With the stroke of his pen, New York Governor David Patterson signed into law the Wage Theft Prevention Act (WTPA) this week, greatly increasing the penalties for withholding pay or other compensation from workers.

This piece of legislation came with the usual opposition from some of the most powerful forces in the U.S. For example, on Dec. 6, 2010, the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, in a letter to Patterson’s counsel, Peter Kiernan, warned that the bill would “affect over 250,000 businesses in New York City and compound the difficulty of doing business…by creating an additional unnecessary and burdensome paperwork and penalty regime.”

But, what the local Chamber of Commerce - and certainly its big brother, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - never mention is the amount of money that is stolen from workers across the country, every day, year after year.

In New York City alone, it is estimated that, if the law is effective, workers will have about $956 million more to spend in New York City every year. For many of the thousands of workers, that money will make the difference between living on the edge and being able to put food on the table and maybe taking a family member to the doctor.

Across the country, if the same numbers held, that would be untold billions of dollars in the pockets of workers and, of course, most of that money would go to the businesses in local communities. But, there is not such a federal law aimed at preventing such crimes.

In New York, before the signing of the WTPA, the laws protecting workers from depredations by unscrupulous employers existed, but the penalties were weak, at best, and for the most part, there was little concern about any penalty on the part of most employers, because any penalty might consist of paying the worker back wages. Even then, if there were few or sloppy records, the settlement might not amount to the full back pay owed the worker.

Failure by government agencies - in this case the labor departments of the various states and the federal government - to act on behalf of the workers cheated out of their just wages appears to be, first, because of the lack of sufficient staff to investigate complaints. Secondly, the workers most likely to be cheated out of their wages and other compensation are among the lowest paid.

These workers, many of whom are immigrants - legal and undocumented - do not complain much. Mainly, they fear losing their jobs and, even more importantly, they fear that a complaint might bring an investigation into their immigration status. Even those in the country with proper papers do not want to start that kind of government action.

It is a system ready-made for abuse of the workers, and it is very easy for an employer, looking for a little more profit in the bottom line, to extract it from the people with little or no power, the low-wage workers.

If workers don’t speak for themselves, who will speak for them? In the past, it has been the trade unions that have spoken up in behalf of the workers, but the powers-that-be have been working overtime to stamp out the unions. And, if they couldn’t actually stamp them out, they would work to eliminate their effectiveness. They have done that by a massive propaganda effort - conducted by Corporate America over many decades and, even, by large numbers of elected officials in state and federal governments over several decades.

Now, though the unions have supported non-union workers in their efforts to achieve some justice in the workplace, the main thrust of support for the WTPA has come from worker support groups, such as Interfaith Worker Justice. But even those groups that are based in the faith communities have come under attack, and that has an effect on the people, even the low-wage workers who will benefit from the WTPA.

A popular commentator (practically a Republican spokesman) on the Fox Network said earlier this year that, if your church mentions the words “social justice,” you should get up and walk out immediately. He bases his hysterical fear of social justice on his fear of “socialism,” or worse, Marxism or communism. Of course, social justice is exactly what the WTPA achieves, at least in a small measure. But when a movement is faced with the power of a television network that spends hours each day crusading against any effort to gain a measure of equity for workers, it raises the fight to another level.

The fears of such people, however, is that somehow the balance of power will be changed and that the obscenely rich will not be able to hold onto their riches. To a small degree, this is a valid fear. But, if America is to be brought back from the brink of economic collapse (which many fear is already upon us), the masses of people have to share in some small way in the wealth of the nation.

Certainly, the Wage Theft Protection Act is a step in that direction, but it is only a small step - it only seeks to make right what has been wrong for so long. And, it only provides for workers in New York. There are a few other states with such laws, but the nation needs a law that covers all workers.

To make it worth the governor’s signature, however, the new law needs to be enforced. And that’s the hard part. So the question remains, how many new wage inspectors does the Department of Labor plan to hire to enforce a law that promises so much, but, without the backing of the force of law, will not be much more than an expression of good intentions?

It remains to the workers themselves and their supporters in organized labor and other social justice groups to demand enforcement of the new law, so that these most vulnerable will be able to conduct their lives with some dignity, knowing they are supported by their fellow workers.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.