We need a Labor Secretary in the mold of Francis Perkins, whose top priority was to help the working man.

In recent days, colleagues have asked me to write about the near-collapse of the economy. My first response was to decline — recognizing all too well that I, like most of our nation’s leaders, was not entirely clear about what was going on. I’ve always been a big believer that wisdom is about knowing when to keep your mouth shut (or fingers away from the keyboard). As Proverbs 17:28 says, “Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is counted wise. When he shuts his lips, he is thought to be discerning.”

Although I must admit that I am still not completely clear about what all has occurred and has not occurred, I am more convinced than ever that we need a Secretary of Labor who cares about workers and who will at least try to address issues faced by workers. Unfortunately for the nation, we have a Secretary of Labor who is Missing in Action.

When the unemployment figures came out last week, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao issued a one-sentence statement: “Today’s employment report provides further evidence of the need for the House of Representatives to pass an economic rescue package today, before it adjourns, which will protect Main Street America and mitigate further job loss,” said U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao. That’s it. That’s all she could muster on the subject.

The day before, she’d given a lengthy speech to the Chamber of Commerce decrying the “Europeanization” of the workplace and denigrating unions. Meanwhile, her Wage and Hour Administrator, Alexander Passantino, claims the Division is doing a great job enforcing wage and hour laws. I’m sure the Education and Training Administrator says the agency is doing a great job there too. Throughout Chao’s speeches over the last year she’s been claiming what a great job the Bush Administration is doing for working people. Well, the emperor has no clothes.

In the midst of the economic meltdown, dramatically rising unemployment figures, military-style immigration raids in workplaces, employers stealing wages like there’s no tomorrow, young people unprepared for today’s jobs — let alone tomorrow’s — and assaults against unions and the right to organize at an all-time high, we need a Secretary of Labor who sees it as his or her job to protect workers. The Secretary of Labor must be the preacher in the bully pulpit for better working conditions for all the nation’s workers. Even if she can’t do anything, she could reach out and talk with workers.

Frances Perkins.

Frances Perkins was the Secretary of Labor appointed by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1932 to help him address the economic crisis left him by eight years of Coolidge and Hoover leadership.

She came to Washington, D.C. with a mission — in her words, to serve God, FDR and the working man. She came with a vision. She wanted to get people back to work, pass national standards for wage payment, and establish a social security system. She and her colleagues created the jobs programs that built many of our nation’s parks and bridges, she passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, the most comprehensive wage protection law in the nation, and she helped design the Social Security System.

Learning from the lessons of Frances Perkins, here’s what the new Secretary of Labor should do:

First, advocate stopping the workplace immigration raids. When Frances Perkins took over, the Department of Labor was responsible for workplace raids and she stopped them immediately. They were wrong then and they are wrong today.

Although Homeland Security, not Labor, has jurisdiction for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Labor Secretary should speak forcefully against this intimidation of workers that is a gross waste of taxpayer money.

Second, enforce the wage and hour laws in meaningful ways. Employers are stealing billions of dollars annually from the paychecks of millions of workers. Wage theft is a national crisis and the Department of Labor is asleep at the wheel. Just as an unregulated banking industry has brought forth catastrophe, unregulated workplaces have enabled employers to steal wages from workers on a mass scale. In 1941, Frances Perkins had 1,500 investigators in the field visiting 12 percent of the country’s workplaces to ensure that employers were paying people legally. Today, with more than 10 times as many workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, there are half as many investigators. Employers know that the chances of getting caught stealing wages is minuscule and that if they are caught, the consequences are insignificant. The Secretary must go after wage theft. What better economic stimulus for the society than workers getting the wages they are owed and spending them in their communities?

Third, lead the charge in supporting unemployed workers. Unemployment insurance should be available widely to workers and job creation strategies should be pursued aggressively both through public incentives for private job creation and public jobs programs. Let’s create those green jobs everyone is talking about.

Fourth, commit to developing the 21st-century supports America’s workers need. During Perkins’s time, she focused on putting in place social security for America’s workers. Today, we need a national health care program. Forty-seven million workers and their families without health care is not in the best interest of workers or the nation as a whole. The Secretary of Labor should play a role in guaranteeing health care to all Americans.

Fifth, support the fundamental rights of all workers to organize into unions of their choice. Although Perkins wasn’t the first choice of labor unions for secretary, she overcame their hesitations with her steadfast support for workers’ rights to organize in the workplace. Elaine Chao, in contrast, has used her public voice to attack the Employee Free Choice Act, the most significant labor law reform to come along in decades.

When the economy is in shambles, it is America’s workers who take the biggest hit. Perhaps in the coming weeks and months, we will all understand better what has happened to our economy. But as we move forward as a nation in addressing the crisis, we need a Secretary of Labor who knows workers, cares for their concerns and speaks up for them. Our current Secretary of Labor is missing in action. We need to put the Labor back in Secretary of Labor.

About the Author: Kim Bobo, Founder and Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice, writes the “Dispatches from the Workplace” column for the online magazine Religion Dispatches. She is the author of Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid — And What We Can Do About It (forthcoming in December from the New Press) and the co-author of Organizing for Social Change, the best-selling manual on progressive activism in the U.S.

This article originally appeared on the God’s Politics Blog (www.godspolitics.com).

For the past 20-30 years, at least since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the US and other advanced countries have sought to solve economic problems by removing impediments to firms and individuals acting in markets. Collective solutions and collective organizations such as labor unions have been viewed as part of the problem in society rather than as part of the solution. Mrs. Thatcher famously said, “there is no such thing as society.” Globalization has proceeded in much the same manner, with the notion that the correct path has been to deregulate, privatize, and trust that markets will work close to perfect.

This view is no longer sustainable. Markets do many things right, but they also screw up royally. This is most striking today in financial markets with the subprime mortgage crisis. If you are religious, pray for Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve who are desperately trying to keep financial markets from making an utter mess of the real economy, as they did in the Great Depression. The issue in finance is no longer deregulation, but getting enough regulations to maintain a stable financial system and making sure when we fix the mess that unregulated markets got us into, we neither reward the “villains,” nor put future market participants into such binds that they cannot do what we as a society want them to do: direct investments to socially useful activities rather than to create Ponzi schemes to enrich themselves.

Financial screw-ups aside, the greatest problems currently facing the world are not problems that competitive markets can solve. There is no way profit-seeking firms will come together collectively to solve global warming and climate change, nor to make sure that the huge demands for natural resources from economic growth now in China and India as well as in the US and other advanced countries do not produce disaster for some countries or persons. Profit-seeking firms have no incentive to deal with the danger of some global pandemic, of protecting us from horrific terrorist biological and nuclear attack. They will not invest in the long-term basic research that might give us alternatives to non-renewable resources or the knowledge to deal with global health problems. The problems of the 21st century are public problems that require an active government and active private non-governmental groups working to resolve.

The only way I can see the US overcoming these problems is for us to move beyond the market triumphalism that followed the collapse of communism toward more cooperative public solutions. Social democrats, progressives, unionists, and yes, conservatives and business groups who want to solve social problems have a great opportunity now to press for a new agenda–for the return of public solutions for public problems. For unions and many on the left, this means moving out of the defensive shell of fending off the attacks of market purists to fighting for expanded collective action to deal with the great problems of our time. For 30 years or more, the world stage tilted in favor of individualistic market solutions. Now the problems demand a tilt the other way. To overcome the great public problems before us, we need more solidarity and cooperative activity, not less. We need to support our public sector workers, not to excoriate government. As Katrina showed, we need effective government, not demoralized, eviscerated government.

Fukuyama saw the end of history just as Mrs. Thatcher saw the end of society. They are wrong. The return of the public means the return to public service. Titans of Wall Street, ideologues of the Washington consensus, wheelers and dealers, your time is past. We have great problems to solve as a nation and as a world. Let’s get to work solving them.