

"The thing is," she told me, "I used to leave the office at seven and my manager would see me carrying my bag out. Now I work until midnight and my husband just thinks I'm scrolling on my phone."

The woman, who asked not to be named because she signed a non-disparagement agreement, described a kind of labor that leaves no trace. No badge swipe at 11 p.m. No security guard nodding as she exits the parking garage. No row of darkened desks to prove she was there. Her employer, a mid-sized logistics company that shifted to remote operations three years ago, had technically closed at 6 p.m. for over a decade. But the culture of after-hours availability, once contained by the building's physical boundaries, had simply migrated home. The work did not stop at the door. It followed her into the kitchen, onto the couch, and eventually into the space between waking and sleeping that she could not quite name.

This is the quiet mechanism by which remote labor has rewritten the geometry of wage theft. For decades, the physical office served as an involuntary witness to exploitation. Overtime violations left paper trails: badge swipes, elevator logs, security footage. Workers compensation claims documented injuries from overwork. The union grievance that cited a supervisor's signature on a mandatory Saturday shift carried the weight of a paper trail. The violations were visible because the workers were visible.

Now that visibility has dissolved. A worker responding to emails at 1 a.m. generates no timestamped record for a labor board to audit. A misclassified employee working from a bedroom in Phoenix performs the same labor as a full-time employee in Chicago, but the power differential has no physical manifestation. The boss cannot see them. The state cannot see them. And increasingly, neither can the worker themselves.