IN PRINT: BOOK REVIEW
Wage Theft In America

WAGE THEFT IN AMERICA by Kim Bobo
(New York, N.Y., The New Press, 2008, 336 pages, paper, $17.95)

Reviewed by Jeffry Odell Korgen, Executive Director of the Department of Diocesan Planning in the Diocese of Metuchen, N.J.

The Judeo-Christian commitment to worker justice dates all the way back to the days of Pharaoh and Moses’ negotiations for holy days off.  Pope Leo XIII brought this tradition into the modern age with his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, which ushered in a century of Catholic social teaching. Now interfaith organizer Kim Bobo has refocused the church’s ministry to low-wage workers for the twenty-first century in Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It.

Bobo illustrates, in sometimes shocking ways, that the crime of wage theft (employers shaving hours, not paying minimum wage or overtime hours, stealing tips, making Social Security deductions and pocketing the money, charging workers for “the right to have a job,” simply refusing to pay wages due, and so on) has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. In some industries, studies indicate that wage theft is so widespread as to be considered a standard (though illegal) practice.

For example, Bobo cites research indicating that one in four construction workers in the United States are either misclassified as contractors (and therefore exempt from payroll and Social Security taxes) or paid entirely off the books. According to the leading surveys, sixty percent of nursing homes in the United States have either misclassified workers, withheld pay for work performed during meal breaks, or paid overtime at regular hourly rates, thus violating U.S. wage-and-hour laws. Depending on the crop picked, between twenty-five percent and sixty-two percent of farm workers are victims of wage theft, according to research cited by Bobo. Minimum-wage violations are common in this line of work, as are illegal payroll deductions.

Poultry workers are even more likely to become victims of wage theft, with underpayment of overtime and non-payment of time spent donning protective clothing considered widespread. A 2000 Department of Labor study found 100 percent of poultry plants to be practicing wage theft. Restaurant workers fare poorly as well, with regional variations found in compliance with the law. The percentage of restaurants practicing wage theft through stealing tips, paying less than the minimum wage, non-payment of overtime, or shaving hours ranged from thirty percent to seventy-eight percent, depending on the region. Bobo herself notes that after talking to Department of Labor staff, she will never leave a restaurant tip on a credit card again.

Finally, Bobo turns to day laborers, who are perhaps the most vulnerable class of workers because many are in the United States illegally and therefore too frightened to report violations to authorities. She cites one study of 2,660 day laborers that found that forty-nine percent of workers reported that in the last two months at least one employer had not paid them anything for their work. Denial of food and water breaks, additional unpaid work hours, and abandonment at the worksite at the close of a job were also common.

Why is this a concern for churches?

The original title of the book– “Thou Shalt Not Steal!”– says it all. With perhaps the day laborer in mind, Bobo quotes the Book of Deuteronomy (24:1-15) at the start of Chapter One:

Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is an Israelite or is a foreigner residing in one of your towns. Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin.

The message is not that all employers are bad or that capitalism is inherently evil, but that faith communities and government have a role to play in ensuring that the most basic principle of justice in the workplace—an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work—is upheld. We may be a long way off from a “living” or “family wage,” but we should at least find ways to root out wage theft.

In the book’s final sections, Bobo outlines a multi-point strategy to reduce wage theft in the United States. First, she points to the emergence of a new generation of workers’ centers across the nation as mediating institutions that can educate low-wage workers about their rights under the law, surface wage-theft violations, and provide connections to government authorities and faith communities that can confront wage-theft violators directly. Many workers’ centers are funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and operate in the tradition of the Catholic labor schools of the 1930s-1960s. Bobo calls for a “community policing” strategy enlisting workers’ centers to strive alongside an invigorated Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor to identify and confront habitual violators of U.S. wage laws.

Second, Bobo argues that increasing union membership is one of the best ways to fight wage theft, since unions have a track record of training workers about their rights in the workplace, offer legal assistance, provide a structure for expressing concerns, and protect workers who complain. As union membership has shrunk from thirty percent of the workforce to ten percent in recent years, it’s no surprise that wage theft has increased. Finally, she calls for strengthening the Department of Labor, particularly its Wage and Hour Division, charged with enforcing the laws most flagrantly violated. Bobo calls for an increase in caseworkers and use of new consequences, such as publishing the names of businesses with wage- theft violations on the Internet, just as health departments publish the results of restaurant health inspections on their Web sites.

From its opening survey of wage-theft violations to its pragmatic suggestions for change, this book will provide clergy, religious, lay ecclesial ministers, and social concerns committee members with the tools they need to apply church teaching on the dignity of work and the rights of workers to the reality faced by low-wage workers, many of whom sit in our pews every Sunday.