This chapter attempts to grasp the material reality of wages in the decentralized silk manufacturing plants in one of Italy’s leading textile regions: Lombardy. The embezzlement of raw silk was endemic in Lombard silk manufacturing plants. Since self-consumption was almost absent for such a precious material, thefts were at the root of a vast market of stolen silk, socially and economically integrated with ‘legal’ silk production, in which women played a crucial role. The widespread theft was linked to the peculiar wage-credit relationship in use in the silk manufacturing workshops, as silk weavers usually saw embezzlement as a form of compensation when they were refused advances on their pay in times of crisis. Stepping away from overly simplistic assessments of the household economy during the industrialization period, the essay shows that debt, pay, and theft therefore constituted the three poles of the wage relationship in the transition to industrial capitalism.