Why work doesn’t pay

Unpaid upends conventional wisdom about how we value work, exposing wage theft as one of capitalism’s enduring open secrets. From unpaid overtime and under-the-table jobs to algorithmic exploitation, there are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them. But what if wage theft isn’t a bug but a feature of capitalism itself?

Across the world, millions of workers exhaust themselves in billions of hours of free labour. As app-based gig work becomes increasingly common, ex­ploitation grows more sophisticated and harder to detect.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Blending personal stories with a fresh, accessible take, Unpaid traces the long history of wage theft and reveals how employers continue to get away with it. Matthew Cole shows that wage theft is not just about broken laws but about the nature of property itself. He makes a powerful case for our collective right to reassert our labour-power.