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

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

The IWJ has had some success in shifting the conversation on economic issues in congregations across America. Building relationships among workers, unions, and religious leaders, it has summoned clergy to stand with exploited workers and pressure employers to pay up and abide by the law. IWJ also proved a pivotal ally in two historic campaigns to improve conditions for low-wage service workers: the Justice for Janitors struggle and Hotel Workers Rising. In both, pressure from numerous local religious leaders in multiple cities (700 in Chicago alone) helped union workers win precedent-setting contracts with better wages, health coverage, pensions, better working conditions, and career ladders.

IWJ has perhaps been most effective through its sponsorship of workers’ centers across the country. Filling the vacuum left by deregulation and deunionization, they are today’s version of the settlement houses that aided immigrants a century ago, as Janice Fine shows in Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream. The centers educate workers about their rights, teach them organizing skills, and intercede on their behalf with recalcitrant employers and impervious government agencies. Bobo first learned about wage theft through the workers’ centers, and it remains the most common problem among workers who come to the centers for assistance.

In Wage Theft Bobo draws from the experiences of workers’-center participants, experiences that also inform her discussion of the broader issues beyond wage theft that the new secretary of labor now faces.

Labor laws today are such a mess that they bewilder and deter those who need them most. As Bobo notes, they are "woefully inadequate," "incredibly confusing," and barely enforced. She tells the story of Anka Karewicz, a twenty-year-old Polish immigrant to Chicago who, in order to stop a single employer from cheating and demeaning her and her fellow workers, would have had to contact three different federal agencies (the Department of Labor, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and two state agencies. Karewicz gave up. Bobo outlines the changes that are needed in the all-important Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, the most crucial potential ally of victims of wage theft. One key goal is providing a staff adequate to enforcement. In 1941 the Division had 1,769 investigators checking workplaces for fair labor standards, approximately one investigator for every 9,000 workers. Today each investigator covers 170,000.


As Bobo knows, fixing the Department of Labor will require larger and more complicated changes than ending wage theft. The Department not only needs a clean break from its recent history of unfailing corporate loyalty under the leadership of Elaine Chao, but also ground-up change to come to terms with an economy no longer led by manufacturing. Bobo did not know who the new secretary of labor would be when she was writing Wage Theft (indeed, as it went to press, it took faith to believe that Barack Obama would win), but she has since applauded the appointment of Solis as a "great choice for labor" and noted the uncanny similarity between Solis’s pre-cabinet experiences and Perkins’s.


Solis is well-positioned to accomplish major changes in the Department. Like Perkins, Solis is taking office after an election in which voters delivered the mandate for change, at a time when working men and women desperately need help, and in an era in which recent immigrants have led a resurgence of labor organizing, backed by a growing network of religious activists. And, like Perkins, Solis has first-hand knowledge of the plight of low-wage workers: she is the child of two immigrant unionists, her Mexican father a Teamsters shop-floor activist and her Nicaraguan mother an assembly line worker and United Rubber Workers member. Solis calls herself "a big believer that government, if done right, can do a lot to improve the quality of peoples lives." Her record makes her the most pro-worker cabinet appointee since Perkins.

In fact, Solis has a chance to do much better than Perkins at creating labor policies that are, for the first time, fully universal and equitable. Bobo resurrects Perkins as a model, but neglects the racial and gender inequities built into the New Deal. As political scientist Ira Katznelson explains in When Affirmative Action Was White, the inequities were the result above all of efforts by powerful Southern, white, conservative Democrats to preserve their region’s low-wage labor pool and racial hierarchy. They excluded workers in agricultural and domestic sectors -- then the leading employers of African Americans and Mexican Americans -- from coverage under all the major pieces of New Deal legislation. As a result, these policies exacerbated racial inequality and created problems that snowballed over ensuing decades -- the disproportionate impact of the current mortgage crisis on black communities is one contemporary effect.


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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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