Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid - And What We Can Do About It »

Kim Bobo is the founder and executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice and a columnist for Religion Dispatches (www.religiondispatches.org). She is the author of Lives Matter: A Handbook for Christian Organizing and the co-author of Organizing for Social Change, the most widely used manual on progressive activism in the country. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.

In what has been described as “the crime wave no one talks about,” billions of dollars worth of wages are stolen from millions of workers in the United States every year. The scope of these abuses is staggering—paying employees far less than the legal minimum wage, purposefully misclassifying employees as independent contractors, illegally denying workers overtime pay—but there are ways to respond. Nationally-recognized labor activist Kim Bobo’s Wage Theft in America is an incisive handbook for organizers, workers, and concerned citizens on how to prevent the flagrant exploitation of America’s working people. Offering a sweeping analysis of the crisis and providing concrete solutions, with special attention to what a new Presidential administration can do, Wage Theft in America addresses one of the gravest issues facing workers in the 21st-century.

1 The crisis of wage theft 3

2 How employers steal wages 23

3 Why employers steal wages 42

4 How U.S. labor laws fail workers 55

5 Organizing to stop wage theft : why unions matter 73

6 Workers centers : front lines against wage theft 88

7 The Department of Labor - more important than ever 107

8 Frances Perkins : more than a building 133

9 Punishing wage theft and rewarding leaders 144

10 A new vision for the Department of Labor 161

11 Stopping wage theft is good for America 193

12 You can make a difference 206

App. A Department of Labor wage and hour settlements 225

App. B Private wage and hour lawsuits 259

App. C Catholic labor schools 266

App. D Workers centers and legal clinics 270

App. E Faith body positions on wages and working conditions 277

App. F National organizations fighting wage theft 287

App. G Congregational study guide for Wage theft in America 294

Notes 301