Today's Stories

January 2 - 4, 2009

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

December 22, 2008

Pam Martens
Madoff's Money Trail Leads to Washington

Gary Leupp
Base Alienation: Obama's Team of Rivals

Mike Whitney
Bail Out the Economy? More Pay is the Only Way

Karl Grossman
Lost in Space: NASA at 50

Niall Meehan
Conor Cruise O'Brien: Historian, Politician, Censor

Steve Conn
Where Would Larry Summers Dump the Guantanamo Mess?

Uri Avnery
Israeli Elections: Spot the Difference

Corey D. B. Walker
The Politics of Freedom

David Swanson
The Purloined Constitution

Worthy Group of the Day
Socialist Worker

December 19 - 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
An Ethnic Cleansing in America

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

Paul Craig Roberts
Country Without Mercy

Patrick Cockburn
The Baathist "Coup Plot"

Felice Pace
Green Myopia: Obama's Appointments Reveal What's Wrong with the Environmental Movement

Diane Farsetta
The Pentagon's PR Slush Fund

George Ciccariello-Maher
By the Time I Get to Arizona: ICE Raids and Resistance in Flagstaff

Eric Bergoust
Extinct Lifestyles: Redefining Prosperity

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Without Regrets: Cheney's Unrepentent Confession

Stan Cox
Clothes and Commentaries That Don't Fit

Michael Donnelly
Clinton III: Continuity We Can Believe In

Robert Weissman
The Auto Bailout

Ralph Nader
Excluded Democracy: Scholastic and the Two Party System

Alan Farago
Shock and Awe Economics

Sam Smith
Not All Public Work is the Same

Timothy G. Hermach
What Happened on the Way to the Inauguration?

Seth Sandronsky
Who's Not Getting By and Why

Rannie Amiri
All Quiet on the Gazan Shore

David Yearsley
Bach as Jihadi

Martha Rosenberg
Wyeth's Pay-to-Play

Dave Lindorff
White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy (But That's Not the Biggest Scandal)

Christopher Brauchli
Weekend at Bernie's: the Confinement of Mr. Madoff

Missy Beattie
President Meathead

Richard Rhames
Corporatizing the Kids

Stephen Martin
Full-Spectrum Dominance of the Big Lie

Paul Krassner
Milk and Twinkies

Lorenzo Wolff
Does Coldplay Give a Shit Anymore?

Poets' Basement
Kathwari, Halling and Payne

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Heartwood

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

Weekend Edition
January 2 - 4, 2009

Tom Colicchio and the Restaurant Economy

Top Chef or Top Wage Thief?

By MICHAEL YATES

We have watched hundreds of cooking shows on television. One of our early favorites was Top Chef, in which a group of talented cooks compete in an elimination format for a large monetary prize and designation as “Top Chef.” The chief judge on the show is Tom Colicchio, a noted chef who has won five James Beard awards. Colicchio has parlayed his cooking prowess into a career as an entrepreneur and is now the owner of the Craft group of restaurants, with venues in New York City and around the country.

On the show, his opinions matter most; if you watch carefully, you soon see that what he says goes. To the aspiring top chefs, Colicchio is imperious and demanding, critical to a fault and not accepting of excuses, no matter how valid they might be. The contestants usually seem to fear him; it certainly is true that they challenge him at their peril.

Given the way he carries himself, it would be reasonable for viewers to think that he is above reproach in his own restaurant affairs. Thus I am sure that it came as a shock to fans of his and the show that he and his restaurants are now defendants in a class action civil suit alleging wage theft. New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse wrote that,

“The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accused management of violations of federal and state wage laws, including failing to pay workers time and a half for all hours worked over 40. It also asserts that management shared employee tips with other workers who are not qualified under federal and state law to share in the tip pool.”

The well-regarded law firm filing the suit, Outten & Golden LLP, states on its website that,

“On December 11, 2008, Outten & Golden filed a nationwide class action against celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and his Craft-brand of restaurants – Craft, Craftsteak, and Craftbar. The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the restaurants’ waiters, bussers, runners, and other hourly service workers, claims that Colicchio deprived his workers of the tips they earned, failed to pay them overtime for all of the hours they worked over forty in a week, did not pay at the proper minimum wage rate, and made other unlawful deductions from the workers’ pay. The complaint also alleges that suit’s named plaintiff, Nessa Rapone, was fired in retaliation for raising concerns with management about the restaurants’ wage and hour policies.”

Serious charges. I don’t know if Colicchio and company are guilty, although given his supercilious demeanor on Top Chef, I would be the first to say, “It figures,” if he is.

On Greenhouse’s blog, there are several dozens comments, and most of them express little surprise at the suit and assume that it is very likely true. Many of the comments are from current or former restaurant workers who have had their wages stolen. In fact, wage theft seems to be epidemic in the United States. Kim Bobo, founder and Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice, documenting this employer crime. Bobo tells us that,

“Billions of dollars in wages are being illegally stolen from millions of workers each and every year. The employers range from small neighborhood businesses to some of the nation’s largest employers—Wal-Mart, Tyson, McDonald’s, Target, Pulte Homes, federal, state, and local governments and many more.

Wage theft occurs when workers are not paid all their wages, workers are denied overtime when they should be paid it, or workers aren’t paid at all for work they’ve performed. Wage theft is when an employer violates the law and deprives a worker of legally mandated wages.

Wage theft is widespread and pervasive across all types of companies. Various surveys have found that:

60 percent of nursing homes stole workers’ wages.

89 percent of nonmonitored garment factories in Los Angeles and 67 percent of nonmonitored garment factories in New York City stole workers’ wages.

25 percent of tomato producers, 35 percent of lettuce producers, 51 percent of cucumber producers, 58 percent of onion producers, and 62 percent of garlic producers hiring farm workers stole workers’ wages.

78 percent of restaurants in New Orleans stole workers’ wages.

Almost half of day laborers, who tend to focus on construction work, have had their wages stolen.

100 percent of poultry plants steal workers’ wages.”

Bobo goes on to say that, by conservative estimates, many millions of workers are being regularly cheated by their employers—not paid minimum wage, denied lawful overtime, misclassified as independent contractors or supervisors and thus illegally denied wages and overtime, denied mandated breaks, subject to illegal deductions from their pay, and victimized by arbitrary changes in their time cards.

What is going on here? Let’s look at this more deeply, using the restaurant industry as our model. My three sons earn their living in this industry, and it is from them that I have learned about this occupation. Working in kitchens is hard and dangerous. Two summers ago, Karen and I were at a party. A woman I have known for more than thirty years was going on about fine restaurants and what an art form the preparation of a good meal was. As she talked, our irritation rose. She knew little about what went on in “fine dining” kitchens. People shouting and moving quickly in small spaces, carrying sharp knives, hot pans, and kettles of boiling liquid. Floors are slippery, and rooms are hot. Temperatures of 150 degrees are not unknown.

In a highly regarded Pittsburgh restaurant, the cooks, overcome by the heat, routinely went outside to vomit. The equipment is often faulty. A chef we know got his hand mangled in a blender he was trying to repair on the fly. Missing fingertips and cut and burn scars are universal. In some small establishments, the head chef works the line with everyone else and the cooks learn and execute the dishes from start to finish. The menu may change daily, adding to the stress but giving the workers a sense of accomplishment and pride as they develop their all-round skills. When one of our sons, who has worked in several such places, cooks a meal for us, we never want to cook again. His food is good in a way that ours will never be. The downside is that work hours are onerous and frequently unpaid. The chef or owner often offers more pay if the cook agrees to go on salary. But then, the bosses assume that overtime does not apply, and hours are cranked up beyond belief. Days off disappear. Even the best of chefs tends to shift work to his most talented underlings. Given that there are usually many available cooks in most markets and given that they are unorganized, there is little that the exploited cook can do except bear the pain or look for another job and begin the rat race all over again.

In larger, more corporate kitchens, work is done in assembly-line fashion, with a strict division of labor and a power hierarchy to match. Each cook has a station and does the same thing again and again. The jobs may be Taylorized (cooks must do a job in an exactly specified way) to enforce maximum labor efficiency. Strict portion control is maintained through intense supervision. If lucky and good, cooks get to change stations and learn new things and eventually be promoted to a position in which they get to oversee the labor of others. Until that happens, cooks can count on low wages and no or limited benefits to complement their hard work. It is a rare job that pays more than $12 an hour to start, no matter the skill of the applicant. But when cooks get better jobs, they will be put on salary, with the aforementioned results: unconscionable hours, few days off, and no overtime.
A fundamental law of capitalism is that competition forces businesses to “accumulate capital,” that is, to make a profit and use it to expand the invested capital. Talented chefs who manage to get financial backers and good reviews dream of owning a restaurant. If they manage to do so, their dreams soon turn to expansion: cloning their restaurants or opening ones with different themes; starting a line of cooking products; writing best-selling cookbooks; starring in a television show. There are also, of course, restaurant entrepreneurs who are not chefs but who just open or buy restaurants. Danny Meyer and Jeffrey Chodorow are good examples. We’re more familiar with the chef/owners—notably such high-fliers as Emeril Lagasse , Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Rocco DiSpirito, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Anthony Bourdain, Paula Dean, Tom Colicchio, Gordon Ramsey. These chefs are omnipresent on television and in the dining section of our major newspapers.

Celebrity chefs serve two functions. First, they glamorize this line of work, both stimulating the restaurant business and encouraging people to pursue cooking careers. Thousands of young, and not so young, men and women shell out thousands of dollars to attend cooking schools, which have sprung up like weeds in every part of the nation. Second, and connected to the first, the chef stars help to hide the reality of kitchen work.

Let us set up a plausible chain of events. A skilled and imaginative cook like Mr. Colicchio works his way up the kitchen hierarchy and becomes a chef. He then takes advantage of an opportunity to become a chef/owner. His restaurant wins awards and multiple star ratings from Zagat or Michelin. He still cooks, but he has assigned many of his previous kitchen duties to subordinates because he has other things to do. He may yet have a paternal concern for his employees. Many workers who were employed by Mr. Colicchio have portrayed him as a fair and honest owner. But now something interesting happens. Rich backers enter the picture and our chef soon oversees the opening of a new eatery. He writes a cookbook and makes his first media appearances. The process repeats itself and before you know it, everyone is clapping when, like Emeril, he says “Bam!” He is the center of a culinary empire, with a small army of PR personnel, lawyers, accountants, bankers, and a large number of intermediaries between him and the workers who staff his various restaurants and related enterprises.

Once this happens, the chef has become a capitalist and less an individual that a representative of the entire class of owners. He is now embedded in an enterprise whose operations are dictated solely by the logic of capital accumulation, and he is no longer the more autonomous being he was when he spent his evenings in the kitchen. If things go awry for a particular employee, the capitalist can, with some truth, claim that he is not responsible. Now, the bottom line rules, and nothing else matters.

What does the logic of capital accumulation mean to the cooks, waiters, and bartenders who keep each establishment humming for lunch and dinner each day? Mr. Colicchio, or any other restauranteur, cannot control the market. There is too much competition—many good chefs, thousands of cookbooks, various lines of cookware, hundreds of comparable restaurants, and new blood always on the prowl for fame and fortune. However, they can control the workers who make the profits and growth possible. The pay and security of supervisors down the chain of command can be tied to their ability to get as much work out of each employee at as little cost as possible. Jobs can be time and motion studied to minimize the amount of labor per unit of output (a meal in a restaurant, for example). Cameras and security staff can reduce theft and unauthorized breaks. Cooking tasks can be subdivided into details to convert a kitchen into an assembly line where meals flow off the stoves like cars on an assembly line. Computer programs can monitor every aspect of the business so that constant improvements can be made (what the Japanese call “kaizen”). All of these thing must be done if capital accumulation is to occur. And they will be done irrespective of what Mr. Colicchio or Mr. Lagasse might prefer from a human point of view.

The restaurant industry has certain features that make more nefarious cost-cutting measures likely, even certain. Much employment in restaurants is casual. Workers move from one job to another with regularity; even skilled cooks routinely quit one job for another. Waiters might be serving tables until something better comes along. Immigrants, some without documents, fill urban restaurant kitchens. Heavy drinking and drug use, often enough tolerated or encouraged by management (to keep workers loyal and hardworking, as rewards in lieu of pay and substitutes for needed rest and sleep), are common in restaurants. Young, transient workers do not always keep track of their daily hours or save their time slips. Cooks are trained to have a macho attitude, to handle any challenge, no matter how physically demanding. At the same time, their training is feudal, in the sense that they are taught to obey superiors without question. Cooks really do say, “Yes, chef,” like they do on the television shows. Finally, kitchen and dining room workers are seldom organized in unions. This makes it less likely that they will be cognizant of laws that might offer them protection against employer abuse.

In such a setting, managers, who are themselves under constant pressure to show a profit, soon see that a nearly foolproof way to cut labor costs is simply to cheat the workers.

At the well-known restaurant in Portland, Oregon I knew a cook whose time card was altered. He said that this was common practice. A manager would visit the place, usually on a weekend, enter the employee hour database on a computer, log in, and reduce employee hours. This worker logged in one day with seventy-two hours on his biweekly time card. He worked nine hours, but he discovered that his total hours had increased only to seventy-four. He was cheated of seven hours of hard work. He had his daily time records, so when he confronted the manager, he was told that a mistake was made. The hours total was corrected. But another time he didn’t have his slips and he was a victim of wage theft. I know cooks whose employers refused to pay them for their last days of work after they quit. I also know restaurant employees who have not been paid legally mandated overtime. In an interview, Kim Bobo says, “You talk to any young person who’s worked in the restaurant industry, in recreation. They all talk about having tips stolen, working hours they’re not paid for or being clocked out long before they stop working. Wage theft is all around us.”  So multiply what I know my several million, and you see that the problem is indeed “all around us.”

What we have in the restaurant industry and many others as well, is not a case of a few bad apples or tragic mistakes. It is systemic. All profits derive from the labor of wage workers. This makes it incumbent on employers to control the labor process—every aspect of the way in which the work is done—as much as possible. If the workers are divided and unorganized, the employer has carte blanche. Put simply, if wage theft can occur, it probably will. If I were a betting man, I would wager that Mr. Colicchio and his companies will be forced to make a settlement of any class action lawsuit. However, even if there is a settlement, he will escape unscathed, a little poorer perhaps but free to continue to make money. How has Kathy Lee Gifford suffered from her admitted connections to Central American garment sweatshops? She is still appearing on television, including a recent appearance on Top Chef, where as a host on the Today Show she rudely and disgustingly spit out the food of a Top Chef contestant. The reason that it will be business as usual for Tom Colicchio is because there is at present little systematic organization of workers, no way to force systemic change. Yes, there will be more lawsuits. But these must be initiated by workers, who must find lawyers to bring them, attorneys who will reap millions of dollars in fees. These lawsuits will not empower workers collectively, the only thing that has real staying power.

My dad worked from 1940 to 1984 in a unionized glass factory in my hometown of Ford City, Pennsylvnia. The union and the company had negotiated a complicated incentive plan for production workers. Each pay day, the men and women scrutinized their checks for errors. A check a few pennies short would lead to an angry demand for immediate restitution. No one worked unpaid overtime. If the employer violated the contract, it had to pay, even if it meant paying someone twice, once for the work he should have done and once for the work he had been ordered to do. Wage theft was unthinkable. If what happens every day in restaurants had happened there, the workers would have walked out the door. And then they would have been paid.  What will stop wage theft is massive working class organization, in workplaces and in the larger society.

Michael D. Yates is Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine.He is the author of Cheap Motels and Hot Plates: an Economist's Travelogue and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. Yates can be reached at mikedjyates@msn.com

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