How employers steal from workers -- and get away with it

In this pathbreaking book, Kim Bobo reveals wage theft as a national epidemic. Inspired by a faith-based and social justice organizing background, she not only documents the problem and industries prone to wage theft, but also traces what states, localities, activists, communities and faith-based coalitions are doing to tackle the problem, including new policies and ordinances to bolster workers’ rights. The updated edition also proposes solutions.

Although most low-wage and immigrant workers are reluctant to report workplace violations to legal entities, Shannon Gleeson’s research documents the myriad obstacles low-wage workers who do manage to come forward face submitting claims in Northern California. She documents the multiple indignities and intermediaries required to help workers translate exploitation into discrete claims recognizable by a claims-based labor rights enforcement system. While unauthorized workers may face heightened forms of vulnerability, Gleeson also demonstrates how deteriorated working conditions, abusive employer behavior and workplace violations are increasingly pervasive in low-wage industries more broadly.

This vivid ethnography of the everyday travails of day labor employment provides a window into how day laborers negotiate precarious work and life amidst heightened immigration enforcement and insecure work, or what Ordóñez refers to as “la situación.”

This book takes an in-depth look at the struggles facing workers in the context of restructuring, with a focus on construction markets and the retail food sector. Beyond low wages, Doussard depicts a larger problem of degraded and insecure work, but also points to specific strategies to upgrade employment in place-based industries. As such, the book demonstrates how bad jobs and inequality are far from inevitable.

This new book by a landmark scholar of labor and immigration, further dismantles the myth that immigrants undermine wages and employment. Instead, Milkman highlights the reverse; the increase in low-wage immigrant workers since the 1970s were instead a response to deliberate industry efforts to dismantle unions and regulations and the impact of neoliberal policies. Immigrant workers with limited rights became the ideal labor force for, and were even recruited by, already degraded industries.

This article, by David Weil, who also headed the US Department of Labor’s (DoL) Wage and Hour Division from 2014-2017, advocates for more proactive strategic and targeted enforcement amidst the changing nature of work and the “fissuring” of workplaces into smaller entities that make them more difficult to monitor and prone to non-compliance.

This report details the extensive scale of labor violations impacting low-wage workers through a rigorous survey of over 4,000 workers in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.

This landmark study lays out the insecure and risky work conditions, low earnings and labor violations impacting day laborers across the United States. The study is based on data gathered through the National Day Labor Survey of 2,660 day laborers across 264 hiring sites, 139 municipalities and in 20 states in addition to Washington DC. It remains a benchmark study for subsequent studies of day labor in the United States.

Fussell’s study of Latino migrants in New Orleans introduces the concept of the “deportation-threat dynamic” to illustrate how unauthorized Latinos become susceptible to wage theft and crime victimization and hesitant to report them Importantly, however, legal status was not significant to Latino migrants’ risks because employers drew on racialized assumptions to target them.

Also advocating for strategic enforcement to upgrade labor rights enforcement and workers’ rights, the authors advocate for specific co-enforcement pathways for public enforcement entities to partner with community groups with strong ties to workers and prone industries like unions and worker centers.