Many of this week's posts about Kim Bobo's impressive book, Wage Theft, have understandably focused on the importance of increasing regulation to stop such theft. Indeed, the importance of stepped-up regulation seems clear, considering all the problems that the G.A.O. found in the Bush Labor Department.

A G.A.O. study released in March found that the department's Wage and Hour Division had mishandled 9 of the 10 cases brought by a team of undercover agents posing as aggrieved workers. In the most egregious case, wage and hour officials failed to investigate a complaint that under-aged children in California were working at a meatpacking plant, not only during school hours, but with dangerous machinery. And when an undercover agent posing as a dishwasher called four times to complain about not being paid any overtime for 19 weeks, the division's Miami office failed to return his calls for four months, and when it finally did, an official told him it would take 8 to 10 months to begin investigating his case.

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Thanks for all the insightful comments this week on wage theft. Everywhere I speak I have folks, like T.A. Frank did, admit that they too were victims of wage theft. Three radio interviewers live on-air said, "Hey, I'm paid as an independent contractor." (Radio interviewers are employees not independent contractors.) During one editorial board meeting, an editor confessed that she thought the newspaper drivers were all paid as independent contractors.

Young people have almost always experienced wage theft. Even students at prestigious colleges tell me about their experiences working off the clock or not getting their last paycheck. One student from Brandeis described how her employer always took a percentage of the wait staff's tips, but if the restaurant had a particularly "good" night, the employer took a higher percentage, claiming that the wait staff didn't need so much money.

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I'm happy Kim Bobo has written a full book about wage theft, because I've experienced the phenomenon myself, and I didn't much enjoy it. Years ago, before I went into journalism, I had an employer who would give us hourly workers more assignments than we could complete in eight hours. We knew we had to finish the work, but we also know that reporting overtime would get us fired, so we'd typically clock out and then stay on to finish the job.

I learned a few things from this.

One was that wage theft seriously erodes workplace morale, no matter how well compensated the employees are overall. I was earning well above minimum wage ($15 an hour, if I recall), but, boy, were my colleagues and I angered to be pressured into working off the clock. A company may superficially benefit from creating this sort of atmosphere (it keeps immediate costs down), but whether it's healthy over the long term is another matter. A lack of morale saps employees of energy. They also tend to look for ways to get even--by legal means (like class-action lawsuits, as was the case with my company) or illegal means (like pilfering, as is often the case in retail).

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Wage theft is illegal. Yet rightwing politicians largely dismiss the problem and most systematically oppose laws to increase enforcement of wage laws. Yet at the same time in recent years, those conservative politicians have been attacking undocumented immigrants as undermining wage standards for native workers. The hypocrisy is palpable, but here's a lesson: state legislators standing up against wage theft have been able to expose that hypocrisy.

At Progressive States Network, we've worked with community groups, advocates and legislators to promote wage enforcement directly as a counterpoint to anti-immigrant rhetoric and promote a policy agenda that builds support for all workers, native and immigrant alike. In states like Kansas, Iowa, and Connecticut, anti-immigrant legislation has been derailed once the issue of the failure to enforce broader wage laws entered the discussion. For example (see below the fold):

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Nancy MacLean, historian and author of a wonderful book called Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, has written a terrific review of the book we've been discussing here.

About Hilda Solis and the possibilities for today's Labor Department, MacLean says almost the opposite of what I said yesterday, so I recommend it for a more cheering interpretation. Nancy MacLean is also intrigued by the Christian perspective Kim brings to the issue, and by the potential for an upsurge in faith-based labor activism. I am too (though I'll admit I'm not at all religious myself). But there was another dimension of this that interested me.

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Not long ago, I was in the same boat as Kim Bobo, having no idea how prevalent wage theft was.

In the summer of 2001, a lawyer phoned me about an off-the-clock lawsuit she had brought on behalf of several Wal-Mart workers on Long Island. A Wal-Mart worker I interviewed in Suffolk County told me that after her store closed in the evening, she and other employees were sometimes forced to work an extra hour for free, after they had clocked out, to help straighten up the store. That worker also told me the store's managers used to lock the front doors so employees working off the clock couldn't even leave if they wanted to.

Perhaps I was naïve at the time, but I was surprised that managers for a big, respectable company like Wal-Mart would be doing such dastardly things.

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I don't like to work for free, but that's, of course, why I feel the issue of wage theft is so important! Thus I cheerfully agreed to read Kim Bobo's important book and participate in this discussion. I'm glad Bobo opens this conversation by asking whether Hilda Solis and her Labor Department will be able to address wage theft, as that was exactly the question on my mind as I finished reading the book. Frankly, I'm worried that Solis won't be able to do much of anything - until the administration feels much more public pressure.

Kim's chapter on Frances Perkins, the visionary Labor Department head under FDR, details many of Perkins' qualities as an individual - her commitment to workers, administrative skills, connection to worker advocacy groups -- and argues that we need someone like this to run the department today. I am sure Hilda Solis has many of those qualities. In fact, she seems pretty terrific. But I'm not convinced it matters who's in that job, because we have neither the political will from the top (the president), nor the organization at the bottom (the working public), to force workers' rights onto the agenda.

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It is great to see Kim Bobo's book on wage theft drawing attention on TPMCafe and elsewhere. It is outrageous that millions of workers have their earnings stolen from them by their employers. Hopefully, this book will help to ensure that enforcement is stepped up so that this practice is brought to an end.

However, one aspect to this issue has intrigued me. Wage theft is often seen as an issue of regulation. The idea is that we need an effective regulator at the Labor Department to ensure that employers do not steal wages from their workers.

This is intriguing because there is no reason to view this as a question of regulation: it is a question of law enforcement. Would anyone call the prevention of shoplifting a problem of regulation? How about the prevention of bank robbery?

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The United States has roughly two million people in jail or prison-- and almost none of them are there for stealing wages from their workers, despite the fact that as Kim Bobo highlights in her book, millions of people have wages illegally stolen from them. In fact, customers of businesses go to jail for shoplifting -- 360 people are in jail for life in California for shoplifting under that state's three strikes law -- but low-wage employers steal thousands of dollars from individual poor employees in violation of minimum wage and hour laws with almost zero chance of jail time.

I would ask why a crime involving millions of people and tens of billions of dollars stolen each year is so poorly enforced and so widely ignored in the media. But the answer is unfortunately obvious. Rich people stealing from the poor is just not considered a serious crime. White collar criminals go to jail for stealing from middle class and other rich people, but the working poor may be stolen from pretty much at will, with at most a tiny monetary fine at stake even if wage theft is actually investigated in court. That is the scandal that Bobo's book outlines-- and will never get the same coverage as the crimes of Madoff or others who steal from the middle class and other rich.

Ten years ago, I had no idea wage theft was such a crisis -- though I suspect it was just as prevalent then as it is today.

Wage theft is the failure of an employer to follow the law by paying a worker for all of his or her work. Two to three million workers aren't paid the minimum wage required by law. Three million, perhaps more, are misclassified as independent contractors when they are really employees, a maneuver that steals both from workers and from the public coffers. Untold millions aren't paid the overtime premium the law requires. Billions of dollars are stolen each and every year from workers. This is not a small or isolated problem of a few bad employers. It's a systematic theft of wages from the nation's workers.

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