How Faith-Based Labor Movements Plan to Stop Corporate America's Billion-Dollar Theft

By Nancy Maclean, Boston Review. Posted June 13, 2009.

More than three million Americans work under these kinds of illegal conditions. And while readers of this article may not themselves have been victims of employer cheating, they likely have children, relatives, neighbors, or students who have. As Bobo notes, "wage and hour laws are violated more often than any other employment law."

Wage theft is one stark symptom of a deeper problem: a low-road model of business management that has spread since the late 1970s. Low-road companies compete less by improving production processes or product quality, and more on the basis of cost -- in particular, by squeezing employee compensation. Firms have not been driven to the low-road simply by global competition (most service employers have no foreign competition), but, as Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman and others have argued, by investor-driven corporate strategy and the political choices of anti–New Deal conservatives who have used their power in Washington to promote deregulation and deunionization. Ethics have declined along with oversight.

Bobo proposes a simple maxim to guide us back to a higher road "Help all of us treat our neighbors in the workplace as we want to be treated." But Bobo is not just a good-hearted reformer drawing attention to the injustice of wage theft with a moral message of broad appeal. Rather, she understands that wage theft is a strategic issue that could jumpstart an overhaul of the Department of Labor, help to shut down the low road, and importantly, reanimate progressive politics with the social-gospel spirit.

Concentrated efforts to end wage theft could bring quick results whereas other problems the new administration faces will prove more difficult to overcome. With political will and adequate resources, wage theft could be largely eradicated within a few years. Such an early and comparatively easy victory, Bobo hopes, would in turn invigorate labor and community activists, policy-makers, and voters for the more formidable challenges of getting the whole system back on a better track. Not least, success would restore the floor under ethical employers pressured to match the labor policies of unscrupulous competitors or go out of business.

In lifting the floor under wages, victory here might also reduce employers’ incentives to fight unions just as the Employee Free Choice Act, if passed, will invigorate organizing efforts. The Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier for workers who want union representation to choose it without suffering intimidation and retaliation by their employers. U.S. labor law currently enables widespread corporate abuses that flout internationally recognized standards of workplace fair play, as Human Rights Watch documents in its recent report "The Employee Free Choice Act: A Human Rights Imperative."

A veteran organizer, Bobo is well-known among activists as co-author of Organizing for Social Change, a leading manual used by community organizers. Like Frances Perkins, Bobo is also deeply religious, and her spiritual values guide her organizing efforts. Raised in a devout evangelical family in Cincinnati, Bobo majored in religion at Barnard College and after graduation directed organizing at Bread for the World, a Christian anti-hunger initiative. In 1986 she published her first book, Lives Matter: A Handbook for Christian Organizing and began training community organizers at the Midwest Academy in Chicago, where she worked regularly with unions.

During the protracted Pittston Coal strike in 1989, Bobo tried to recruit religious leaders to support the miners, only to discover that practically no religious body at the time had a labor liaison. So she began to build a network of religious leaders to ally, at first informally, with workers. With a $5,000 inheritance from her grandmother, Bobo founded the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice in 1996 out of her Chicago home. The organization, now called Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), has since become a national advocate for low-wage workers, with a network of over 70 local affiliates, worker centers, and related student groups.

IWJ got going just after the 1995 election of a reform leadership in the AFL-CIO. The central mission of the new leadership was to organize unorganized workers, an objective that unions had more or less dropped. The primary focus of that effort has been low-wage immigrant workers -- exactly those with whom IWJ works most closely. Frustration over the rate of new organizing has since split the AFL-CIO into two federations (the AFL-CIO and Change to Win), but Bobo’s organization has managed to maintain good working relations with both sides. That is no doubt because IWJ brings essential resources to both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions: moral authority, the capacity to inspire community support, and a dense network of diverse congregations able to build value-based bridges across the ethnic and linguistic differences that characterize the low-wage work force.

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Nancy MacLean is Professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her most recent publications are Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace and, with Donald Critchlow, Debating the American Conservative Movement, 1945 to the Present.

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