Her baby will soon be due, so Modesta Toribio has to grudgingly admit she may not soon make her current career goal  New York’s supposedly mandatory $7.25 minimum wage  that she has been routinely denied for the past five years. She inched her salary up to $6.60 an hour from the starting $5 at a cut-rate Brooklyn clothing store mainly by pestering her bosses. Ms. Toribio has a brassy knack for that, but she has learned it takes a lot to best scheming employers.

Academic studies estimate that unscrupulous employers in New York City keep an extra billion dollars a year by defying New York State’s weak labor law and cheating timorous and ill-informed immigrant workers.

Ms. Toribio was both when she arrived from the Dominican Republic 10 years ago. But she evolved into a word-of-mouth investigator and organizer for the Make the Road New York community group. The organization has successfully worked with committed state inspectors to wring wage-theft judgments against scores of employers  $28,000 for a gouged fruit-stand peddler, $70,000 for 99-cent store workers, $400,000 from moguls squeezing the payroll at a sneaker chain.

New York needs a strong labor law like Arizona’s. Arizona is rightly notorious for its abusive anti-immigrant law. But its labor law seriously penalizes employers who retaliate against outspoken workers, and it provides confidentiality for whistleblowers and faster, bigger damages for employers who ignore wage-theft judgments. A bill to toughen New York’s law awaits action by the Legislature, which is in its closing days, when the good and the ugly elbow for attention.