solarpunk memes

Profit is wage theft? How does that make any sense, or help anyone?

Extortionate profits is exploitation.

But profit per se is a person - or the company owners - receiving back some part of the value they created (helped create), on top of the expense put in.

Employees receive profit for their labour as salary; owners receive profit for their investment as 'company profit'. The problem is exploit their control and position to shift more of the profit to themselves, exploiting the labour of those doing most of the work.

But calling profit wage theft means investors and entrepreneurs should get exactly zero for their investment and work getting things started: and that seems to me a nonsense take that helps nobody - unless you rename profit as ' investor salary'.

Companies making record profits, which don't go proportionally to all the members/labourers therein, is a wrong. And I agree with other commenters that it needs a different name.

Wage theft is a different issue that (as I understand it) is massively under-addressed but legally recognised in America/UK/etc, of robbing employees of their wages as per the agreement/contract. This crime needs attacking, and expanding the name to include things that are not legally criminal, makes it harder to tackle this one - or you need a new name for this specifically.*

To address this other kind of wage theft, where employees are robbed, legally, of their appropriate/fair share of the resulting value**, you need a separate framework of legality of fair profit sharing, and illegality of the converse.***

* Incidentally, this is a concern I have about 'rape' as non-consent. (And maybe sometimes a parallel concern about some uses of 'terrorism'.) Should the couple who go into a room for sexy times, get naked, then one decides maybe not tonight, but the other emotionally presses them into it - should that be treated as severely as the man who accosts a woman in the alley at night and forcefully copulates with her? Perhaps? Should the man who forcefully copulates be treated as lax as the one who didn't take no for an answer after they were both naked in the bedroom? ...No. I hope people who actually deal with these things have ways to handle them properly, but it's seemed to me like the definition gets expanded to make a point, "these things are also bad and you should hate them just as much!" But in the process loses the force of the worse, more specific crime.

(Sorry, long, unrelated tangent.)

** Okay, so I'm calling it 'robbed' now. I guess that means I've kind of cone round to agreeing more than I intended to.

*** And that's your point, isn't it! Well, I thought I disagreed with you, then it seems I've talked myself into something at least similar. I'll let my long and boring comment stand anyway. It's not 100% useless ;-)