Unpaid: The Past, Present, and Future of Wage Theft - A Conversation with Matthew Cole and Sarah Jaffe

About the Event

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.

About the Speakers

Matthew Cole is an Assistant Professor of Technology, Work and Employment at the University of Sussex and an associate of the Alameda Institute. His research and writing revolves around the political economy of work and technology, with a particular focus on wage theft. He has published various academic book chapters and journal articles on these topics, as well as essays for Jacobin, The Independent, Dissent and Novara, among others.

Sarah Jaffe is a journalist, researcher, and author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. Her next book, Heterosexuality is Broken, is forthcoming in 2027 from One Signal and Profile Books. She is also currently at work on a PhD at the University of West London. Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and co-host, with Craig Gent, of Heart Reacts an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism.

About the Location

Details on navigating the Strand Campus can be found here.