Overlooked amidst tales of corporate wrongdoing, stock swindles and Madoff-like investment fraud is the fact that millions of American workers are not getting paid by their employers. Since the vast majority are low-income, this pervasive wage theft fosters economic inequality and prevents people from making ends meet. To help end this profound injustice, Kim Bobo, co-author of the classic Organizing for Social Change, has released Wage Theft in America, which provides a specific blueprint for accomplishing this goal. Bobo notes that the number of Department of Labor staff investigating Wage and Hour violations has decreased by more than 50% since the agency began in 1941, while the number of affected workers has increased by 900%. Her book is a clarion call for the Obama Administration to address this staffing shortage, so that the government fulfills its duty to protect workers wages. With workers advocate Hilda Solis soon to be heading the Labor Department, Bobo’s book could not be more timely; she has given Solis and the public a step by step roadmap for boosting economic justice among the working poor.

After spending ten years at the Midwest Academy, among the nation’s preeminent organizer training schools, Kim Bobo founded Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ). IWJ has chapters across the country that engage clergy in struggles for economic justice, particularly on behalf of immigrant workers and the working poor. I became familiar with the group’s work when Bobo’s South Florida affiliate played a crucial role in a landmark janitors organizing drive by SEIU in 2006, a struggle I describe in a chapter of my Beyond the Fields.

Bobo’s new book could not be timelier. Had this book been released anytime prior to 2008, readers would only have been frustrated at Bush Administration inaction. But Barack Obama’s election, and his choice of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary, means that Bobo’s book offers a realistic blueprint for the changes that are needed to end pervasive wage theft in the nation.

(I would be surprised if Solis has not already read Bobo’s work, and is not already planning on how to implement its proposed reforms).

The Feds Encourage Wage Theft

While many of us will not be surprised at the Department of Labor’s failure to stop wage theft in recent decades, Bobo shows that the reality is even worse than we suspected. For example, there were over 48,000 investigations into wage and hour violations in 1941, when 15.5 million workers were covered, and less than 25,000 inspections in 2007, when 130 million were affected.

This discrepancy is not because American employers are now far more law-abiding. Rather, pro-employer, anti-worker political administrations look the other way, creating obstacles to enforcement, while providing incentives for law-breaking.
The media is full of stories of workers in certain industries---such as garment manufacturing, restaurants, meatpacking and construction---where a predominately immigrant workforce is routinely cheated out of wages. Yet as Bobo points out, our Department of Labor relies largely on an unusuable complaint procedure, rather than sending investigators into the field to check wage and hour documentation on an industry-wide basis. As Bobo puts it:

When bank robberies rise in a region, the FBI shifts enforcement staff. When drug dealing increases in a neighborhood, local police shift officers. When there is a national crisis, such as occurred on 9/11, the nation responds by setting up a new agency and hiring thousands more staff dedicated to addressing the problems….Wage theft demands such attention and focus.

At a time when surveys find that 89% of nonmonitored garment factories in Los Angeles stole workers wages, that from 25-62% of growers in key agricultural industries stole farmworker wages, and where virtually all poultry plants stole workers wages as a matter of regular practice, Labor Department inaction is not only a social justice outrage, but Bobo sees it as a moral outrage as well.

Biblical Opposition to Wage Theft

While this book is directed to all who care about economic fairness, Bobo makes a special appeal to the faith community. She not only cites biblical provisions against wage theft throughout the text, but includes an appendix of positions taken against wage theft by such groups as the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Ever the organizer, Bobo clearly seeks to boost activism around wage theft among the faith community. This book will likely be widely circulated among not only the IWJ, but among the IAF, PICO, and Gamaliel faith-based networks in an effort to boost support for Solis’s efforts to implement Bobo’s recommendations.

What distinguishes Wage Theft in America from many other books exposing economic injustice is that Bobo provides point-by point, detailed solutions. Not all readers/critics appreciate this approach, as I learned when an otherwise very favorable review of my second book, Reclaiming America, questioned why I had provided a strategic roadmap for reducing the bloated military budget (which has tripled since that book was released). But I found Bobo’s specificity exhilarating, and it is this facet of the book that I believe makes it most worth reading.

Since Bobo has outlined the specific steps needed to combat wage theft, she has given readers the ability to evaluate whether the Obama Administration is doing what needs to be done. We know that Hilda Solis is as committed as Kim Bobo to eradicating wage theft, but will the Obama Administration give her the resources that Bobo says the Labor Department needs? Bobo has provided a scorecard that enables activists to organize to obtain the necessary resources, and to then measure Obama’s commitment to the issue by the outcome.

Kim Bobo has written the scripture for those fighting to end wage theft in the United States. Having laid out the problem and how to correct it, she has eliminated any excuses for inaction. To monitor the Obama Administration’s progress at implementing her plans, and to check future calls for action, see Bobo’s organizational website at http://iwj.org/template/index.cfm.