Tuesday’s House labor hearing on “Wage Theft” was supposed to be pretty lively. Left-wing advocacy groups had brought grievances against the Bush Department of Labor to the sympathetic chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, Rep. George Miller (D., Calif.). Career employees in the Government Accountability Office had anecdotal evidence that Labor’s Wage and Hour Division is failing to enforce the law against employers who deny employees their wages, and they’d agreed to do a study to investigate.
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In the end, outrage over the Bush administration’s supposed oppression of workers ran thin in the hearing room. You can’t argue with numbers: Last year, the Department of Labor recovered more than triple the amount in unjustly withheld wages ($220,613,703 in all), for almost triple the number of wronged workers (a total of 341,624), than it did ten years earlier under the Clinton administration.
But another real reason to watch this hearing was the testimony of Kim Bobo, executive director of the group Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ).
Bobo’s invitation to testify alongside three government officials indicates that she is a serious Democratic player. Her group, which sends religious seminarians to work for labor unions, has only a $2 million budget, but Bobo is nonetheless well-known in religious Left circles — a labor leader and community organizer, a Chicagoan who has run in the same activist circles as Barack Obama.
Bobo could be an obvious choice for the Obama Labor Department, perhaps as head of the Wage and Hour Division that was the subject of the hearing. Her group already works closely with WHD, and her positions on labor issues are identical to Obama’s.
It was unfortunate that Bobo did not deliver the most provocative part of her testimony orally: In a written document submitted before the hearing, she called for an expansion of the number of Wage and Hour investigators from 750 to “more than 12,500” — this is a factor of more than 16, and such an expansion would nearly double the size of the entire 15,000-employee Department of Labor. For perspective, the section of Labor that protects workers from union abuses (the Office of Labor and Management Standards or OLMS) has 350 employees in all, and Democrats have been trying to shrink it. The Democratic Congress froze OLMS’s 2008 budget at the previous year’s levels.
By his own account in
The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama is a union man, supportive of this one-sided approach to labor issues. Of his union supporters and endorsers, Obama writes: “I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away.”
In this light, someone like Bobo would be an appropriate choice for an Obama administration. Her group is a significant if small member in the left-labor activist complex. When the editorial board of the
Las Vegas Review-Journal recently
attacked IWJ as a “union front group” that was attacking local homebuilders, two IWJ board members
protested that the group has only four union leaders (including Linda Chavez-Thompson of the AFL-CIO) on its board, and only receives only 12 percent of its funds from unions . This amounted to $266,000 in 2007.
According to a 2004 profile of Bobo in the
San Francisco Chronicle, she “
has spent the last 30 years trying to get people of faith to see the connection between their Bibles and the federal budget, to see ‘moral value’ in tax policies that would bridge the widening gulf between rich and poor.” Like Barack Obama, she is a principled believer in the idea that high taxes are a moral imperative. Obama writes in
The Audacity of Hope: “
I consider the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to be both fiscally irresponsible and morally troubling.”
