Well, we could start by screaming bloody murder about crap like this:

Soon after Trudy LeBlue began working at the new SmartStyle hair salon outside New Orleans, her salon manager began worrying that business was too slow and profits were too weak.

To keep costs down, Ms. LeBlue said, the manager often ordered her and the two other stylists to engage in a practice, long hidden, that appears to have spread to many companies: working off the clock.

Many weeks, Ms. LeBlue spent 40 hours in the salon, but was ordered to clock out for 20 of them while waiting for customers to show up, she said. With the salon's computer tracking her official hours, she was told to clean up and stock merchandise during the unpaid stretches.

"If you weren't doing hair or a perm, they'd tell you to get off the clock, but you still had to stay in the salon," she said.

What angered her most was her paltry paycheck, which she said often came to just $200 for two weeks, even after 80 hours at work. For Ms. LeBlue, that worked out to $2.50 an hour, less than half of the $5.15-an-hour federal minimum wage and her official rate, $5.35 an hour.

Workers at hair salons, supermarkets, restaurants, discount stores, call centers, car washes and other businesses who have murmured only to one another about off-the-clock work are now speaking up and documenting the illegal practice.

An honest day's pay for an honest day's work. Now there's a moral value that we Democrats can champion seven days a week and twice on Sunday. It's simple, it's powerful, and it profoundly affects the lives of real people across the country.

Like the man said, you can't beat somethin' with nothin'. And vile practices like the one described above are just the kind of somethin' we Democrats need to loudly and proudly condemn in order to start making the case that the values debate currently raging in America is not now, and has never been, about right and left.

It's about right and wrong.

And on that, my friends, the party of Jefferson and Jackson and Roosevelt and Kennedy has much to say to Americans of every region, every faith, and every color: black, white, brown, Blue, and, yes -- even Red.