In anticipation of April 15, the 10th annual STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY, we have prepared a brand new website collecting nine years of STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK testimonials, interviews, educational materials, and analysis—a treasure trove of first-person perspectives about stealing from work. This is the definitive resource for employee-led wealth redistribution.
Go to the new STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY website!
If you need to gently test the waters to see which team a fellow employee is batting for in the class war, try bringing this to their attention without any indication of your position: “Crazy, huh?” How they respond will tell you everything you need to know.
Here’s a preview of what the site has to offer:
- An FAQ answering common questions about workplace theft
- A gallery of outreach materials including posters, stickers, postcards, trifolds, and zines
- Interviews and other corporate media coverage, from The Guardian to a miserably dismayed Glenn Beck
- International contributions to STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY
And a whole host of reading material, including…
Narratives
- Out Of Stock: Confessions Of A Grocery Store Guerrilla—A former Whole Foods employee recounts his efforts to run his employer out of business by means of sabotage, graffiti, and insubordination, reinterpreting William Butler Yeats’ line “The falcon cannot hear the falconer” from a bird’s-eye view.
- Steal from Work to Create Autonomous Zones—The shocking true story of how a photocopy scam nearly escalated into global revolution.
- A Cashier’s Guide to Putting Yourself Through College— How one worker stole a higher education from a hardware store.
- What Became of the Boxes—An adventure in proletarian revenge.
- Stealing from Work Is a Gamble, but It Can Be a Good Bet—The story of one risk-tolerant employee who set out to double his earnings.
- Don’t Beg for a Piece of the Pie—Take the Whole Pizza for Yourself!—A chronicle of workplace resource distribution in Eastern Europe.
- Like Most Workplace Thieves, I Am an Exceptional Worker—Being a small-time criminal, demystified.
Analysis
- The Team is Real—A model for how employees at a variety of businesses can support each other beyond networks of kinship or affinity.
- A Theft or Work?—A grad student brings poststructuralist theory to bear on time theft, why the master’s degrees will never dismantle the master’s house, and how to resist work when it has spread so far beyond the workplace.
- Yes, We Even Stole from Work under Socialism—An extract from A Worker in a Worker’s State, a book written by Miklós Haraszti in 1972 when he was a young employee at the Red Star Tractor Factory and suppressed by the Hungarian government as a threat to socialism.
- Beyond Stealing from Work—Stealing from the workplace is only the beginning.
Testimonials
The site offers scores of anonymous first-person accounts of what they steal and why—offering considerable insight into the human condition (under capitalism). For example:
STEAL FROM WORK TO HELP PEOPLE
My wife and I are both employed in Central Florida through a technical division of the largest American motor company. The location overstocks the restrooms with free hygiene products like tampons and pads, soaps, and first aid kits. We both fill our bags with these items a few times a week before leaving. We make waterproof bags and leave them in areas where homeless people congregate. We have done this for over a year and have redistributed thousands of items.
–Robin Hood of Hygiene
Enjoy and stay safe!