Employers named a crime for the act of being paid while not producing.
Time theft is the employer-side term for any period during which a worker is on the clock but not performing productive work. The concept emerged alongside the time clock in the late nineteenth century, when mechanical devices made it possible to measure, and therefore to police, the exact minutes of a worker's presence.1
The phrase frames the relationship between employer and employee as one in which the employer has purchased a block of time and any unauthorized use of that time by the worker constitutes theft. The language borrows from property law and applies it to hours.
Common forms of time theft as defined by employers include buddy punching, in which one worker clocks in for an absent colleague, extended breaks, personal phone calls during work hours, and slow starts to the workday.1 The Bundy clock, invented in 1888, was marketed partly as a solution to what employers called the vexatious question of recording employee time accurately.
Frederick Taylor's scientific management, developed in the 1880s and 1890s, intensified this logic by timing workers' movements to hundredths of a minute and calculating the precise amount of output an employer could expect per unit of time purchased.2
The concept of time theft assumes that paid time belongs to the employer entirely. Under this framework, a five-minute conversation, a trip to the bathroom that exceeds an allotted break, or a momentary pause to think about something unrelated to work can all be classified as theft.
The American Payroll Association has estimated that time theft costs U.S. employers billions of dollars annually, though the methodology behind such estimates varies widely.3
Time poverty describes the worker's experience of having too few hours for their own life. Time theft describes the employer's accusation that the worker has taken back some of those hours. The two concepts sit on opposite sides of the same relationship, each naming a different form of loss.