And for good reason: the game is TENSE. It’s tied 1-1 when we finally take our seats, but almost immediately—SCOOOOOORE! The stadium erupts. Before I know it, Zoe and I are on our feet cheering, though we don’t know whom for.
\n\n“WOOOOOO!!!! What just happened?! I’ve never seen a hockey game.”
\n\n“What! Are you serious, Zoe? Then why did you want to come here?”
\n\n“Are you kidding me? This is way better than work!”
\n\n“Well, uh, I think it was the Capitals, because everyone in here is losing it.”
\n\n“We’re winning!” Some stranger screams in my ear as she hugs me. Yes, we are.
\n\nThe rival team—the Pittsburgh Penguins—start off the third period strong. Two goals right off the bat take away the Capitals’ lead, but it brings suspense back into the game. A fight breaks out on the ice.
\n\n“Yo! They’re just letting those dudes brawl!”
\n\n“Yeah, that’s hockey.”
\n\n“Hell yeah.” Zoe is loving it.
\n\nWith five minutes to go, I start wondering if we should call it and beat everybody to the exit—especially Matt and Laura. But while I’m discussing it with Zoe—SCORE!!!! The Capitals tie it up again. Four minutes left.
\n\n“Aw, fuck it. This is too good.” We stay.
\n\nThe stadium is roaring. The atmosphere is electric. Time slows down for the next four minutes. Not a soul questions whether their tickets were worth what they paid for them. For once during my employment at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, the calculator in my head stops evaluating whether $8.50/hour is worth what I’m doing with my time. I am more than fine with sneaking in to watch this game and hang with my friend for $8.50/hour. Fuck, this shit is FUN.
\n\nOvertime buzzes in and the crowd is LIT.
\n\nI explain to Zoe, “Overtime in hockey is sudden death.”
\n\n“What’s that?”
\n\n“First goal wins. So as soon as somebody scores we out, okay?”
\n\n“Kay.”
\n\nThe whole crowd is screaming their goddamn heads off. Is that Emma’s voice I hear cheering in the stands? Albert’s too!? And George’s? I can’t tell—I can’t take my eyes off the ice. The ice. This is so much nicer than standing around outside in the heat.
\n\nBam! Pittsburgh scores. All the energy is sucked out of the room. My gaze is hypnotically fixed on the ice, along with forty thousand other eyeballs, disbelieving what we just saw. What the fuck is wrong with me? How did I all of a sudden care about this game? Damn, what a rush…
\n\n“Hey, we gotta go, right?”
\n\nZoe breaks me out of my daze.
\n\n“What? Oh. Yeah.”
\n\nWe bolt, trying to beat the crowd. But, as we were sitting in the highest section, all the floors below us are full of people clogging the exits.
\n\n“Damn, we are definitely stuck. Hopefully we don’t see Matt or Laura.”
\n\n“Hey, why don’t we just hand out coupons right here?” Zoe proposes.
\n\n“What? We’ll get kicked out or something.”
\n\n“So? We’re trying to leave anyway. I’m just saying it’s a bunch of disappointed people who might want something to do now, and we get commission from the coupons, y’know?”
\n\nI agree that she has a point.
\n\n“Alright, yeah, go get changed.”
\n\nThe coupons are flying out of my hands. Everyone’s eager to take their minds off the game. Damn, I should’ve brought more.
\n\nTwo floors down and we’re almost to the exit, when none fucking other than motherfucking Matt breaks away from a conversation and gets in our face, “What are you guys doing in here?!”
\n\n“Uh, when the game ended we rushed in, you know—big crowd, lots of coupons.”
\n\n“No. No, no. Jesus, you can’t just go into a private establishment and solicit. You’re going to get us in trouble. We need a contract to hand stuff out in here! Get out of here, NOW!”
\n\nWe turn around and start for the exits.
\n\n“Hey! And don’t get caught.”
\n\n“You got it, boss.”
\n\nIn practice, this theater group was one of the most functionally anarchist projects I’ve participated in. At the beginning of the season, we established agreements—rather than rules—that only passed if every single cast member agreed to them. For the first half of the season, we took part in long, challenging exercises addressing racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ageism—not only discussing them as abstract concepts but also sharing stories about the impact of oppression on our own lives, whether we faced the brunt of it or wielded privilege. In the second half of the season, we broke into small groups, each of which developed a one-act play based on our stories. These plays were then woven into a collectively written, full-length play. For me, the most transformative part was that whenever a problem came up in the cast—some beef, drama, or cliquing—if it couldn’t be addressed interpersonally, we addressed the conflict openly. The experience of working out problems between people from really different backgrounds, people who probably would never have met if not for this theater project, cemented my conviction that human beings have the capacity to live in societies without authority figures.
\n\nNo one besides myself would have identified as an anarchist or understood anarchism as anything other than Hobbesian chaos. However, through this project, everyone came out armed with the lived experience of collective organizing, consensus process, conflict resolution, and an understanding of power and oppression. While I treasure certain anarchist critical examinations of consensus process, identity politics, and conflict resolution, I lament the lack of attention given to the anarchistic aspects of the ways people often live, albeit by some other name or without a label at all. Everyday practices that reproduce anarchistic values are as important as our wildest revolutionary aspirations, for the latter require fertile ground to grow in—and the former can provide it. ↩
\nYears later, a small scandal emerged over the museum paying black youth to stand outside in orange prison jumpsuits, essentially to entertain tourists. For me, this just illustrates how for targeted populations in a white supremacist society, dependence on a wage and imprisonment in a cage are just different expressions of the same thing—different points on the same continuum of oppression. ↩
\nApril 15 is annual Steal Something from Work Day. Today, whether we like it or not, millions of employees around the world are stealing from their employers in a desperate bid to slow the process that is steadily expanding the gap between those who labor and those who profit. (Yes, even on a Sunday.) That makes it a good day to reflect on workplace theft. If you are confused about why people steal from their employers, review the Steal Something from Work Day FAQ or our colleagues’ text, How to Justify Workplace Theft. On the other hand, if you simply want to savor a few pulpy stories about workers who set out to get even, we’ve got just the thing for you.
\n\nMind you, we don’t endorse any of the following behavior. We’re not trying to persuade you to drop a banner or engage in some kind of illegal activity! What we’d like to see happen is for those who violently impose the prevailing system of property and profit on the rest of us to think better of what they’re doing and help us create a world in which stealing from work will be impossible because there are no such things as property, work, or theft. Change their hearts and minds! Failing that, we hope you’ll enjoy the following (surely fictitious!) tales of risk and reclamation.
\n\nFor more resources and other such stories, consult past Steal Something from Work Day commemorations:
\n\nSno-Från-Jobbet-Dagen: The banner reads “Your job is eating you up—Steal a little back!” The line of the advertisement still visible below it urges “Don’t let pollen stop you this year.”
\nWe received this anonymous video from somewhere in Sweden, where enterprising rebels celebrated Steal Something from Work Day 2018 a couple days early by promoting it to their fellow workers.
\n\nYou can also read about Steal Something from Work Day in German and a variety of other languages.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nIn the repertoire of punk jobs there used to be a job known as poster tour. Many people who have spent a little time on college campuses can conjure a memory of this traveling spectacle. Picture it: a company orders absurd quantities of posters from overseas and sends forth its minions to market them to the gaping voids of personality that are the college students of America. The premise is that these first-year students, lost in the sea of their future, will desperately cling to any kind of material affirmation money can buy—to be specific, by adorning their dismally blank walls with beautiful portraits of the complex identities they’ve laboriously constructed throughout their lives.
\n\nBy and large, the students’ poster selections involve a constellation of beer pong, action movies, bikini babes, the ever-present visage of Bob Marley, and some poem about Jesus.
\n\nThe life skills needed for this job are similar to those required for other facets of the punk lifestyle, especially for anyone who has been on any other kind of tour. You wake up and eat a sorry excuse for a hotel breakfast, then get in a van and navigate to an unfamiliar destination; the host of the sale might meet you to introduce you to your venue (the requirements for the role of host do not include being available, being present, having any idea what’s going on, or being sober); you set up your poster sale, painstakingly facilitate access to it, and watch the clock until the event is over. Then you break down the sale, head to the cheapest motel the company could possibly find for you, fill out a bunch of paperwork, and cry yourself to sleep. Repeat this the next day, and the next, and the next—for six weeks.
\n\nThe job attracted outliers from several sections of society. The largest faction, due to the connections of our subculture and the viral nature of our relationship to employment, was the punks. Besides us, there was a smattering of hippies, weirdos, a few wild cards (including some non-subcultural, seemingly successful people), and a healthy portion of Europeans. People from the last category were in a unique circumstance. Through shady outreach efforts and middlemen, they were promised gainful employment in the USA—at a price, of course. The company made sure that the workers’ profits were drained from what they owed to the company for securing their employment, as many companies do.
\n\nTo top it off, we were tasked with selling the drivel of American culture. In rural Kansas, I watched as a dumbfounded Czech person was asked about the TV show Friends. Then the confused college student asked his companion, “Why are there Russians on campus?”
\n\nIt goes without saying: the system was rigged. The company set projections of how much they expected you should sell; you wouldn’t get paid above a meager daily base rate unless you sold more than their projections. It was an easy way to motivate workers while making sure they could never get ahead. The workers were instilled with the desire to work harder in order to reach their projections and make more money via commission, while the company set the numbers high enough that the workers could rarely make a profit—yet in the company’s logic, the workers could only blame themselves for this failure.
\n\nIt was obvious from the get-go that playing by their rules wouldn’t get us anywhere. We needed to create a new landscape if we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity that was taking advantage of us.
\n\nThe first step is always to get organized. At orientation, we exchanged contacts, made friendships, and vetted each other for trust. Mixing fun and subversion, someone uploaded a bingo board to a blog and shared the login passcode with others. (This whole story precedes smart phones.) The idea was that this would help us to keep in touch and allow us to report our winnings.
\n\nThe squares on the board included a fun mix of communal misery (crying yourself to sleep, an\neasy square to win), impossibilities (going a day without selling a Bob Marley poster, which was never achieved by any team), hijinx (selling cute monkey posters to really tough sports bros), and bad behavior (going skinny dipping, drunk dialing the boss, meeting with other poster teams on tour). The blog served as a break room for us to gripe about our working conditions, share tricks, and foster a work environment that would be increasingly hostile to our employers.
\n\nWe showcased our commitment to slacking and time theft front and center. This was such a pillar of\nour work culture that there was no place for people who weren’t slacking and boasting about it. With the help of the blog, every day became a competition to see who could commit the most outlandish offense to the job. At the same time, the blog also helped us share information which enabled us to work out how much profit we were making for the company: with over 50 teams at work, we were making the company about a million dollars a week.
\n\nWe tried to organize a strike. Unfortunately, in the end, the strike did not really come together and the team who was leading it decided just to quit. Quitting seemed like the best option—until we learned what happened when you quit: the company had all kinds of sly rules to ensure that you lost your earnings if you quit prematurely. Worse still, you might end up owing the company money afterwards! The team that quit ended up having to hitchhike out of the company office, as a final insult to the work they had done already.
\n\nThis incident transformed our small-time scheming into war. We had already been telling each other how to pull the small scams we all depended on to stay afloat while working. The company gave us a small stipend for food, so we used our food stamps and pocketed the money. The company paid for hotels, so we would camp or stay with friends and pocket the money. The company allowed for a percentage of shrinkage, so we made sure that a percentage of posters “disappeared” and pocketed the money. Teams got creative: one bought a bunch of their own merchandise and sold it alongside the merchandise provided by the company. They weren’t found out until a college contacted the company to say that it was not OK for them to be selling “all this marijuana merchandise.”
\n\nThe company noticed our sales weren’t meeting their projections, so they authorized us to have a 20% off sale. We charged full price and kept the extra 20%. When you’re in this mindset, the ball just keeps rolling.
\n\nIn a Super 8 motel, I began to toy with a new idea. We dealt with lots of cash. How do you make more cash out of cash?
\n\nThe answer hit me the next day as we drove by a riverboat casino: gambling.
\n\nObviously, this was a bad idea. Countless movies, crime novels, and real-life disasters start this way. Still, we passionately hated the company, we shared an affirming and subversive worker culture, and we had already gotten away with a lot. The fact that it was a bad idea was what made it so appealing: workers at terrible jobs are always looking for something self-destructive to do that might just take the whole enterprise down with them.
\n\nThere was one problem—I knew nothing about gambling. I sat in the motel for hours scribbling out math and probability problems, the way so many people have done in motels near casinos. The prudent gambler would have consulted proper sources via the internet or the library, as many people have written extensively on gambling tactics. But I was motivated and in my zone, and after a few days of neglecting the duties of the job, I had worked out my plan.
\n\nI won’t get into the mechanics of the plan; I wouldn’t want to bore the reader or showcase its obvious flaws. Let’s just say I came up with a strategy that felt safe as long as I would be working with a large amount of cash.
\n\nTo play it safe, I did a test run with some of the money I had earned already. I was really nervous—taking risks with money is completely contrary to my character. I also hadn’t been to casinos, so it was terrifying to watch people lose hundreds and thousands of dollars in seconds. I watched a\ncouple who had just gotten married earlier that day, still in their wedding attire, lose more money than I was slated to make all year in less than an hour. I wasn’t cut out for this.
\n\nStill, I persevered, comforting myself with the thought that if I lost my own money, I’d just take it from the company and figure out some way to get away with it. Sure enough, a nerve-wracking hour or so later, I had more than doubled my initial bet. Like many gambling strategies, it worked in the short term.
\n\nThe next day just happened to be an anniversary dear to jingoistic patriots. It always feels appropriate to do something irreverent to capitalism and America on such a day. We went into the casino, a battlefield of flashing lights and singing machines desperately fighting to keep you feeling like a winner while draining all of the life and money out of you. I’d heard that when you’re gambling, it’s important to have a stopping point—a goal you set beforehand to keep yourself in check in case the desperation of losing or the elation of winning takes over. I won’t disclose the numbers, but with the pretty penny squeezed out of all those Bob Marley posters in my hand, I set out to make ten times the amount I walked in with.
\n\nIn casinos, they don’t want you to stop gambling. They offer free drinks to gamblers, free food, members-only areas, concerts, shirts, stickers, and all sorts of other useless crap to assure you that you’re a winner in hopes that you’ll go on gambling until you’ve lost it all. I couldn’t fall victim to this nonsense; I had a scheme supported by math problems I did on napkins. It was mechanical, cold, exacting, and required the coolheaded rejection of any kind of victory-induced excitement that could tempt me to stray from my path.
\n\nDealer after dealer watched me make the same tactical choices, unfazed by the results. While most gamblers would think about their next bets and take time to place them, I had already done my thinking and was simply executing a strategy. I didn’t take any of the free alcohol; I gave it to my tour buddy, who intelligently decided not to participate in my harebrained scheme. Like a rising flood, my winnings slowly grew while I watched other gamblers win and lose thousands of dollars around\nme. After a full day of what must be called work, I achieved my goal. I had taken company money and made tenfold what I put in.
\n\nI experienced none of the feelings I project to be associated with gambling—I felt no elation, no highs and lows, no sense that my good fortune would enable me to steal the wealth of the casino. I did a math problem and it worked long enough for me to quit while I was ahead. Having reached my self-prescribed goal, I was free to revel in all the benefits that the riverboat casino had to offer. We enjoyed all the free bowling we could handle, ate free hot dog after free hot dog, and danced with middle-aged day-drunk casino goers to a band of older men doing a cover of “What I Got” by Sublime (with several additional gratuitous saxophone solos).
\n\nThe money I made came and went, as money does. But the feeling of getting yet another one over on the company that had engineered nothing but failure for its workers is something that I’ll carry with me forever. It reminds me that if I divert the energy and time that my bosses want me to invest in the job towards the more strategic goal of subverting my workplace, my fellow employees and I will come out ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/15/2.jpg\")
\nOn March 30, 2018, longtime anarchist and author Paul Z. Simons passed away. Paul was a determined rebel and illegalist; his writing is both lively and erudite. He published an article entitled “Take Things from Work” in Black Eye, a journal he helped edit some three decades ago. More recently, in “Illegalist Praxis: Notes on a Decade of Crime,” he outlined his own experiences stealing from work as a young person.
\n\nBear in mind that Paul was writing about a different era, when surveillance cameras were less of a concern. But you’re not the sort of person who would consider doing what he’s describing, anyway, are you?
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/13/resources-for-steal-something-from-work-day-2018-posters-stickers-and-more", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/13/resources-for-steal-something-from-work-day-2018-posters-stickers-and-more", "title": "Resources for Steal Something from Work Day 2018 : Posters, Stickers, and More", "summary": "Steal Something from Work Day is right around the corner! We offer posters, stickers, and other resources with which to promote it. So long as there are capitalists, make every profit cost them!", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/header1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/header1.jpg", "date_published": "2018-04-13T16:55:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:36Z", "tags": [ "Work", "Steal Something from Work Day" ], "content_html": "Before I begin, a disclaimer or two. First, I never knowingly physically harmed anyone. Second, most of my criminal activities were driven by survival, in some cases by desperation.
\n\nA quick philosophical footnote: money taken in crime is far sweeter than money earned. The fact that one relies on oneself, or a group, to outthink, outsmart, and outbrave some stupid boss and his security precautions turns ill-gotten gains into reward beyond compare. Plus, the hours, while short and nerve-wracking, are never boring.
\n\nOddly, one of the best ways to begin a burglary is by getting a job in the store you plan to hit. In general, places that have loads of cash, that deal with deposits in a lazy fashion, and that trust you just enough to let you know that the burglary alarms are “just for show.” After a week or two of drudgery, you’re ready. The neighborhood is dead quiet at night, there are rear entrances that haven’t been used in years, and hopefully those entrances have windows. Timing is key and I recommend between 3 and 4 in the morning on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. The cops are all changing out shifts, the security guards (if any) are drinking coffee somewhere trying to stay awake, and the neighbors are all tucked in their beds. Windows can be easily removed by breaking through the glass with a cloth wrapped hammer and steel bars can be separated using a tire jack. If the back is lit by floodlights, unscrew them. For windows placed high, use a car as a boost to reach them. A quick dash into the establishment—to exactly the place where you know the day’s cash receipts are hidden—and out. A peek in the rear view mirror to make sure you’re clean—and gone. Like it never happened. The rewards from burglaries can be surprising: in one short twenty minute stint I walked off with almost $5000. They can also be disheartening; one burglary took almost an hour and netted less than $300—but that was the exception.
\n
It’s that time of year again! For years, employees around the world have celebrated April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day, a day to even the scales with those who profit on our labor. This year, April 15 falls on a Sunday, which means employers should have nothing to fear—since for thousands of years, Sunday has been designated as a day of rest on which no one should have to work. Didn’t we win the struggle for the 40-hour work week? However, just in case the ever-increasing precarity of the labor market has forced some poor soul to work on Sunday, we’ve prepared a great deal of outreach material celebrating Steal Something from Work Day.
\n\nThe capitalists are enriching themselves on your labor! Settle the score!
\n\nTo employ these, just print them out on a sheet of sticker paper, cut them up, and deploy!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/stickers/steal-from-work/steal-from-work_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF of a sheet of our classic Steal Something from Work Day stickers.
\nComrades have translated our classic sticker into Swedish!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/3.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF of a sheet of these stickers.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/stickers/steal-something-from-work-day/steal-something-from-work-day_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF of a sheet with a variety of Steal Something from Work Day stickers.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/1.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/if-your-coworker-needs-something/if-your-coworker-needs-something_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/hang-in-there/hang-in-there_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF.
\nPrint out this trifold to spread the word. Slip it into lockers, leave it in a tip jar paper-clipped to your tip, give them out at the metro.
\n\nUntil we can abolish capitalism—make every profit cost them!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/15/steal-from-socialism", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/15/steal-from-socialism", "title": "Yes, We even Stole from Work under Socialism : Steal Something from Work Day: Against Capitalism, Socialism, and Work Itself", "summary": "So long as there are managers, workers will rob their workplaces—not just for personal gain, but above all to keep alive that which is best in themselves.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/15/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/15/header.jpg", "date_published": "2017-04-15T04:15:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:33Z", "tags": [ "Steal Something from Work Day", "employment", "capitalism", "socialism", "hungary" ], "content_html": "To celebrate Steal Something from Work Day 2017, we present this extract from the book A Worker in a Worker’s State, written by Miklós Haraszti in 1972 when he was a young employee at the Red Star Tractor Factory and suppressed by the Hungarian government as a threat to socialism. Throughout history, workers have stolen from their workplaces under capitalism, socialism, and communism alike. Haraszti suggests that this stealing is actually the most creative and enterprising activity that takes place in the factory, implying the possibility of a world in which all labor would be equally creative and free. His text also provides a window into the lives of workers in the Eastern Bloc, revealing the void at the heart of the supposed workers’ utopia. So long as there are managers, workers will rob their workplaces—not just for personal gain, but above all to keep alive that which is best in themselves.
\n\nAt a time when young people in the West who did not experience the horrors of state socialism are spreading nostalgia for it while fascists gain legitimacy in Eastern Europe by presenting themselves as its foes, it’s important to remember that state socialism never gave workers the freedom or abundance it promised—and that its true opponents are not the nationalists who would inflict still worse horrors, but anarchists and other ordinary working people who resist all forms of imposed authority. Likewise, Haraszti’s text is prescient in anticipating how artisanal craftsmanship would be further commodified in the post-industrial economy, offering the illusion of free activity as yet another facet of the market. Instead of peddling nostalgia for state control of industry, factory work, or any other specter of the 20th century—or seeking to monetize our autonomous activity after the fashion of the 21st century—let’s take immediate action against against capitalism, socialism, and work itself.
\n\nToday is a good day to get started: it’s Steal Something from Work Day!
\n\nYou can find this text and a great many more like it in Heist, our journal of workplace expropriation. Print out copies and distribute them at your workplace!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/15/02.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nA homer is an object made for his own purpose or pleasure by a worker using his factory’s machines and materials. It is not made for sale as an additional source of income. The word does not appear in most dictionaries, but appears to have been the most widely used equivalent in England and North America.
\n
“Homers? Is there any chance of homers?” is often asked by those thinking of leaving this factory, when they’re tipped off about another place. Many factors must be taken into account when you want to change your job. Although for most workers homers are not vital, they’ll make them if they have the chance, and they’ll try to create the opportunity if it doesn’t exist already. Some will pay a high price to obtain a position that allows them to make homers.
\n\nThe government journals portray workers who make homers as thieves. Similarly, the factory bosses “fight” against homers. Warnings and sanctions rain down on the heads of those who misappropriate materials, use machines for their own purposes, or tap the factory’s supply of electricity. If the factory guard finds a homer in our pockets or on our bodies, he has caught a thief.
\n\nBut even if the journals don’t acknowledge it, both workers and bosses know very well that this is just words. The real damage to the factory is the time lost in making an object—time which cannot be utilized by the factory. “If the foreman knows you’re making homers, he’ll send one of us to fetch some glue and he’ll stick you to your machines for the rest of the day,” said my neighbor, joking with someone who was borrowing a tool from him to make a homer.
\n\nThe secret of this passion for homers is not a simple one. It can’t be reduced to the minimal value of the knick-knacks which the workers actually make and, especially on piece-rates, how long they take bears no relation to the value of the time lost.
\n\nWorkers on hourly wages turn to homers when they have given to the factory what the factory has demanded, or when they have a free moment. If hourly workers make homers they don’t risk anything—except being found out. Not only will they then be punished, the discovery will also offer an excellent opportunity to demand increased production from them.
\n\nWorkers on conveyor belts, or on fully automatic machines, completely delivered from the pressures of time, are only likely to make homers in their dreams. Technological development has given these workers a moral superiority, which at least forces the government satirists to look for a new theme in their attacks.
\n\nBut the piece-rate worker manages his time himself, and each minute that passes without an increase in the number of pieces represents a financial loss for him. With the constant pressure of piece-rates, the factory does all it can to preach the morality of labor. According to the rate-fixers’ estimates, the piece-rate workers should themselves renounce their passion for theft. In fact, management has to admit that nothing—neither prohibitions, nor punishments, nor public humiliation by the security guards—will persuade them to give it up.
\n\nPerhaps it is more than an empty play on words to say that we “loot” [that is, cut corners in violation of regulations] in order to have time to steal.
\n\nMaking homers is a real addiction; those who go in for it know that they do themselves more harm than good. The bosses and the rate-fixers view the persistent refusal of piece-rate workers to give up this habit in terms of the basest instincts. “How does a person like that bring up his children? We gave him sound advice and even delivered a sharp rap across his knuckles, but nothing will stop him from pilfering,” the foreman grumbles, talking about a homer addict. Yet the passion for “looting” does not upset the bosses. Not because they force us to do it, but because “looting” doesn’t cost anything except the strength, nerves, wellbeing, thoughts and life of the worker—even when he thinks that he is stealing something from the factory.
\n\nWhy, then, are piece-rate workers so fond of making homers? The usefulness of homers cannot be the real motive, because the worker’s life is so dependent on the workshop, the machine, his materials, and his eight-hour shifts that there is no chance whatever of his making anything which he really needs. It would be a dubious triumph for “do-it-yourself”—given the gigantic level of infringements that would be involved—if the conditions of work were such that they permitted workers to make everything they needed for setting up house in the form of homers. Then, certainly, homers would be worthwhile, since every worker could do repairs, and make small gadgets cheaply and with little effort.
\n\nSome of my colleagues still harbor a nostalgia for the days of the domestic artisan, but they rarely talk about their feelings, except when they are embarrassed or are making an excuse if someone catches them out. “Peasants, too, give what they produce to the State, but they don’t buy their vegetables in a market. Here, there are all the tools you could want, and stacks of discarded materials—but if I want to repair my faucet, I’m supposed to call the plumber.” This sort of talk is really a rationalization; it doesn’t bear much relation to the real motives for making a homer.
\n\nPerhaps the mechanics and fitters, who are paid by the hour, really do have the means—thanks to homers—to set up their families, since they have at their fingertips, in the workshop, all the tools and machines necessary for household repairs large and small. But I am chained to my machine even if, at the most once a week, I find after an interminable number of runs that I have won a little time for myself. It is impossible for the piece-rate worker to flit across the workshop like a butterfly and to fiddle around with other machines. The foreman would see him at once, and fix him up with more work. Besides, the others are also riveted to their machines, and in any case our machines are too specialized, too large, too powerful, and too complicated: they themselves dictate what we can make with them.
\n\nAnd so in fact homers are seldom useful things. Bizarrely enough, when they are, it is generally not for some outside use, but for something needed within the factory. In theory, there are special workers to manufacture the base plates and braces for mounting pieces, but in fact we must make them ourselves. It is an unwritten rule that when feasible we make everything our jobs require with our own machines. Such operations have real utility, but are also infuriating. They are hardly paid but they are necessary to get through faster, or even to complete a job.
\n\nEven around such necessary preparatory work, the mysterious aura of homers begins to appear, to the extent that everyone calls these pieces “homers” even though in fact they entitle us to a supplementary payment. No one would think of telling his neighbor how he’d run through a series, and no one would be interested if he did. But everyone can talk with gusto about these preparatory “homers,” and find an interested audience. Without doubt, the reason is that we plan this work ourselves, and can complete it as we think best.
\n\nOur machines rarely give an opportunity for other useful kinds of homers. But that doesn’t do away with homers, it only changes them. For piece-workers, homers are ends in themselves, like all true passions. Here the passion is for nothing other than work, work as an end in itself. The diverse forms of homer have only one thing in common: they have to be of a size that can be surreptitiously smuggled out of the factory. Some have not kept to this rule; and finished objects lie gathering dust in their locker, or their tool boxes, or beside their machines, until the worker changes his factory, when they try to get them out, or, if this is hopeless, give them away.
\n\nFor us, the potential of milling machines, lathes, and borers stimulates and at the same time limits our imaginations. The raw material is chiefly metal. The objects that can be made are key-holders, bases for flower-pots, ashtrays, pencil boxes, rulers and set squares, little boxes to bring salt to the factory for the morning break, bath mats (made out of rolls of white polystyrene), counters in stainless steel to teach children simple arithmetic (a marvelous present), pendants made from broken milling teeth, wheels for roulette-type games, dice, magnetized soap holders, television aerials (assembled at home), locks and bolts, coat-holders for the changing-room cupboard, knives, daggers, knuckle-dusters, and so on.
\n\nIn place of the order, “You make that,” comes a question: “What can I make?” But if this work is an end in itself, it is not thereby without a purpose. It is the antithesis of our meaningless “real” work: the possibilities are limited, but the worker who makes a homer uses his head and keeps his eyes open. He scans the raw materials around him, weighs up the unexploited capacities of his machines and the other auxiliary machines, like the small disc-cutter in the corner of the section or the grinding-machine, as he examines the hand tools at his disposal. Then he decides. He decides on what he will accomplish and works to realize that chosen object and not for some other purpose. If he uses the product itself, then before all else he will relish the pleasure of having accomplished it, and of knowing when, how, and with what he made it, and that he had originated its existence.
\n\nThis humble little homer, made secretly and only through great sacrifices, with no ulterior motive, is the only form possible of free and creative work—it is both the germ and the model: this is the secret of the passion.
\n\nThe tiny gaps that the factory allows us become natural islands where, like free men, we can mine hidden riches, gather fruits, and pick up treasures at our feet. We transform what we find with a disinterested pleasure free from the compulsion to make a living. It brings us an intense joy, enough to let us forget the constant race: the joy of autonomous, uncontrolled activity, the joy of labor without rate-fixers, inspectors, and foremen.
\n\nA complex organization forces me to maintain a minimum level of quality in my daily work. In making homers, quality, which itself arises as I have envisaged it, is the aim itself, the profit, and the pleasure. It is so natural that the question is no longer “What are you making?” but “How are you making it?”
\n\nThe joy of this unity between conception and execution stands in extreme contrast to our daily work. “Where is the blueprint?” an inspector asked as usual when he came over to make a check. M— loves to repeat the brazen response (fortunately it did not get him into trouble) which aimed to rub in that for once he and the inspector had nothing to say to each other: “It is here, in my head.” The inspector had to puzzle over this for a while before it clicked. M— was making a homer. In outward appearance, nothing had changed. The same movements, which otherwise served only to increase production for the factory, were transformed by what he was doing into an activity of an entirely different kind.
\n\nBy making homers we win back power over the machine and our freedom from the machine; skill is subordinated to a sense of beauty. However insignificant the object, its form of creation is artistic. This is all the more so because (mainly to avoid the reproach of theft) homers are rarely made with expensive, showy, or semi-finished materials. They are created out of junk, from useless scraps of iron, from leftovers, and this ensures that their beauty comes first and foremost from the labor itself.
\n\nMany do not care if their noble end-product clearly reveals its humble origins; but others hold fervently to the need for a perfect finish. Were it not that homers have to be made in a few snatched minutes, and that often we can’t get back to them from one week to the next, if making homers were not such a fleeting activity, then one could almost claim that there were two schools: the first “Functionalist,” the second “Secessionist” [a pre-Soviet Hungarian art movement celebrating excessive decoration]. There are also passing fashions in homers. And just as homers are a model of nonexistent joys, so they are the model for all protest movements.
\n\nMaking homers is the only work in the factory that stands apart from our incessant competition against each other. In fact it demands cooperation, voluntary cooperation—not just to smuggle them out but also to create them. Sometimes my neighbor asks me to do the necessary milling for his homer, and in return makes a support for me on his lathe. On these occasions we wait patiently until the other “has the time.” Among piece-rate workers altruism is rare. Even in making homers, aid without a return is inconceivable. But it is not a matter of like for like: no one calculates how much his help is worth, or the time spent on it. Sometimes one can even come across selflessness without any expectations of recompense—which could never happen in “real” work. Most friendships begin with the making of a joint homer.
\n\nThese different joys are obviously marred by the knowledge that they are only the joys of an oasis in a desert of piece-rate work. Slowly, the factory returns to itself, the computer dries out the oasis, the pressures of production continue unchanged. Despite this, everyone is cheerful during these few precious minutes. This is manifestly obvious to all but the bosses—who don’t need to worry about the constant bad temper of piece-rate workers except insofar as it relates to production; and who don’t display the least understanding of this loophole to happiness, not even as a matter of tactics. A foreman’s anger is a sure indication of the happiness that the worker sows with a homer.
\n\nI am convinced that homers carry a message. “Artisanal tinkering, survivals from a dying industry: if homers are a negation, then they are only a nostalgia for the past.” This might be said if you didn’t grasp the importance of homers for workers on piece-rates. In fact, they don’t know the old handicrafts any more and they detest the private customers for whom they often do black market labor after factory hours.
\n\nWorkers would gladly renounce the artisan character of homers, but they have no other way to assert themselves over mechanized labor. Similarly, they would gladly produce things which made sense, but the production of senseless homers is their only chance to free themselves, for a few minutes, from the “good sense” of the factory. They would gladly manufacture, often collectively, things which were useful for the community; but they can only make what they want to make on their own, or at most with a few others.
\n\nSo these two steps towards the senseless—producing useless things and renouncing payment—in fact turn out to be two steps in the direction of freedom, even though they are swiftly blocked by the wall of wage labor. In fact, homers are a vain attempt to defect from the cosmos of piece-ratios.
\n\nSuppose that all of our work could be governed by the pleasures of homers, then it would follow that in every homer is the kernel of a completely different sense: that of work carried out for pleasure. The industrial psychologist, the expert in managerial methods, the social technician, and all the growing number of specialists who are replacing functionaries once breathless with the heroism of labor cannot comprehend the hopelessness of their task if they are unable to understand the pleasures of homers. Their task is to dry out the oases while filling the desert with mirages. Were it not that these experts in production are also dispensers of our livelihood, in command of discipline and achievement, we would enter the age of the Great Homer. This alienated sense, imposed from outside by wages (and its denial, the consolations of forbidden irrationality), would be replaced by the ecstasy of true needs. Precisely what is senseless about homers from the point of view of the factory announces the affirmation of work motivated by a single incentive, stronger than all others: the conviction that our labor, our life, and our consciousness can be governed by our own goals. The Great Homer would be realized through machines, but our experts would subordinate them to two requirements: that we use them to make things of real utility, and that we are independent of the machines themselves. This would mean the withering of production controls. We would only produce what united homer-workers needed and what allowed us to remain workers united in the manufacture of homers. And we would produce a thousand times more efficiently than today.
\n\nTo take the whole world into account, to combine our strength, to replace rivalry with cooperation, to make that we want, to plan and execute the plans together, to create in a way that was pleasurable in itself; to be freed from the duress of production and its inspectors—all these are announced by the message of the homer, of the few minutes that resurrect our energy and capacities. The Great Homer would not carry the risk of our frittering away strength senselessly; on the contrary, it would be the only way to discover what is even precluded by the homer of wage-earners: the real utility of our exertions. If we could direct our lives towards the Great Homer, we would gladly take on a few hours of mechanized labor a day, so long as it was needed. Otherwise, if everything remains as it does today, we face a terrible destiny: that of never knowing what we have lost.
\n\nConnoisseurs of folklore may look on homers as a native, decorative art. As yet, they aren’t able to see further than that. But they will, and the day will come when homers are no longer forbidden but are commercialized and administered. People who work on automatic machines will be able to buy homers in the shops after seeing them in magazines or on television. Then, no one will suspect that homers were originally more than a “do-it-yourself” hobby or a mere pastime; that they once shone through factory controls, the necessity of making a living, and the pressures of wages, as a surrogate for something which by then perhaps will be even more impossible to name than it is today.
\n\n\n\n\nThe tiny gaps that the factory allows us become natural islands where, like free men, we can mine hidden riches, gather fruits, and pick up treasures at our feet. We transform what we find with a disinterested pleasure free from the compulsion to make a living. It brings us an intense joy, enough to let us forget the constant race: the joy of autonomous, uncontrolled activity.
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/15/01.jpg\")
\nAt a factory in the Soviet Union, inventory control had determined that one of the workers was stealing from the People’s State. They heightened security and monitored him carefully. Every evening, as the man left work with his wheelbarrow, the security guard would search him fastidiously—packages, boxes, bags, pockets, everything—but to no avail. Although the guard never found a thing, he continued to search the worker at the end of each shift—year after year after year. Finally, decades later, the man was due to retire. As he pushed his wheelbarrow out for the last time, the guard searched it, then said in despair, “Look, it doesn’t matter anymore, but satisfy my curiosity. We know you are stealing something. Yet every day I search your wheelbarrow and find nothing. How can this be?”
\n\n“It’s easy,” shrugged the worker. “I’m stealing wheelbarrows.”
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/13/announcing-steal-something-from-work-day-2017-frequently-asked-questions-about-our-yearly-day-of-action", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/13/announcing-steal-something-from-work-day-2017-frequently-asked-questions-about-our-yearly-day-of-action", "title": "Announcing Steal Something from Work Day 2017! : Frequently Asked Questions about Our Yearly Day of Action", "summary": "Tax Day is coming up. If you’re wondering why you should give your hard-earned wages to Donald Trump, consider how billionaires like him get their fortunes—they skim profits off people like you.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/13/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/13/header.jpg", "date_published": "2017-04-13T16:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:33Z", "tags": [ "Steal Something from Work Day", "employment", "capitalism", "labor organizing" ], "content_html": "This coming Saturday, April 15, is Steal Something from Work Day, a worldwide holiday scheduled to coincide with Tax Day. If you’re wondering why you should give your hard earned wages to an erratic billionaire so he can pay for more bureaucrats to spy on you and police to hassle you, consider where billionaires like Donald Trump get their fortunes in the first place—they skim profits off the hard work of ordinary people like you. That’s where Steal Something from Work Day comes in: don’t let them puff themselves up at your expense!
\n\nAt this point, Steal Something from Work Day is a time-honored tradition. Even Haaretz is covering it this year. Tax Day 2017 has been pushed back to April 18, but Steal Something from Work Day still falls on the customary day; unfortunately, millions will spend this Saturday carrying out orders for a boss rather than disposing of their potential on their own terms.
\n\nWork is stealing everything from us. Isn’t it time you took a little back?
\n\nIs STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK immoral?
\n\nStealing is immoral, yes. That’s why your employers should pay you the full value they obtain from your labor, rather than paying you a fraction of it and taking the rest for themselves as profit. If you take something from the workplace, you’re not stealing, but simply taking back the results of your effort.
\n\nIs STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK illegal?
\n\nTechnically, it may be. Slavery, on the other hand, was legal until December 1865.
\n\nIs STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY anti-employer?
\n\nHate to break it to you, boss, but your employees steal from you every day. By encouraging them to focus on one day a year, we’re looking out for you! Consider this a harm reduction approach.
\n\nDoes STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY make it harder for employees to get away with stealing?
\n\nNot significantly. The number one obstacle to employee theft is not bosses or cameras, but misguided coworkers. STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY is a consciousness-raising holiday promoting worker solidarity and legitimizing employee redistribution of wealth.
\n\nNot everyone has an easy time stealing from the workplace. Some demographics are singled out for surveillance, and many people can’t afford to risk getting into trouble!
\n\nThat’s true! That’s why, if you are not one of those people, you should STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK to share with those who can’t risk it themselves.
\n\nI’m retired. Can I participate in STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY?
\n\nYes, you can—just go back to your former place of employment! If you had to wrestle over a pension with them, they’ve got it coming. It’s never too late to STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK!
\n\nI’d love to STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK, but I work at a local non-profit foundation providing free services to survivors of domestic violence.
\n\nIf you truly love the place you work, chances are it’s under-funded. That’s because the for-profit mega-corporations are hogging all the resources! Time to pay a visit to someone else’s workplace.
\n\nBut my employers give to charitable causes when they make a profit! If I STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK, they’ll have less to donate.
\n\nWho do you think should choose the most deserving charitable cause for your earnings—you, or some corporate bureaucrat? Just because you STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK doesn’t mean you have to keep it all for yourself!
\n\nIf I STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK, will it make me a more selfish person?
\n\nNot necessarily! By and large, people find it easier to share things when they don’t have to trade their lives for them in miserable drudgery. STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK might actually make you a more generous person!
\n\nWhat does God think about STEALING FROM WORK?
\n\nAcademic theologians such as German Old Testament scholar A. Alt, author of Das Verbot des Diebstahls im Dekalog, suggest that the commandment “thou shalt not steal” was originally intended against stealing people—against abductions and slavery. This lines up with Jewish interpretations of the statement as “thou shalt not kidnap”—for example, as stated by Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, famed as the author of the first comprehensive commentary on the Talmud. If this is so, the real crime is not the worker taking back a part of the fruit of his labor, but the economic system that forces him into wage slavery in the first place. Likewise, as Jesus explains, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24)—don’t put your employer at such risk!
\n\nWhat if I STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK and my company goes out of business? Is this biting the hand that feeds me?
\n\nCorporations plan workplace shrinkage into the budget well in advance. They’re practically counting on you to steal something! If that surplus goes unclaimed, it’ll just stay in their coffers as more unearned profits.
\n\nWill the costs of STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK be passed on to consumers?
\n\nYour employers are shrewd businessmen—if they were simply trying to distribute goods to the needy as affordably as possible, they’d be in a different line of work. That means if they could be charging customers more, they already would be. The prices of their products are determined by the market, not by the cost of producing them.
\n\nBut won’t STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK destabilize the economy? What if the market crashes again? Will STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK bring about the end of the world?
\n\nAre you kidding? Who does all the work in this society—bosses, or workers? If anything, things would go more smoothly without them. If every corporation went out of business tomorrow and we could get our hands on all the resources they’ve hoarded, don’t you think we’d be able to distribute them more sensibly? They’re lucky we don’t steal everything!
\n\nWill STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK inhibit real social change? Shouldn’t we be organizing to address the root of our problems rather than acting individualistically?
\n\nMaybe you’re onto something! But STEALING SOMETHING FROM WORK doesn’t prevent you from organizing collectively. For example, you could coordinate with your coworkers to share what you pocket. Really, what good would it do to get organized together if you were still afraid to take what you deserve? On the other hand, imagine if we could go beyond taking things from our workplaces, and take over the workplaces themselves…
\n\nWhy is April 15 STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY?
\n\nAs most employees know, every day can be Steal Something From Work day. But we can’t encourage people to go steal from their workplaces all the time—
\n\nIf there was ever a good day to Steal Something From Work, it has to be April 15, Tax Day. For the government, every April 15 is Steal Something From You Day. They take your hard-earned money and dump it right into some oil war or back room deal—that’s yet another way the corporations are making out at your expense.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/13/01.jpg\")
Remember who’s stealing from you!
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