Unpaid
The Past, Present and Future of Wage Theft
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Verso Books
Publishing:26th May '26
£16.99
This title is due to be published on 26th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
A searing and revelatory unmasking of the despicable reality of modern capitalism. Few books are able to make complex ideas so accessible - yet this is one of them -- Owen Jones
Passionately political. A vital read for anyone who works for a living -- Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work
An absolutely essential guide to capitalist class relations. Unpaid unflinchingly catalogues the reality of labour exploitation under capitalism, presenting Marx's most important ideas in a clear, succinct and compelling way -- Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism
The future is being stolen from us, day by day. The glorious technological future we are constantly being told is imminent is in fact, Matt Cole reminds us, built with unpaid labor. In this deeply researched and meticulously argued book, Cole provides a sharpened blade with which to take on the techno-oligarchs (and ordinary bad bosses, too) -- Sarah Jaffe, author of From the Ashes and Work Won’t Love You Back
ISBN: 9781804295663
Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 18mm
Weight: 280g
288 pages
Paperback original