Kim Bobo: Wage Theft in America

My colleague Kim Bobo has written a book about our common line of work. Entitled Wage Theft in America, the book reveals the scope and impact of illegal wage cheating that goes on all around us, most of it undetected and unaddressed. Ms. Bobo doesn’t know that we share a trade, and I’m sure she wishes as I do that we could be doing something else for a living.

Yet here we are, having spent much of our lives trying hold back a river of wage stealing with a bucket and sponge. Ms. Bobo runs an organization called Interfaith Worker Justice, which has been active in the field for years. I have worked for the U.S. Department of Labor, and for various unions or labor/management organizations in the construction trades since 1988. Over that span of time I have interviewed thousands of workers, filed just as many claims with state and federal agencies, and occasionally—when the stars aligned—brought a few workers the wages they were supposed to have been paid in the first place.

Bobo’s book is hard reading even for somebody jaded by this work. Even so, Wage Theft is a strong reminder that there are good people out there who believe in the law and in the right of working people to their own money. It is beyond sad that such things go on year after year; worse yet that our government considers the situation to be relatively unimportant: we send people to prison for embezzling $5,000 from a bank, but when an employer steals millions from workers by denying them overtime wages, we let him pay back a fraction of what’s owed and continue business as before.

If you don’t think wage theft is a serious problem, understand that I have been able to make a good living detecting it for years. Business is always good. Wage cheating is as rare as salt in the ocean.

Last week I filed a series of complaints against a construction contractor who seems to have some relationship problems with a couple dozen of his workers. He has systematically deprived them of overtime pay, forcing them to work Saturday without compensation as well as failing to pay for extra hours worked each day. This company gave its workers regular lectures about being “team players” and let them know the consequences of failing to make the team. While working on state and federally-funded projects, the company also misclassified skilled trades workers as laborers in order to pay them at lower rates.

Workers who complained about working for free were fired; others were promised their pay later (without overtime) or simply not paid at all. Workers who spoke to a union organizer about the overtime problem were also terminated. The company has a little policy about traveling workers: when they go from job to job in the middle of the day, the company doesn’t pay them for the hours. Neither is the firm real good about letting workers have a lunch or required bathroom breaks. It seems that they’ve also failed to pay taxes of any sort on the unreported hours. The firm’s apprenticeship program is a fraud and a scam. Many a hopeful lad has entered only to find himself untrained and unemployable at the end, used only for fetch-and-carry work.

A quick tally of the included offenses against state and federal laws turns up half a dozen distinct violations of the law. Some of these I’ve referred directly to enforcement agencies, others will be dealt with through my firm’s attorneys. If we are lucky—if the winds of enforcement blow our way and we manage to get a good accounting from all the agencies—some of the workers of this firm will get a portion of the wages they worked for. Undoubtedly many will not. Perhaps there will be some compensation for those unjustly terminated. That is the way of the law and of the current state of enforcement. If things go as they often do, cases will be fumbled or dropped outright, perhaps some statements confused—maybe the company will hire a high-priced attorney who will stonewall the government side—and I will have to hold one of those delightful meetings wherein I inform a crowd of unemployed workers that they aren’t going to get their wages. If you have never done that and want to see what it’s like I can take you to the next one. There will be a next one; if not with this case then with others.

If you want to know how corporate America treats its workers, you can go to the appendix of Bobo’s book and see how many billion-dollar firms cheated their people out of the minimum wage and 40-hour overtime. [After a scan of the columns the millions begin to dull the mind.] The firms in the listing (and these are only the ones made public) are companies we all deal with every day of our lives. If we found that State Farm Insurance or our local grocery store ripped us off for a hundred dollars, we’d be furious. State Farm was made to pay $135 million in back wages; Safeway, Albertsons and Ralph’s supermarkets paid their janitors over $22 million in back wages and it doesn’t raise an eyebrow. We have somehow come to think that wage cheating is just a clever business practice, something like the careful scheming that puts an asset in a more favorable tax category. If you lose the game you just write a check for the difference and move on. Nobody goes to prison—when was the last time you read of some corporate chieftain doing jail time for wage theft?

Kim Bobo’s prescription for change includes substantial alteration in the structure of government agencies and in the treatment of cases under the law. She is on the right track there, but the road to that utopia will be long and rough. I think the main benefit of this book comes in the form of a shift in terminology. Bobo refuses to speak the technical lingo of the law in describing the failure to pay wages. She calls it theft, robbery, stealing. Which it undoubtedly is to the millions of affected workers. The adoption of those designations will be a substantial move away from the current complacency and toward the better world that Bobo wants all of us to live in.

This book is unpleasant reading because it is the unvarnished truth. Buy a copy and be thankful there are such in the world as Kim Bobo.

Michael McGrorty