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Workplace Theft Is On the Rise (theatlantic.com)
rfengineer tipped us off to this story. The Atlantic reports:
Your office is a den of thieves. Don't take my word for it: When a forensic-accounting firm surveyed workers in 2013, 52 percent admitted to stealing company property. And the thievery is getting worse. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners reports that theft of "non-cash" property -- ranging from a single pencil in the supply closet to a pallet of them on the company loading dock -- jumped from 10.6 percent of corporate-theft losses in 2002 to 21 percent in 2018. Managers routinely order up to 20 percent more product than is necessary, just to account for sticky-fingered employees.
Some items -- scissors, notebooks, staplers -- are pilfered perennially; others vanish on a seasonal basis: The burn rate on tape spikes when holiday gifts need wrapping, and parents ransack the supply closet in August, to avoid the back-to-school rush at Target. After a new Apple gadget is released, some workers report that their company-issued iPhone is broken -- knowing that IT will furnish a replacement, no questions asked. What's behind this 9-to-5 crime wave? Mark R. Doyle, the president of the loss-prevention consultancy Jack L. Hayes International, points to a decrease in supervision, the ease of reselling purloined products online, and what he alleges is "a general decline in employee honesty."
The report advises companies that the best way to reduce fraud was with surprise audits and data monitoring.
Another interesting statistic? "Fraudsters" who'd been with their company for more than five years "stole twice as much."
Some items -- scissors, notebooks, staplers -- are pilfered perennially; others vanish on a seasonal basis: The burn rate on tape spikes when holiday gifts need wrapping, and parents ransack the supply closet in August, to avoid the back-to-school rush at Target. After a new Apple gadget is released, some workers report that their company-issued iPhone is broken -- knowing that IT will furnish a replacement, no questions asked. What's behind this 9-to-5 crime wave? Mark R. Doyle, the president of the loss-prevention consultancy Jack L. Hayes International, points to a decrease in supervision, the ease of reselling purloined products online, and what he alleges is "a general decline in employee honesty."
The report advises companies that the best way to reduce fraud was with surprise audits and data monitoring.
Another interesting statistic? "Fraudsters" who'd been with their company for more than five years "stole twice as much."
Have they tried not treating their workers like shit? Won't stop all theft, but should reduce it.
It's not worth getting in trouble for snagging office supplies most of the time, but if you're struggling to make ends meet and your school just sent home a giant list of crap you need for your kid then suddenly it's worth it.
I remember being pretty shocked when even in high school I had to come up with $50-$100 bucks a month in various supplies for my kid's school projects. Crap that, when I was a kid (before the funding cuts of the mid 90s and 2000s) was just part of school.
A buddy of mine recently moved from a poor district to a rich one after saving the down payment to buy a house and was shocked by how much he was saving on school supplies because the school had things like paper, pencils and art supplies.
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I only worked for one company that wasn't run by a total piece of shit in my career,
There might be something wrong with you. At very least, you can say your selection of employment places should be improved.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Treat workers like crap, and you'll get treated like crap in return. A lot of US employers: (1) Don't want to give time off, even if it's written into the contract. No vacation time and discouraged sick leave are a fucking disgrace. (2) Lobby against things like public insurance, because they want workers tied to their jobs for life, (3) Treat employees like children -- drug-test and thus penalize recreational activity outside the office. (4) Fire employees before their vested to keep them from vesting. Is it any wonder that a few rolls of tape or whatever go missing? I'm surprised more employees don't steal more things, frankly.
If he's in the US, maybe there's something wrong with 50-hour-per-week, no-vacation, all-work-no-play American "culture."
If he's in the US, and he has that, then there's definitely something wrong with his method of choosing workplaces. Even if you're an Uber driver you can do better than that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I seem to remember a Dilbert book "How to build a better life by stealing office supplies".
The summary didn't mention "envy" as a reason. The disparity in pay and wealth has grown a lot in the last few decades. Contrast Jeff Bezos with an Amazon warehouse worker, or the Walton family vs Walmart clerks. CEOs have always made more than line staff, but the ratio has increased greatly.
Not everyone wants a gig economy McJob -- why should a secure job and reasonable working conditions be incompatible? They're not in most of the developed world, you know.
A secure job and the computer industry are incompatible everywhere. Security in the computer industry comes from developing the skill of finding a good job.
Which coincidentally, our AC friend lacks.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm not condoning employee theft, but I understand where they're coming from. With stagnant wages, it should be no surprise to anybody that more employees are committing petty larceny. But the bigger cost is "time theft" when non-smoking workers take smoke breaks too, long visits to the bathroom with a smart phone in the pocket, or the frequent extended lunch break. Employees with stagnant wages will seek just compensation one way or another.
If you go back in time 50 years, office supplies of the sort discussed in the article were paramount. There was no other way to run a business without the physical supplies required to function. So the inventory and management of those items was critical, because the volume of those items used was so high that it directly effected the profit to unsure their efficient use (we processed 5000 accounts this month, we should have consumed X amount of resources A, B and C). Now that it is possible and desirable to go "paper free", the management of physical office supplies has fallen to the wayside. Businesses recognize that these things must be needed for some tasks, and so they provide them. However since they do not drive the bottom line, and the volume consumed is an order of magnitude less, they are not managed as closely. So now it is easier than ever to take things even though the volume of those items consumed by a business is far less.
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Real life is overrated.
But they told me to act like I own the company.
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Stop lumping the guy who went home with a pen (literally anyone) alongside the chick stealing boxes of pens and selling them online.
There is a very big difference between the person who just doesn't sweat their location when they print something and the person who deliberately prints and binds copies of books from project guttenberg to resell.
It's hard not to take home office supplies. You're running late to a meeting, so you grab a pen off your desk and stick it in your pocket. Then you forget about it. A week later, your significant other asks if you forgot about something, and that's when you find out that the pen exploded all over the laundry. Or at best, you notice it, and you toss it somewhere to bring with you the next day, and then by the next day, you've forgotten about it. A month goes by, and you see a pen and wonder why it is there, and you put it in the jar with the rest of your pens.
That's not stealing in any meaningful sense of the word. Besides, most employers these days expect you to do some work from home outside of office hours. So if you don't have a few random office supplies from work at home, then your employer is arguably stealing from you.
The real problem is companies that let their bean counters total up the cost of those supplies and then try to find ways to reduce that cost. In aggregate, yes, office supplies add up. But the total collapse of workplace morale when you try to limit those losses adds up to far more damage, both in the short term and long term. Office supplies are simply a part of the cost of doing business, including the ones that end up randomly walking away, whether intentionally or accidentally. And if you can't afford office supplies, you should really take a look at the balance sheet and see how much more expensive your employees are. :-)
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Funny story. When I started at my office I went to the supply closet and found a red Swingline stapler. Used it for a couple of years, and then one night it disappeared off of my desk. I was kind of annoyed, but it wasn't really *my* stapler, and the supply closet had some replacements (black, not Swingline, but really, it's a stapler I use a dozen times a year, so who cares). Eight years later I was joking with a co-worker about Office Space and he mentions that he used to have a red Swingline, which he'd stolen from a co-worker who said he'd stolen it from someone else (me), but that it had been further stolen by yet another co-worker. Apparently they're a hot item, or everyone has a one-track mind. So I went and checked, and indeed the original model was on another guy's desk. I don't actually know if it was the one I had, but it doesn't really matter. I taped a bunch of strips of paper to my black stapler and wrote "Red" all over it. Then I swapped it for the red one, which I covered in paper that had "black" written on it, as the world's worst disguise and to make it more of a prank. I figured it would make it two days before someone noticed and swapped it back. It's been 18 months. One of the middle-men in the chain did actually notice, but he laughed his ass off and didn't say anything. At this point I'm just waiting for an opportunity to pull out Ol' Red--disguised as blackie--and see the realization in the other guy's eyes, but he got shifted to the other side of the building and it's unlikely to come up.
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