Garment Workers: Perceptions of Inequity and Employee Theft

This paper is concerned with the question of what garment workers did when they felt they were treated inequitably or unfairly at work. Did unfair treatment lead to employee theft? By conducting 16 semi-structured interviews with retired garment workers and employing a qualitative analysis, it was learned that neither employee theft nor other forms of deviance were often selected when responding to matters involving inequity. In only a few cases was there any indication that theft occurred as a result of the worker feeling he or she did not receive what was owed to him or her. This can be explained by the influence of the work group and the institutional mechanisms developed by the union.