From TPM: What Part of Illegal Don’t Conservatives Understand — or Why do They Ignore Wage Theft

Wage theft is illegal. Yet rightwing politicians largely dismiss the problem and most systematically oppose laws to increase enforcement of wage laws. Yet at the same time in recent years, those conservative politicians have been attacking undocumented immigrants as undermining wage standards for native workers. The hypocrisy is palpable, but here’s a lesson: state legislators standing up against wage theft have been able to expose that hypocrisy.

At Progressive States Network, we’ve worked with community groups, advocates and legislators to promote wage enforcement directly as a counterpoint to anti-immigrant rhetoric and promote a policy agenda that builds support for all workers, native and immigrant alike. In states like Kansas, Iowa, and Connecticut, anti-immigrant legislation has been derailed once the issue of the failure to enforce broader wage laws entered the discussion. For example:

In Connecticut in 2007, a bill was introduced that would have made it a criminal offense to hire undocumented workers, but instead it was modified into a state law that goes after all employers who commit workers’ compensation premium fraud in order to cheat workers out of benefits.

When the Iowa Senate in 2008 approved SF 2416, a bill to toughen enforcement against employers who violate Iowa wage laws, it stalled movement in that chamber of an anti-immigrant bill approved in that state’s House and halted anti-immigrant legislation for 2008.

When the Kansas House in 2008 voted to gut an anti-immigrant bill by adding provisions to severely punish employers violating wage laws and exploiting undocumented immigrants, it led to deadlock on a purely anti-immigrant bill in the state Senate that lacked those wage enforcement provisions. Anti-immigrant politicians walked away from their own bill rather than support wage law enforcement amendments.

If anti-immigrant politicians resist such wage enforcement proposals, it just emphasizes that their supposed concern for wage losses by low-income workers is an empty smokescreen for hatred and nativism.

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The point is that anti-immigrant resentment smolders across the country, partly because of racism and cultural xenophobia, but also with a greater number of people who recognize the unacceptability of illegal sweatshops, but wrongly have been told to scapegoat immigrants and the immigration system. When progressives stand up and attack wage theft directly and demand real enforcement of wage and hour laws, the elimination of illegal sweatshops will help blunt the effectiveness of much of the overall anti-immigrant political attack.

What most don’t seem to ‘get’ is that wage theft and other abuses heaped on workers — and most especially on undocumented workers — amounts to a new system of slavery. Call it indentured servitude or slavery, the effect is the same. State and Federal laws were enacted to protect all workers without concern over their status because to do otherwise would amount to complicity with corrupt employers. Employers who fail to abide by those laws, simply because the worker doesn’t speak English, or is undocumented, or is in some other way powerless, are no more than slave-holders.

People won’t buy goods from China because of its treatment of Tibet, but they feel perfectly content shaving a few nickels off their restaurant bill — those nickels being the unpaid wages owed to a new class of slaves.

These ‘new slaves’ are us. They are our grandparents and great-grandparents, the people Bishop Hodur stood with when they were abused by the coal bosses of Pennsylvania. That is our legacy. I stand with workers, to protect their God given humanity and dignity. As a Church we must stand with workers so that the words of a deceased coal miner won’t have to be recorded again (from King coal: a piece of eastern Pennsylvania history by Jill M. Beccaris and Christine Woyshner in Social Education, January 1, 2007).

Forty years I worked with a pick and drill,
Down in the mines against my will,
The Coal King’s slave, but now it’s passed
Thanks be to God I am free at last. –Tombstone of an anthracite miner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.