alt Hacker NewsActually not paying earned wages is one of the few things that has a lot of teeth around it. Federal rules typically award back pay and an equal amount as liquidated damages, plus attorney's fees and court costs, and states may add penalties of their own.
Wage theft is one of the largest classes of theft in the US if not the largest. The government may do some work against the most egregious instances of theft but they barely stop it.
This is 2012 data but it seems like the FBI is no longer reporting the stats when I went to their crime data tool[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wage_theft_versus_other_p...