Because They Can: Employers and the Payday Heist: Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid-and What We Can Do About It

Because They Can: Employers and the Payday Heist: Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid-and What We Can Do About It By Kim Bobo THE NEW PRESS, 2009

Readers of New Labor Forum are no strangers to the uncanny illogic of the American economy. If we needed a refresher course, we got one recently by trying to explain that health care is already rationed, or that "too big to fail" is an oxymoron coming from a big, failed bank. But if the title of Kim Bobo's Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid - and What We Can Do About It strikes labor insiders as old news, consider this: Bobo's book may be the single most effective grassroots organizing tool available during this crucial window of opportunity for labor.

Her first accomplishment is to gather the evidence of wage theft in one place; the result may rattle even those already familiar with workplace injustice. Employers steal billions of dollars annually from millions of workers by illegally denying overtime rates; tampering with time cards; refusing mandated breaks; underpaying the agreed-upon wages or the legal minimum; paying minimum wages on federal projects and pocketing the difference between the prevailing wage and the minimum; avoiding employer contributions to Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and workers' compensation insurance; deducting specious charges from paychecks; seizing tips; or flat-out refusing to pay for work performed, period. Studies by the Department of Labor, the Government Accountability Office, the Urban Institute, Human Rights Watch, and even the business-backed Economic Policy Foundation reveal that these tactics of theft can be found across industries, with particularly high incidences in nursing homes, garment factories, large-scale farms, restaurants, residential construction sites, and poultry processing plants.

Management apologists cannot hide behind individual mom-and-pops hopelessly confused by byzantine regulations, although Bobo advocates common sense revisions that would eliminate this genuine hazard. But the scale of the larceny demonstrates that wage theft is largely a deliberate method of cost control. Employers display their knowledge of the laws they are breaking by the ingenuity of their tactics. One car wash in Nashville clocked workers out when customers were not present. A Wisconsin cook worked eighty hours a week...