We Are Worth More

Last month a few hundred retail and fast-food workers, from places like Sears, Dunkin’ Donuts, and McDonald’s, walked off their jobs for a rally in downtown Chicago.   Carrying signs saying “Fight for 15” (or “Lucha Por 15”) and “We Are Worth More,” these workers make $9 or $10 an hour, at best, and they figure they’re worth at least $15.

A one-shift walk-out and protest by a few hundred out of the thousands of such workers in the Chicago Loop and along Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile cannot have the economic impact of a traditional strike – one that shuts down an entire workplace or industry for an extended period of time and, therefore, can bend an employer’s will.   And these workers’ chances of getting $15 an hour any time soon are worse than slim.   This “job action,” bolstered by community supporters organized by Action Now and with help from Service Employees International Union organizers, is more in the nature of a public protest than a “real strike.”   You could even call it “a public relations stunt,” but you’d be wrong to dismiss it as inconsequential.

“Public relations,” ironically, has a bad image.  But think of it as workers witnessing their own plight, calling for others in similar situations to join them and appealing to those of us with decent incomes to support them.  Witnessing, with its religious overtones, is not intended as an immediately practical action.  It’s first about individuals summoning the courage to put themselves forward to make a public claim that they are one of thousands (millions nationally) who are being treated unjustly.  In this case, it means taking the risk that they may be fired or otherwise disciplined for leaving work and going into the streets to proclaim “We are worth more.”

Witnessing is meant to make us think about justice as the witnesses simultaneously inspire and shame us with the courage of their individual actions.  I was at one of the first draft-card burnings that protested the Vietnam War in 1965, and I remember saying something like, “I’d do that if I thought it would do any good,” while knowing in my heart of hearts that I didn’t have the guts to take that kind of risk then.  But it inspired and shamed me – and thousands and then hundreds of thousands of others — to do many other things to fight against that war as we inspired and bolstered (and exerted peer pressure on) each other.

For the broader public, these initial job actions – in New York and Chicago among retail and fast-food workers; in California and Illinois among workers at Walmart warehouses; and all over the place among Walmart retail workers – are “public relations” that raise awareness and pluck consciences.   But for workers who watched workmates walk off the job to witness for them, there may be some of that inspiration and/or shame that is a particularly powerful call to action. That’s what organizers are counting on, in the hope that the numbers of such workers will grow helter-skelter across the retail industry, eventually initiating a contagion of worker direct action that can put these workers in a position to negotiate for “labor peace,” with or without the blessing of the National Labor Relations Board.

There’s another determined witness who couldn’t be more unlike these striking workers.  He’s a retired law professor from the University of Texas, Charles Morris, who is a leading expert on the legislative and early administrative history of the National Labor Relations Act and the Board that enforces it.  In a 2005 book, The Blue Eagle at Work, Morris makes the legal case that the Act defined a labor union as any group of two or more workers who act together (“in concert”) to seek redress of grievances from their employer.   According to Morris, the “concerted activity protection” articulated in the Act means that employers cannot legally fire workers for forming a non-majority  or “members-only” union (as few as two workers acting together), and what’s more, an employer is legally bound to “bargain in good faith” with that union.

Through meticulous legal research, Morris has shown that these worker rights were in the Act from the beginning but have been forgotten by the subsequent customary practice of defining a union as only that group of workers who have formally voted to be represented by a petitioning union. What’s more, other legal scholars have now signed on to Morris’s legal interpretation and are ready to bolster it before an NLRB that is willing to hear their case.  There would be such an NLRB, what Morris calls “a friendly Board,” if Republican Senators would allow a vote on President Obama’s nominees for the Board.

A favorable NLRB ruling would be important for a variety of legally technical reasons that workers and organizers could use to their tactical and strategic advantage – none of which includes the expectation that employers will voluntarily obey the law just because it is the law. But equally important is that Morris’s reading of the Act’s history restores the original meaning of a labor union that is based on workers’ decisions to act together “in concert” with one another.  That is, a labor union is not just an institution with a bureaucracy and a marble palace in Washington, D.C., though it may be that as well.  It is any group of workers in any workplace, no matter how big or small, who decide to and then do act in concert to advance their own interests in their workplace.

In March Chicago Working-Class Studies helped organize a public forum that brought Charles Morris together with workers and organizers from Fight for 15, the Walmart retail and warehouse strikers, and two other groups who are already acting as unions under this definition.  Though there were some disagreements between the elderly legal scholar and the mostly young workers and organizers — one emphasizing the importance of politics and administrative case law in the long run, the others focused on the potential of direct action in the here and now – they agreed that if and when the two come together, the possibilities for a worker-led upsurge of union organizing are great.

Nonetheless, through their actions these workers have already changed what a labor union is and is thought to be.   It is now, and really always has been — even a century before the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, even when it was an illegal “conspiracy” — simply a group of two or more workers acting in concert with one another.   To be really effective there will need, of course, to be many, many more than the hundreds and thousands who have begun this process.  But it starts with a few brave witnesses who take a risk and ask others to join them.  The peer pressure is now on the rest of us.

Jack Metzgar, Chicago Working-Class Studies

Restoring Traditional America

Over the weekend The Daily Kos highlighted a cartoon from Tom the Dancing Bug (cartoonist Rueben Bolling) that responded to Bill O’Reilly’s election night claim that Obama’s win signaled the death of traditional America. According to O’Reilly, “the demographics are changing, it’s not a traditional American anymore.” Bolling wondered what would happen if Barack Hussein Obama traveled back in time to the world of Leave it to Beaver. In this imaginary scenario, Obama tells the Cleavers of his plan to raise the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans, reduce the gap between CEO pay and that of the lowest paid employees, and bolster the social safety net. The “Beave” and his family point out that those features were already in place in their traditional 1960s America. “Golly, mister,” the Beave exclaims, “I think you’re bringing back traditional America.”

I do, too. I am writing a book about how workers and unions were represented in 1950s popular culture.  In Striking Images: Labor Unions on Screen and in the Streets in the 1950s, I argue that workers were represented in popular culture more often, and more positively, than we remember. This is, in part, because union membership was at its highest point in U.S. history (roughly 35% of all US households). Unions were also active, not passive. There were more than 30,000 strikes over the course of the 1950s.  In other words, union membership was traditional.

For example, in 1965 Eisenhower, declared that “the protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the Eisenhower Administration.” Rachel Maddow once quipped about Eisenhower’s relatively liberal policies that she was “in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”

As we return to a more traditional America, how are ordinary workers being represented in popular culture? This is a question we often ask on this blog, and we make our share of withering critiques, as Susan Ryan did when she addressed the phenomenon of “extreme work” reality television and how workers are being exploited in front of and behind the camera.

But there are some other more positive, and possibly even authentic ways in which workers are being represented in popular culture. Here’s a quick run down:

Striking workers are back in the news. Thanks to the massive (and largely successful) Chicago teacher’s strike and a well-organized blitz of Black Friday job actions at Walmarts across the country, the mainstream media has been covering strikes with more sympathy than in years past. Do a search for “Black Friday” and “workers” and more than 2 million hits pop up. While some of the coverage of Black Friday’s job actions underplayed the overall impact of the Walmart actions, other headlines suggested the range and the power of the strikes which took place in more than 100 cities in 46 states.

The Ed Show. Ed Schultz, the one time sports broadcaster and conservative shock jock now spins his blue-collar bluster in a more progressive direction on MSNBC every weeknight at 8:00 PM. Schultz starts every show with the tag line “Let’s get to work.” If you were watching The Ed Show last week you would have seen coverage of the raw deal that Hostess workers were given in the Twinkie show down, a piece about the unionization of exotic dancers, a report on a union on the rise in Phoenix, Arizona, and an exposé on what Walmart really pays its workers. You won’t find this much working-class related news in video form in one place anywhere else.

Blue: America at Work and Blue: Portrait of an American Worker. In a coincidence of naming, two photographers of the contemporary American labor scene have titled their projects “Blue.” Ian Wagreich’s Blue: America at Work was “kickstarted” in August and includes stunning black and white portraits of American workers in industrial settings. The photographs are visually gorgeous, and they are as much as about aestheticizing the industrial landscape as they are about giving a voice to individual workers. They remind me of Charles Sheeler’s arresting photographs of the Ford River Rouge plant. Waigreich’s work photographs are currently on view (until December 10^th at Washington D.C.’s Art Museum of the Americas in a show called “On Labor”). Photographer Carl Corey’s photographs from his collection Blue: Portrait of an American Worker are in color, and provide a more literal “close up” of the workers themselves. One of Corey’s goals in taking these photographs, as he explained in an interview with The Wooly Pulpit, was to advocate for American workers: “my hope is awareness will breed support for the American Worker.” The workers look proud, even stoic, and the photographs remind me a bit of the classic worker portraits taken by Milton Rogovin.

Current TV’s profile of the American worker. During the lead up to the election, Current TV posted a new worker profile every day for 30 days. Thirteen of the workers profiled were women, and 10 were African American, Latino, or Asian. The jobs covered included cop, firefighter, graphic designer, bus driver, Boeing mechanic, bartender, CPA, nurse, farmworker, and web developer. The profiles included detailed interviews, includingquestions about union membership and political leanings. Though not all of the workers profiled were working class, the interviews echoed common themes. Everyone who had health insurance was grateful for it, and everyone who did not have it wanted it. When asked “what is the one thing you could change about your job if you could,” almost everyone wanted better pay and/or benefits. One of the most inspiring quotes came from the Boeing mechanic, Monico Bretana, the highest paid union worker in the group: “I would have to say that I’m a working guy; I work for my money. Just like everybody else, I just want to be treated fairly, I just want to have a decent living wage, decent benefits to cover me and my family, and the union has provided that for us. And I want people to know that unions are not what people perceive anymore. We’re here to help the middle class, we’re here to help maintain a good living standard.”

Now doesn’t that sound sort of like the 1950s? Of course, I don’t want to go back to the 1950s altogether. I don’t want to go back to Jim Crow America, or Operation Wetback America, or Mad Men America. But when it comes to taxes on the wealthy (can we get the marginal tax rate back to the 1950s rate of 91%?), the tradition of union membership, and images of proud, beautiful blue-collar workers, I would be happy to go back in time.

Kathy M. Newman

How Obama Can Win Ohio

Note: This week’s blog is a repost of John Russo’s column from Friday’s Opinionator blog at the New York Times.

The decisive referendum vote to repeal the bill that would limit collective bargaining by public sector unions has changed the political landscape in Ohio. Tuesday’s vote on Senate Bill 5 could and should be a harbinger for the 2012 presidential election. By mounting a direct assault on public sector workers and the unions who represent them, Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio may have done more to help Barack Obama win re-election than anything Obama’s political team is likely to do over the next 12 months.

With Ohio’s continuing high unemployment rate (9.1%!, just like the rest of the U.S), it had seemed unlikely that President Obama could win Ohio, and without Ohio, he’d have difficulty getting re-elected. The same factors make re-election a challenge for Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democratic and one of the most pro-labor members of the Senate. But Kasich, the Republicans in the Ohio legislature and outside conservative financers and think tanks like the Buckeye Institute, may have done Obama and Brown a big favor.

Karl Rove described Senate Bill 5 as a much “more extensive reform” to public sector unions than was enacted in Wisconsin, in part because the Ohio version included firefighters and police officers. While the protests in Columbus were smaller and received less national attention than those in Madison, unions and community groups in Ohio organized a ballot initiative with 10,000 volunteers circulating petitions in all 88 counties. Over 1.3 million Ohioans — more than five times the number required to put the initiative on the ballot — signed the petitions.

Despite a large influx of money from conservative organizations like Citizens United, Freedom Works, and Restoring America, Ohio voters repealed Senate Bill 5 by an overwhelming 22 point margin — 39% yes, 61% no (a no vote was pro-union). Democrats and independents voted overwhelmingly against the measure, and, if pre-election polls are correct, 30% of Ohio Republicans also voted to reject Senate Bill 5.

This should be good news for Obama. While Ohio is notorious for swinging back and forth between supporting Republicans and Democrats, its 18 electoral votes are especially important for Republican candidates. It’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the presidential election without Ohio, and that means winning significant support among union household voters.

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).

If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich’s actions, together with the national Republicans’ just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.

It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans – a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio’s union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent – that is, if they match the national average for union household voters – they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio’s electoral votes.

But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

This gives Obama the opportunity to score a big victory in Ohio, but that won’t happen solely on the basis of Senate Bill 5. The president must offer a positive economic vision and a program for economic change. The American Jobs Act – even if it must be pushed through piecemeal — is a good start, as are the president’s recent actions on mortgages and student loans.

Such positions will also help Senator Brown’s chances of re-election, but in 2012, in Ohio at least, the usual pattern of members of Congress benefiting from presidential coattails could be reversed. Brown’s solid support for organized labor, community groups and those who have been most hurt by the continuing economic crisis — positions that resonate with the millions of Ohio voters who overturned Senate Bill 5 — may help Obama more than anything Obama has done will help Brown.

None of this is guaranteed, of course. In order for the battle over Senate Bill 5 to influence the 2012 election, those who have organized so effectively to defend unions must continue to work together. Unions will have to keep educating members and reach out to those outside of the labor movement. They will also have to work closely with community and neighborhood groups like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which played a pivotal role in community organizing around Senate Bill 5.

None of that will be easy. Competing interests within and between organized labor and community organizations make the coalition very fragile. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is relatively weak in Ohio, and some tensions exist between public and private sector unions. Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to put parts of Senate Bill 5 through in a series of smaller bills next year. Without solidarity across labor organizations, the coalition that fought so well against one big bill could fracture. It may be that other issues won’t have the unifying effect of Senate Bill 5. After all, the same voters who overturned that bill approved a constitutional amendment barring the implementation of the individual insurance mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act.

But if the organizers of the campaign against Senate Bill 5 can hold together and if the Obama campaign can tap into the anger and solidarity of that fight, Tuesday’s vote could turn out to be the turning point in the 2012 election.

 

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Fighting for More than A Contract

While Wisconsin drew most of the national media attention as the home front of the battle over collective bargaining for public sector workers, what’s happening in Ohio is every bit as significant and interesting.  Ignoring weeks of protests in the state capitol and around the state, and despite divisions within the Ohio Republican delegations, the Ohio legislature passed Senate Bill 5 in March.  The bill would place tight limits on collective bargaining for most public employees, and it would ban it entirely for college professors (using the language from the Yeshiva Decision that defines us as managers). By June, almost a million people had signed petitions to put the measure on the ballot in November, giving voters the opportunity to overturn the bill – something we can do in Ohio that isn’t an option in Wisconsin.

The petition drive involved unions across the state, as well as community and religious organizations, while local chambers of commerce, businesses, and even the state’s university presidents either overtly advocated for SB5 or insisted on “remaining neutral” and thus passively embraced it .  Those same divisions are playing out as the campaign heats up heading toward November.

For public sector unions, this has been a tough time.  No one wants to make organized labor or collective bargaining look bad right now.  The Ohio Education Association, for example, has encouraged its locals to settle on contracts, no matter how bad, early in the game, and many have complied.

Here at Youngstown State University, we’re living with the political ramifications of this bill right now.  The faculty union, an OEA affiliate, first accepted the recommendations of an external fact finder,   which included small pay raises, a large  increase in our health care costs, and a small cut in pay for teaching summer courses.  We said yes, agreeing to accept what amounted to major concessions, but the Board of Trustees rejected the fact-finder’s report, demanding even greater “shared sacrifice” from the faculty.  Their counterproposal asked for cuts of up to $7500 in a single year for some, though their public statements insisted that most faculty would lose less than $1000.  Much of that loss comes in summer pay, which affects only faculty, not administrators or other staff.  So much for “shared sacrifice.”

Clearly, the upcoming referendum on SB5 has created an especially difficult context for unions.  Some have speculated that the Board of Trustees (most of whom were appointed by Republican governors) is playing hard ball at the request, advice, or encouragement of the Governor or other Republican leaders who hope that a strike by YSU faculty will illustrate the need for this bill. Others are encouraging the faculty to give in to avoid generating public resentment that could lead to a bad outcome in November.  No doubt, every public sector worker in Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and other states with similar laws must be feeling the pressure to make organized labor look good.  But should  we make every concession we’re asked for, in order to show that unions are reasonable and willing to do our part to balance state and local budgets?  If we do that, aren’t we also willingly contributing to the loss of power for workers and for unions?

Some organizers of the campaign to overturn SB5 have encouraged us to avoid making trouble, but I would argue that the situation at YSU offers a great illustration of why collective bargaining is so important.  What’s happening here illustrates just how bad SB5 and similar bills will be for public sector workers.  If we were not allowed to bargain, the administration would have imposed much bigger cuts.  YSU faculty are already the second-lowest paid in Ohio, and under SB5 we’d be solidly at the bottom, with no recourse whatsoever.

At the same time, we illustrate that collective bargaining works, not only for workers but for employers.  After all, our negotiations have already been built around concessions, not demands for increased salaries.  Further, in exercising our labor rights – by going to fact finding, by holding democratic votes on the proposals, by authorizing a strike and ultimately deciding not to strike, by filing unfair labor practices – we are working through a process that protects us even as it limits some of what we can do.  To my mind, we make a great poster child for public sector bargaining.

For an academic activist who is also deeply engaged in teaching, this has been an especially difficult time.  On the one hand, I’m ready to push this fight as hard as I can, because what happens here matters not only for us but for public workers across the state.  On the other hand, the threat of a strike – and that remains a possibility – creates real difficulties for students.  The University administration has already shown that it is willing to put our students at risk in its effort to force even greater concessions from the faculty.  A week before classes were due to start, YSU announced that it was putting a hold on financial aid, claiming that they could not say with confidence when school would start because the faculty had filed a strike notice.  They had never done this before, despite strike authorizations in previous rounds of negotiations or during an actual strike in 2005.  While assuring students of the administration’s concern, YSU had prepared alternative schedules and a website full of information, and they had sent threatening messages to members of other campus unions insisting that they were required to cross the picket lines.  The faculty union refused to play along, and after voting down the administration’s “last best offer,” we decided not to strike.  Instead, we are back in the classroom, working under the provisions of the old contract and trying to continue negotiations.

Some students responded exactly as the administration must have hoped: blaming the faculty and creating a facebook page that included many statements by students vowing to vote in support of SB5 because of this.  But others were not reeled in.  Instead, they organized.  They created a facebook page, YSU Students for Faculty (which now has almost 900 members), but they also held protests, conducted a letter-writing campaign, and challenged the University administration to treat its workers fairly.  They analyzed the administration’s actions and communications, and they have used a wide range of tools, from social media to filing public records requests to showing up and trying to ask questions at a Board of Trustees press conference last week.  They are also working with the campaign against SB5.

As the students have made clear, this is a case where politics are not entirely local.  What happens here may well affect the statewide vote in November, and of course, I hope it will make clear to anyone who’s unsure about the issue that unions are our best, maybe even our only, tool to protect the rights of workers.  But while the dispute at YSU and the debate over SB5 are inherently political, they also serve as learning opportunities.  The discussion among the students — and even on local talk radio — has encompassed why people should vote to overturn SB5, what’s happening to workers and universities across the country, the sad state of the American dream, and the real purpose of a college degree.  Those conversations remind us that the fate of public sector workers – educators, clerical workers, safety officers, health care workers – is not just about our income or benefits.  It’s about the public good.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

Jerk in Charge

The word “boss” traces its roots to the Dutch word “baas,” meaning master, and some have argued that it caught on in the Americas as a way for workers to avoid the word master and thus the pairings of “master and servant,” or worse, “master and slave.”  As a slang word for “awesome” or “excellent,” boss took on an added positive meaning as early as the 1880s.  It was used in that way throughout the 20^th century, as the character Michael Scott observed on The Office:

Remember when people used to say “boss” when they were describing something really cool. Like, “those shoulder pads are really boss man.” “Look at that perm, that perm is so boss!” It’s what made me want to become a boss. And I looked so good in a perm and shoulder pads. But now, boss is just slang for jerk in charge.

Have you ever had a horrible boss?  Have you ever fantasized about doing something to get rid of your boss that was, ummmm, kind of extreme?  Like….MURDER?  If so, you might enjoy this summer’s latest popcorn comedy, Horrible Bosses, in which three white (and white collar) workers played by Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day come together with the help of a black conman (Jamie Fox) to kill each other’s bosses.  Their bosses are each horrible in their own special way:  there is the “Psycho” boss, played by Kevin Spacey, the “Maneater,” a sexually aggressive dentist played by Jennifer Anniston, and the “Tool,” an impossibly ugly, sleazy boss, played by Colin Ferrell outfitted with a paunch, a comb-over, and the classic short-sleeve-shirt-with-a-tie-look.

We don’t normally look to Hollywood films for revolutionary zeal, but the people who made Horrible Bosses are keenly aware that a lot of Americans are angry about their jobs.  In 2010 a CNN report found that job satisfaction among Americans was at a historic, 22 year low, around 45%.  Horrible Bosses producer Jay Stern, in an interview with Hollywood reporter Steven Weintraub, said that he hoped the movie would appeal to the sense of “stuckness” that so many Americans have in their jobs:

If [Horrible Bosses] comes together the way I see it, it’s gonna tap into all the emotion and all the upheaval for a lot of Americans right now. People who can’t afford their mortgages and have to renegotiate with the bank or something gets repossessed after you worked your whole life. You follow the rules and you do the right thing and you still get screwed. That’s what I think a lot of Americans are in the middle [of] right now and I’d love to tap into that because that underpins the desperation that a lot of Americans are in…”

Stern is definitely on to something.  Last year workplace consultant, Lynn Taylor found that Americans spend 19 hours a week “worrying about ‘what a boss says or does,’” including 6 hours during the weekend. If this seems like a lot, think about your own job. How much time do you spend ruminating, fuming, griping, venting, or gossiping about your boss?  How much time do you spend in meetings with your boss, or answering emails sent by your boss, about things that do not help you to be productive?  Taylor argues that the managers’ words and actions can be a “tremendous drain” on the “minds and work product of its most valued asset:  people.”

Other studies show that a bad boss can be dangerous to your health.  A recent Swedish study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that employees who had managers who were “incompetent, inconsiderate, secretive and uncommunicative” were “60% more likely to suffer a heart attack.”  Employees with good bosses—bosses who didn’t cause them undue stress—“were 40% less likely to suffer heart problems.”

When it comes to class, who has the worst bosses?  Blue collar or white collar workers?  While I could not find data that suggested one kind is worse than the other, I did find a list of the ten “least stressful” jobs, and they were all white collar jobs:  Audiologist, Dietician, Occupational Therapist, Dental Hygienist, Software Engineer, Mathematician, Speech Pathologist, and Philosopher were in the top ten.  Are these jobs less stressful because they allow workers higher degrees of autonomy and provide for less interference from meddling bosses?  Perhaps.

If your boss is stressing you out, there are several places you can go to publish your pain.  One popular website has trademarked the phrase “Really Bad Boss^TM,” and has a rich archive of stories and forums.  You can also send it to a website called “Employee Surveys,” run by a company called Business Research Lab.  In 2006 the AFL-CIO ran a “bad boss” contest, which it used to get press attention and to raise member awareness for the purposes of organizing for several years following the contest.  You can also choose from a variety of books that will tell you how to manage your boss.

Some journalists have argued that bad boss stories spike in a bad economy.  So perhaps Horrible Bosses is, indeed, a product of the recession. But what else can you do besides gripe?  If you are feeling violently angry, you may be in good company;  research suggests that employee sabotage on the job can be seen as a form of protest.  One study argues that “theft, sabotage and aggression…can be viewed as a form of protest in which organizational members express dissatisfaction with or attempt to resolve injustice within the organization.”

I wondered as I conducted this research for Horrible Bosses if unionized workers, equipped with grievance procedures and options for collective action, might feel less anti-boss sentiment than their non-unionized counterparts.  But according to a recent study union workers are more likely to see their bosses in an antagonistic light.  Perhaps, in this terrible recession, with its jobless recovery, lots of non-unionized workers are having a harder time seeing their bosses as “partners” too.

Of course, I am always a big fan of collective action when it comes to bad bosses or anything else that’s bad on the job, but if you are not represented by a union and you need a quick fix, sneak your own popcorn and drinks into a matinee showing of Horrible Bosses.  As cathartic solutions go it will probably be a lot cheaper than buying a gun.

Kathy M. Newman

How to Build a Strong Economy: Education or Unions?

On May 15, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that

The American higher-education system has long been seen as a leader in the world, but confidence in its future and its enduring value may be beginning to crack along economic lines, according to two major surveys of the American public and college presidents conducted this spring.

The surveys, conducted by The Pew Research Center and The Chronicle, reveal few surprises to those of us who have been paying attention to the latest crisis of higher education, but several points underscore the different views of the purpose of higher education among education professionals and between those with degrees and those who have not gone to college . For example, of the 1,055 presidents of colleges and universities across a broad spectrum, including four-year, two-year, public, private, and for-profit institutions, respondents are split roughly in half on whether colleges should be about work force preparation or “intellectual growth,” and the responses fall along a predictable axis, with four-year institutions arguing for the latter, and two-year and for-profits advocating the former.

Equally interesting is the difference between college graduates and those who have not (or have not yet) attended college in their responses to the same question on the mission of higher education. According to Pew, those who attended college more often believe that the mission of college is intellectual growth, while those who have not feel it should be work-force preparation. As significant are the responses, across all educational levels, to the question of what a young person needs to succeed in the world: a college education comes in third, behind a “strong work ethic” and the ability to get along with people..

The Chronicle survey addresses President Obama’s statement in last year’s State of the Union address of a national goal that the U.S would lead the world in degree attainment by 2020, so that we can lead the global workplace. The assumption that America will regain its competitive edge simply by awarding more college  degrees seems naïve, , particularly when the same respondents to the Chronicle survey report overall “lower quality” of preparation on the part of incoming students. Indeed, few of the college presidents surveyed think the goal is attainable: only three percent believe it is “likely” that the U.S. will achieve this benchmark, while 50 percent say it’s not likely.

Compounding the problem is that, even if this goal were achieved, a college degree is not a guarantee of gainful employment, though university marketers often suggest it is. Just last week, Catherine Rampell of the New York Times cited a study by Andrew Sum of Northeastern University that shows that only 55.6 percent of 2009 college graduates are working in jobs that require a college degree, while the other 44.4 percent are almost evenly split between working in jobs that require no degree and not working at all.  In the current economy, and as Sherry Linkon and Jack Metzgar have suggested in their analyses of predictions about job growth in the service sector, in the long run, college degrees are clearly not the answer for everyone.

Indeed, in his response to Obama’s aspiration, Brookings Institute fellow Grover J. ‘Russ” Whitehurst noted:

Germany has a stronger economy than France but half the percentage of young adults with a college degree.  Further, France has increased its percentage of young adults with college degrees by 13 percentage points in the last 10 years whereas Germany’s output of college graduates has hardly budged, yet the economic growth rate of Germany has exceeded that of France over this same period.  Obviously increasing educational attainment is not a magic bullet for economic growth.  Education credentials operate within boundaries and possibilities that are set by other characteristics of national economies.  We must attend to these if more education is to translate into more jobs.

And what are those “other characteristics” that might generate a stronger national economy? The answer is ironic, especially as governors in Ohio and Wisconsin are pushing anti-union bills through state legislatures. According to several studies, one of the conditions of strong economies like Germany’s is not increased degree attainment but strong unions and worker protections.

Marc McDonald suggests that when looking at two of the world’s nations with the lowest jobless rates, Germany and Japan, what emerges is a common factor of heavily unionized workforces:

Take a look at two of the most heavily unionized nations in the world: Germany and Japan. Both nations are thriving and have jobless rates far below the U.S. rate. Both nations still have large manufacturing sectors, which are heavily unionized. And both nations are exporting more than ever—even to low-wage nations like China. (Japan, for example, is one of the few nations on earth that has enjoyed a trade surplus with China much of the time in recent years)… Not only are Germany and Japan heavily unionized, both nations have strong pro-worker laws that back up their labor movements. In both nations, for example, it’s virtually impossible to fire full-time workers. Mass layoffs are very rare in both nations.

While many would balk at the suggestion that the U.S. emulate Japan, with its notorious reputation as a stressed out, all-work economy, McDonald notes that, on average, Japanese workers work fewer hours than their American counterparts and enjoy greater benefits. McDonald argues that because workers are protected within these economies, the companies that employ them must think beyond the immediate and develop long-term strategies, rather than short-sighted policies that focus solely on short-term growth and quick shareholder gains.

McDonald may be on to something in his suggestion that as corporations –  and increasingly universities — clamor for the “flexibility” that non-union and non-tenure workplaces promise, they may be embracing a short-sighted strategy. Writing in Harpers last year, Thomas Geoghegan, urges Americans to “Consider the Germans,” and in so doing he counters the claim that what American employers need is greater flexibility and fewer fetters that come with worker representation. In considering the ways that Germany continues to thrive in high-market manufacturing he notes:

All my life as a labor lawyer I have read the same thing in The Economist, about the United States and its wonderful labor-market flexibility. What they mean is: Unlike the Germans, U.S. working people are completely powerless. But it’s precisely because of our labor-market flexibility that we can’t compete. Our workers have been flexed right out of their high-wage, high-skill jobs and into low-wage, low-skill jobs. That’s bad for the workers, of course, and it’s also bad for the economy. The German model—with worker control built into the very structure of the firm—keeps bosses and workers in groups, rubbing elbows with each other, and sometimes just elbowing. It creates a group interaction that over time builds and protects what economists like to call human capital, especially in engineering and quality control. It’s precisely this kind of valuable capital that our atomizing “flexible” labor markets are so good at breaking up and dispersing.

Both McDonald and Geoghegan share the belief that while America obsesses (with good reason) over China, that the model to emulate is that of Germany, with its strong secondary education system and clear worker rights’ laws.

What’s the connection between the value of a college degree and the economic impact of unions?  Just this: if our goal as a nation is economic growth, then we might do better to focus on the rights and status of workers rather than on getting more people to go to college.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

Unions: Getting Things Done for Workers

I have been a labor organizer for 11 years.  Periodically someone pronounces labor unions as dead or dying organizations, and we all put our heads together to think about ways to save them. Lately, I am much less worried about preserving this version of the labor movement. To me, preserving is about freezing in time and let’s be real: we are already starting to look a little moth-eaten. For most working people unions are something akin to a fairy tale character–either monster or superhero, depending your politics. Very few working-class people are now or have ever been members of a union.

Those unions that are left are under serious attack all over the county. It seems like the answer to those attacks can’t only be self-preservation. A movement of any kind is about moving–about being an instrument for change. It is about reflecting the people and struggle of today. I am very interested in figuring out how to make a labor movement that moves people forward. I keep coming back to a quotation from the late labor organizer and folk singer Utah Philips who defined a union as “a way of getting things done together that you can’t get done alone.” Nowhere in that definition is there a claim that there is only one way to get things done together. For that matter, the word “things” is open many interpretations.

During the last two months I have had little time to think about anything outside of the campaign I am working on here in Oregon. Workers who provide support for people with developmental disabilities are organizing for the first time to preserve the very programs that allow people with disabilities to exercise their civil rights and live independently. We have been visiting thousands of people to ask them what they feel needs to be done. The events in Wisconsin have broken through the bubble of campaign work and captured the imagination of organizers and workers alike. While the battle unfolding in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere is partly about preservation, what has captivated me and others across the country is more than that.

Having a union is not the end goal. It is a means to an end, a tool for working people to have power over their lives and work.   Now someone is trying to take away the best tool working people have for getting things done together. While working people themselves know what they want to get done, Wisconsin has shown a way it may be possible. Instead of becoming mired in an attempt to work through acceptable channels and follow a “process” that would have likely ended in crushing loss, people in Wisconsin took swift and direct action to confront the decision makers who were trying to rob them of their rights. That is a compelling lesson for all of us fighting to build a worker movement.

Recently, when a member of the union I work for was asked why she was volunteering to visit with non-union workers on her day off, she said: “I want to do a difference in the world . . . if not for myself then for others.”  Let’s start there, by redefining the labor movement that way.  What we do as a labor movement is to ‘do a difference’ for working people. If we are serious about organizing the working class, then working people need to decide what needs doing. With so few working-class people in unions we need to go far beyond our membership to ask what needs doing and then really listen to the answers.  Let’s start where every union organizing drive should start: by talking to workers–employed and unemployed–about what they want to improve about their work and this economy.

A union has meaning when it is the expression of what working people want or need to do. What has become glaringly obvious in Wisconsin is that the system we are supposed to use to get what we need is mostly used against us these days. As a result, the labor movement needs to be an adaptable tool, molded to fit the task at hand. The demonstrations in Wisconsin speak to the potential power of people getting things done together and the need to display that power more.

If a union is a tool to get things done, then we have often been going about this all wrong. We don’t need to run around convincing people about the virtues of unions, we need to start with workers’ experience. We need to find out what can’t get done without coming together and create a labor movement that gets it done.

Angela MacWhinnie

Angela MacWhinnie has been a union organizer for 11 years and currently works with SEIU Local 503 in Portland, Oregon.  She is also a member of the Working-Class Studies Association.

$2 Trillion

I really have no conception of how much $2 trillion is, and I’m not helped much by knowing that it’s enough for a stack of 20-dollar bills to reach the moon.  $2 trillion is really, really a lot of money – I got that part.  I know that it is $2,000 billion, and that helps some because I have some sense of what a billion is.  I also know that $2 trillion is equivalent to 1/7^th of the entire U.S. economy, which has a GDP of about $14 trillion.  So $2 trillion is a huge amount of money, but it is a relatively small piece of the whole, about 14%.

$2 trillion is the amount that businesses are currently holding in cash and short-term investments rather than investing in long-term productive activity that would create jobs and thereby spark our stagnant economy to life.

$2 trillion is also roughly the additional amount that full-time workers would earn each year if productivity growth had been shared since 1979 the way it was for more than thirty years before 1979.  (I get this from Steven Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze, page 5, where he calculates that shared productivity growth would result in full-time workers earning about $22,000 more than they actually do.  There are about 100 million full-time workers, and multiplied by $22,000, that amounts to $2.2 trillion.)

I think these two different $2 trillion amounts are related.  That the $2 trillion lost to workers by the disappearance of productivity sharing has piled up in corporations where they cannot find a useful purpose for it.   And  because their wages have stagnated, workers do not have enough spending power to buy all that our economy can produce, and that this insufficiency of wages and salaries is the principal cause of our current economic stagnation.  If this is so, then raising wages (and quickly) would be the best way to stimulate our economy.

This is relevant because the business press is currently debating why that $2 trillion in corporate cash and short-term investment is being “sidelined” (meaning not just temporarily out of the game and ready to substitute for existing players, but in the football metaphor, that the economy is playing with only 9.5 players rather than 11).  One view says this huge amount of money is sidelined because of “business uncertainty” related to all the new regulations the Obama administration is imposing.  The other view holds that businesses are sitting on this money because there is insufficient consumer demand to assure businesses of profitable investment opportunities.  The second view believes that if consumer demand were “robust,” businesses would take that $2 trillion off the sidelines and even borrow money to invest in productive economic activity.  The vast majority of consumers are wage-earners, of course, the same folks who lose about $2 trillion a year because they have not been sharing in economy-wide productivity gains.

If these various $2 trillion amounts are related as cause and effect, it means that transferring some part of the $2 trillion in sidelined money – say just $500 billion – to workers in increased wages and salaries would result in more profitable opportunities, thus more business investment, millions more jobs, even more profitable opportunities, and an economy growing at 5% or 6% (for a while) rather than the hoped for 3% growth that is now projected.  At 3%, a good growth rate in normal times, it might take a decade to get unemployment down to below 5%, and meanwhile an enormous amount of permanent social and economic damage will continue to be done.

Though I’m not an economist, I am well aware that there is no existing mechanism for increasing wages that dramatically across the economy – a $500 billion transfer from the corporate pile to wages and salaries would amount to a $5,000 increase for every full-time worker.  Unions are now too weak to get substantial increases like that for their own members, let alone to have their traditional positive “spillover” effect on nonunion workers.  And the federal minimum wage is now so low (at $7.25 an hour) that raising it even very dramatically (to say $10), while highly desirable, doesn’t affect enough workers to get much of that corporate pile off the sidelines.

The point is that our economy is growing too slowly because workers don’t have enough consumer spending power, and as a result, businesses don’t have enough investment opportunities to put all their capital to work.  Investors have too much because workers have too little, and vice versa.  Transferring a sizeable chunk of it would probably be good for everybody.

Fighting for living wages and improving prospects for union organizing are the best options to restore productivity-sharing going forward.  But in the short-term, to get us out of our current stagnation, the one best way to restore the balance between investors and consumers might be to raise taxes on corporations and high-end individuals and then air drop the resulting revenue in 20-dollar bills onto low-wage communities across the country.

If that strikes you as a frivolous idea, ask yourself why there is no national discussion of how to restore productivity sharing in order to increase wages, consumer demand, business investment, and millions and millions of jobs.  Ask yourself why, instead, we’re discussing how to cut Social Security and public service workers’ jobs and pensions.

Jack Metzgar, Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies

The Myth of the Benevolent Boss

Following this year’s Superbowl, viewers who stayed tuned to CBS were treated to the premiere of the network’s new series, Undercover Boss, in which COO of Waste Management Corp., Larry O’Donnell, dons coveralls to go undercover in his own corporation.

The premise of the show according to CBS is that

Each week a different executive will leave the comfort of their corner office for an undercover mission to examine the inner workings of their company. While working alongside their employees, they will see the effects their decisions have on others, where the problems lie within their organization and get an up-close look at both the good and the bad while discovering the unsung heroes who make their company run… O’Donnell’s mission is to garner an up-close look at his company and workforce to see how and where improvements can be made from both an operational and morale standpoint.

In the premier episode, O’Donnell, alias “Randy,” cleans toilets, picks up trash and sorts recyclables alongside his workers, and in so doing he comes to realize that… wait for it…manual labor is hard! Randy is also surprised to learn that, unbelievably, when trash collectors are followed by supervisors in conspicuous white pick-ups, they feel as though they are being spied on and that when his company eliminates positions, the work load is shifted onto remaining employees who receive no additional compensation for their extra labor.

In the blogosphere the show has already attracted much attention, mostly negative, and largely deserved.   The New York Post reported that unlike a “reality” show, for which participants are paid, the network has labeled the show both a “docu-narrative” and a “formatted documentary,” which CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler tells Josef Adalian “…hits all of the same visceral high points of our scripted shows. It’s emotional, it’s funny, it’s compelling, it’s full of surprises…”

And it’s also a bargain for the network because as “documentary” CBS is not bound to pay any of the participants as it would with scripted or “reality” shows. Responding to TV Squad’s reports of the uncompensated appearances, a CBS spokesman said, “No one in the company is being paid for participation in Undercover Boss. Neither the employees, the executives, nor the companies receive compensation for participating in the show.” The blog reports that the workers in the program signed releases to be in a documentary film, which means it is not covered by the television actors’ union, thus eliding the requirement for minimum payments for TV appearances.

As incredible as the irony of a “docu-narrative” that chronicles the plight of workers without paying them might be, equally disconcerting is the meta-narrative that drives the series, described by Tassler as “aspirational…it’s wish fulfillment and it’s a new form (of reality).”

Randy/Larry rides along with a female trash collector.  When he learns that under the watchful eye of the aforementioned supervisor surveillance truck, she is reduced to urinating into a tin can rather than compromising productivity by taking a bathroom break, he appears visibly shaken., Undercover Boss suggests that O’Donnell’s experience will lead to better policies, as O’Donnell tells NPR’s Linda Holmes:

I was out working a residential route, and I then found out that one of the policies that I had put in place was actually causing a lot of frustration out there in the field. So we’re working right now on improving our communication and our coaching between the supervisors and the drivers.

When pressed by Holmes to reveal “tangible” changes in corporate policy, O’Donnell responds with non-specific corpo-speak about motivational videos and better communication instead of actual policy shifts.  The white truck isn’t going away anytime soon, probably because it is part of a strategy to save the company more than $100 million and increase divided to stockholders, as outlined in the company’s most recent annual report.The episode focuses on five “unsung heroes”—the trash collector, a cancer-survivor field office worker performing three jobs (due to corporate streamlining of positions also noted in the annual report) to support her family and hang on to her home, a dialysis patient who blows O’Donnell away with his positive attitude, a plant worker who must race back from lunch to avoid what appears to be an illegal pay docking policy, and a toilet scrubber who makes his job “fun.” While the first two voice complaints about corporate policies, all perform their jobs with capability and aplomb, and each (save the trash collector) is tangibly rewarded: the field office worker is promoted to a salary position, while the dialysis patient and the toilet scrubber are given temp gigs as in-house motivational speakers.  Meanwhile, the middle manager responsible for enforcing the time clock policy is roundly taken to task by O’Donnell, although O’Donnell later tells NPR the whole issue was a “miscommunication.”

Absent from the narrative is union representation, which is perhaps not surprising given Waste Management’s troubled history with the Teamsters that culminated with a lockout of workers in 2007 and has resulted in at least one settlement with the union over its practices toward organized labor.

Instead, even as the show glorifies the unsung worker, it also perpetuates the myththat all workers need to improve their lots is a positive attitude and a benevolent COO, a mythology that ignores some of the stark realities of corporate culture.

Media promote that mythology, perhaps unwittingly, through a recession narrative  that valorizes workers’ willingness to sufferithe necessary indignities of work life because they are, and should be, grateful just to have a job during the economic downturn.. Such stories tend to ignore the contradictions of the narrative in favor of the media friendly package.The narrative says that companies are struggling, but a recent Sagework analytics study shows that waste collection is among the industries experiencing the largest sales growth over the last twelve months.

At the same time, overall worker productivity rose 7.2 percent, according to the most recent Labor Department statistics, as employers wring more labor from existing workers and, in many cases, engage policies that CNN’s Peter Walker notes “would have been seen as too radical, or too likely to antagonize unions, before the crisis.” , Indeed, pri.org charts a rise in wage and worker’s rights violations during the same period.

The goal of the CBS program is, in itself, laudable: to connect the disparate dots between top-level policy and the daily lives of workers. But by perpetuating the “feel-good” narrative over the more complex contingencies of the real story of workers and bosses in a tough economy, the show engages in nothing short of myth-making, which as John Drakakis notes, is born of an impulse to produce

…a series of essentialist meanings which function to transform a sequence of historical and political events into a series of permanent, one might say almost literary truths, which can when deployed by the powerful constituencies, deflect resistance or challenge by framing the historically contingent as a ‘tragic’ necessity…

While Drakakis is referring specifically to instances in which pundits evoke literary frames for politically complex realities, his thoughts are relevant for cultural productions like Undercover Boss, that in mythologizing the corporate narrative, reduce complexities to what Roland Barthes has called the “depoliticized speech” of myth. The idea that bosses value their workers and care about their needs enough to change company policies is, sadly, more a myth than a reality.  It reinforces another problematic myth: that labor unions aren’t  necessary.  If workers do their jobs the best they can, then the boss will respond to their needs.

Perhaps CBS is banking on the appeal of these myths in producing Undercover Boss, but skeptical viewers will recognize the truth in the smirks of O’Donnell’s management team when he explains that the company’s policies make workers unhappy.  And the strategies outlined in Waste Management’s annual report remind us that profit always matters more than people.  So much for the myth of benevolent management.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

Stop Stealing from Workers

Late last year I sat in the office of an Ohio County Prosecutor and provided her and the County Sherriff thick notebooks documenting a systematic theft of workers’ wages by a local construction contractor by means of misclassification under Ohio Prevailing Wage Law and systematic underpayment. The theft was compounded by the fact that company officials signed false verifications of compliance with state prevailing wage laws under penalty of perjury.   To add insult to injury, the job on which the wage theft took place was being paid for with tax dollars from that same county.

I asked the Prosecutor what would happen if a local construction contractor had brought evidence that one of their workers, perhaps a bookkeeper, had fraudulently written herself tens of thousands of dollars in checks from funds belonging to the company and then lied about the theft on government mandated reports signed under penalty of perjury. The Prosecutor, Sherriff, and their assistants and deputies all assured me that the culprit would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I smiled, certain that  these law enforcement officials, ethical office holders, and civil servants would be as anxious to arrest and prosecute the owners of the construction company for stealing wages from their employees and lying about it under penalty of perjury as they would be to prosecute that bookkeeper.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

They flatly refused to treat the wage theft as a criminal offense.  Instead, the company’s conduct was treated as a “mistake,” blamed on failure to understand the law.

Enforcement was left to the Ohio Department of Commerce, which could only require the company to pay back wages.  While more than $40,000 was ordered to be paid to the 9 employees and a 100 percent civil penalty assessed, the company owners were spared the life changing consequences of a criminal prosecution.

My experience was put into disturbing context by Kim Bobo’s new book, Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—and What We Can Do about It (New York: The New Press, 2009) .  Bobo documents a wage theft crime wave across the United States. The victims range from illegal immigrants who fear deportation if they report violations to skilled construction workers who are forced to kick back parts of their paycheck on government projects, and includes childcare and home healthcare workers, sales clerks, and many others.  Bobo makes a compelling case that wage theft is far more pervasive than most of us understand or would like to admit.

Bobo draws her analysis primarily from her experience in running Interfaith Worker Justice Center in Chicago and cases handled by other worker centers throughout the country, and  a recent study of over 4000 low wage workers dramatically verified Bobo’s conclusions.  The study, “Broken Laws: Unprotected Workers,” makes stunning discoveries of the rampant nature of wage theft in America. Here are a few of the conclusions:

• 26 % of respondents had been paid less than the minimum wage in the previous workweek.
• 25% of the respondents had worked more than 40 hours in the previous week but a  whopping 76% of them were not paid overtime.
• 70% of workers who arrived early or stayed late at their employer’s request were not paid for the extra time.
• 69 % of workers entitled to meal breaks didn’t get them.

Wages are stolen from tens if not hundreds of thousands of American workers every day.  If employers were stealing from customers in such a systematic way, law enforcement at all levels would be forming task forces and putting thousands in jail.

Why should theft of wages from American workers be different?  Bobo suggests that most instances of wage theft can be traced to old-fashioned greed.  Greed is sometimes dressed up with rational sounding names like “pressure from competitors in low wage countries” or “innovative” compensation schemes.  But at the end of the day employers steal from those who work for them in order to make more money.

Bobo correctly points out that wage theft is also driven by the greed of consumers who demand low prices.   That demand leads some companies to indirectly encourage wage theft.    Bobo quotes the Congressional Testimony of MIT Professor Thomas Kochan, regarding the poster child for wage theft in America: “Wal-Mart executives have established corporate policies that are ethical and appear to conform to legal requirements. However Wal-Mart has also established financial and business objectives that managers find difficult to achieve without circumventing those rules.”  This is a scenario not unique to Wal-Mart. Despite ethical, legal policies, many companies repeatedly steal from their employees in order to reduce labor costs.

But perhaps the biggest factor is the lack of consequences.  Wage thieves are only rarely caught, and those who are face almost no legal, financial, or societal consequences.  Often the worst penalty for a wage theft is being forced to pay workers what they should have been paid to begin with and then only for the period of time allowed under the statute of limitations (often as little as two years).   Weak enforcement of relatively weak laws is as much to blame for the widespread practice of wage theft as employer or consumer greed.

Wage Theft in America proposes a variety of potential solutions to the problem.  Bobo’s proposals range from creating more worker centers to dramatically beefing up the enforcement capacity of Federal and State Wage and Hour Enforcement Agencies to policies that increase the number of workers represented by labor unions.  While her proposals would work, much of what she suggests would require legislation and appropriations that are politically unattainable even with Democratic control of all three branches of the federal government. (See the recent collapse of card check provision of the Employee Free Choice Act, if you have any doubt about this).

However, some less controversial and inexpensive strategies can help.   Congress needs to simplify economic protection laws and make it easier for employees to report wage theft offenses.  In particular, workers need reliable protection against retaliation for reporting violations.  Workers currently risk of termination or other workplace punishment if they report wage theft.

But ending wage theft may not require new laws.  Instead, government agencies should simply enforce existing regulations.  It won’t take many well-publicized arrests to persuade employers to stop cheating workers.

Making that happen will require political pressure.  Activists, religious organizations, and labor unions need to reignite the kind of moral outrage that brought about our current labor laws almost a century ago.  Rooting discussions of wage theft in religion can help.  Bobo argues that religious teachings from the Old Testament to the Quran demand that workers receive their fair day’s pay.  Because of this, religious organizations can be fertile ground for generating moral outrage against those who exploit the least among us.

Labor Unions and political activists should educate elected prosecutors and sheriffs about wage theft and how it undermines local citizens and the community.  And they should pressure law enforcement officials to do their jobs.  Local business communities should also support such efforts, since cheating competitors have an unfair advantage over ethical businesses that follow the law.  And since Bobo’s book demonstrates that companies with labor unions are less likely to commit wage fraud than their competitors, union leaders should engage their counterparts across the bargaining table to join in efforts to encourage more serious enforcement.

Unions and their lawyers can devote resources to investigating and documenting wage theft, providing overburdened state and federal officials the evidence they need to bring cases.  Efforts by construction unions to promote “fair contracting” have forced non-union competitors to comply with prevailing wage laws. Organized labor should embrace these efforts as tools to strengthen unionized competitors in every industry and for organizing more companies in the future.  Such efforts also show management and potential members the added value that having a union can bring to a company and its workers.

Wage Theft in America frames the debate as about not just the value of labor unions in the workplace, but also the value of workers themselves.  Reframing wage and hour violations as crime, reclaiming the moral high ground, and refusing to tolerate wage theft not only discourages cheating of workers but also reminds companies that operate ethically, as most do, that wage theft cuts into their bottom lines.  Such changes in the public debate would certainly have changed the outcome of my efforts to prosecute the cheating contractor in Ohio.

Marc Dann is a lawyer in Cleveland who represents labor unions and workers seeking fair wages and contracting practices and has been a community affiliate of the Center for Working-Class Studies for four years .