Even with protective laws on the books, a woman struggling to support a family and avoid foreclosure faces a devastating choice when the alternative to an abusive home is homelessness. The decision to break away is even harder when local service programs and battered women’s shelters are themselves struggling for survival amid budget cuts.

But there are hints of Muscatine’s illustrious past: a riverside sculpture of a man in a flatboat with clams surrounding his feet, raising two shellfish rakes above his head; the word “buttons” emblazoned in chipped paint on some of the old brick structures. In its heyday, this area produced an astounding one third of the buttons sold worldwide—shiny, delicate “pearl” buttons produced from shells of the wealth of clams and mussels that once filled this stretch of the Mississippi, where a bend taking it east-west (rather than north-south) calmed the current enough to allow the shellfish to proliferate.

The local button industry was started in 1891 by an enterprising German immigrant, John Fredrick Boepple, skilled in making buttons from sea shells, who brought his manual-operated button press machine to Muscatine and launched a quickly mushrooming industry. Soon thousands of men were collecting shellfish from the river and its tributaries, and thousands of women and teenagers turned them into glistening buttons sewed onto decorative small cards with names like Mermaid and Blue Bird.

Pearl was the name for the shell interiors used to make the buttons, and it was also the name of a fiery young labor activist renowned in her time but relatively unknown in more recent decades. But she appears to be enjoying a resurgence of fame now.

At 9 p.m. Tuesday night, the country’s second-largest waste disposal company locked 79 workers out of their jobs. The day before, Republic Services/Allied Waste gave the Evansville, Ind., workers an ultimatum: accept management’s “last, best and final” offer, or be locked out of work. The union, Teamsters Local 215, blames the lockout on management’s insistence on permanently eliminating workers’ pensions.

"It's a kind of extraordinary move in labor relations to lock workers out unilaterally," says Louis Malizia, assistant director of the Teamsters Capital Strategies Department. "So there could be a return to work—the company need only open the gates and then let workers continue to work while they try to resolve issues at the bargaining table."

Republic Services did not respond to a request for comment, but in an interview with an NBC affiliate, local general manager Mark McKune blamed the conflict on the union’s rhetoric: “When threats of war were made across the table at the company, the company felt it was necessary to take this step.”  Republic has a contract with the city of Evansville to collect trash and recycling. McKune told the Evansville Courier & Press that with replacement workers filling in for locked-out Teamsters, customers were experiencing only “minimal service disruptions.” 

Local 215 represents Republic’s Evansville drivers, mechanics and landfill staff.  Republic and the Teamsters entered negotiations on a new contract in March. In April, a 25-day extension on their current contract expired, and Republic began training other employees to do the work of the Evansville Teamsters. Tuesday night, Republic exercised its legal right to lock out the workers—denying them any work until they reach a deal acceptable to management.

But in the play Labor Rites, running May 11 through May 20 at Northwestern, Madison and her crew add a new, unexpected and refreshing twist to the legend of Sisyphus. Rather than being mentally and emotionally crushed and deadened by “dreadful, purposeless repetitious labor,” he is recast as the archetypal “trickster,” in the tradition of Kokopelli, Coyote, Puck and other characters, who has the last laugh because he manages to take control of his own fate and find beauty and glory in his toils. “He turned his punishment and drudgery into possibilities and freedom!” an actor declares.

In this way, Sisyphus becomes an apt and timeless metaphor for the labor movement, wherein people come together in inspiring acts of resistance, bravery, creativity and pure joy in the face of grueling and brutal oppression and exploitation. 

Madison’s play, performed by an impressive cast of undergraduate students, weaves together vignettes of famous and lesser-known labor struggles and labor heroes past and present, with dance, dramatic tableaus and humor from narrator “clowns” and a sort of chorus providing the glue. The mesmerizing physical numbers include a recurring ballet wherein the cast mimics the repetitive motions of sewing in a sweatshop, simultaneously expressing both grace and pain.

The company has been resisting implementing a safety agreement at a Louisianan refinery that it already has agreed to around the country. “ExxonMobil has been trying to undercut rest of oil industry on health and safety standards,” says Patrick Young of the United Steelworkers (USW) special campaigns department.

At a refinery employing 900 workers in Baton Rouge, La., the company has been resisting the appointment of a person for the crucial newly-created post of “process safety management representative,” Young says. The Process Safety Management Representative, under the terms of a national agreement reached February 1 between the USW and the oil industry, would be selected by the union, subject to approval by the company and responsible for calling attention to safety hazards and demanding that they be addressed. 

The issue is part of larger negotiations between USW Local 13-12 and ExxonMobil, which are a new three-year contract. Local 13-12 members refused to vote on the company's latest offer because it didn't include the safety measure that is part of other union contracts at other refineries.

“Exxon Mobil is the only company in the industry not living up to safety standards,” Young says. ExxonMobil has agreed to follow the safety agreement at refineries in Chalmette, La., Beaumont,, Texas,  Billings, Mont., Torrance, Calif., but refuses to implement this provision at Baton Rouge.

As we’ve reported previously, the move was seen by labor and child rights groups as a shameless pander to anti-regulatory forces in Washington. Activists have for years reported on the systematic exploitation of children on farms. Last year many hoped the Labor Department would finally respond to alarming injury and death rates by curbing the most hazardous forms of agricultural work for kids under 16, including restrictions on high-risk work in tobacco production, and limiting dangerous tasks involving certain farm equipment and animals.

Then advocates were distressed when the proposed reforms were held up under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget, the administration’s gatekeeper for regulatory proposals. The final affront came in April when the Labor Department announced that it was pulling the proposal in response to opposition from producers.

While the new rules would have explicitly exempted family farms, critics painted the measure as an assault on the rural way of life, glossing over the need to shield kids, many from migrant families, from the day-to-day brutality of industrial farm labor. The administration not only recycled these whitewashed arguments, but even scrubbed its own website of information explaining the proposal, according to the Pump Handle.

The local press reported earlier that the representatives of UNRWA workers’ councils had issued further demands, including "promotions for teachers, directors and supervisors and the filling of vacancies in all the agency's sectors, as well as the improvement of UNRWA employees' work conditions."

In a way, this was a classic labor conflict between a public agency and workers in a relatively poor country. But UNRWA is a unique international bureaucracy, with a global budget crisis intertwined with the politics of the conflict-ridden regions it serves.

Since last Tuesday, May 1, 780 members of Beeson’s union, International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 851, have been walking the picket line against their employer at Caterpillar's hydraulics plant in northern Illinois.  Local 851 went on strike to protest what they see as an extraordinarily concessionary contract.

“Put it this way: Under their proposed contract, I wouldn’t be able to afford to take my kid to the doctor,“ says Beeson. “Basically, this contract wouldn’t make this job worth working anymore. I would still pay union dues under this contract, but I wouldn’t have a good union job anymore. ”

Workers say the six-year contract proposed by Caterpillar would nearly double their healthcare costs. In addition, according to IAM Local 851 President Tim O'Brien, it would effectively freeze their wages for six years. The contract would lower pay for certain groups of workers resulting in pay cuts by as much as $8 an hour, O'Brien says. Under the contract, new hires in the second wage tier of the contract, who currently start out at $13 an hour, would instead have their starting wages determined by the “market based” formula set by Caterpillar. That could potentially allow the company to pay workers even less, O'Brien says.

In recent years, Ryan’s congressional district has been hollowed out by the loss of major employers like Delco in Oak Creek (3,800 jobs, mostly going to Mexico), Chrysler in Kenosha (850 jobs sent to Mexico with the help of auto industry “bailout” funds), and General Motors in Janesville (a plant closing wiped out 2,800 jobs directly and another 3,000 jobs in nearby supplier plants). 

A devotee of hyper-capitalist author Ayn Rand, Ryan has seen the misery and, well, shrugged, just like Rand's Atlas. At least that's what his latest federal budget, which was passed by the House in late March, implies. In the face of suffering in his district and across the nation, Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" would deepen the economic polarization of America by heaping new riches on the 1%. A little-understood provision in it would make the exodus of jobs even worse by creating huge new tax incentives for corporations to relocate more jobs and assets overseas.

The government had lodged serious corruption charges against Gomez in 2006 in what labor leaders in the U.S., Canada and Mexico saw as part of the government’s war on independent unions. Labor conflicts in Mexico include the high-profile strike at the Cananea copper mine and other mines in Mexico. Cananea, owned by Grupo Mexico, was shut down for three years by the strike until police ousted strikers and re-opened the mine (illegally, the union alleges) in 2010.

Among other things, the government charged that Gomez had embezzled $55 million from the union. Supporters have always said the allegations were trumped up for political reasons, and the funds are now accounted for. The Canadian government refused to extradite Gomez and granted him legal residency.

In a 3-1 vote, the Mexican Supreme Court’s Second Chamber ruled that the Mexican labor ministry had acted illegally when it revoked recognition of Gomez as General Secretary of the National Union of Mine, Metal and Steelworkers (aka Los Mineros). The court decided that only the union itself can decide whether a leader’s election and tenure is legitimate.

MILWAUKEE, WIS.—“It's people power versus money power,” declared Robert Peterson, president of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, reflecting on the build-up to the June 5 recall election of Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker.

Some 1 million Wisconsinites signed petitions triggered the recall, infuriated by Walker’s  assault  on public-sector worker rights, the slashing of crucial public services like education  and health while granting $2.3 billion in new tax breaks for corporations. If Walker loses, it will mark only the third time in U.S. history that a governor has been expelled from office through a recall election.

The "people power" of which Peterson speaks is manifested in door-knocking, meetings with neighbors and small acts of persuasion. But the “money power” held by Gov. Walker represents a remarkable turn toward plutocracy in a state that pioneered campaign finance reform a century ago under Gov. Robert M. LaFollette and has long prided itself as being a “laboratory for democracy. Walker has raised an astonishing $25 million, $13 million of it during just the last three months. 

As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported,

“Tonight, the irony persists,” said Sotheby’s worker Julian Tysh. “Sotheby’s is selling a copy of the scream – an artful interpretation of human anguish and suffering – and they’re going to profit tremendously tonight, while at the same time they continue to create anguish and suffering among their own workforce.”

Tysh and 41 of his co-workers have been locked out since August 1, a month before Occupy Wall Street first occupied Zuccotti Park.  Among labor stuggles, the lockout has drawn some of the earliest, and longest-running, Occupy support. Occupy's involvement has inspired workers, upped the pressure on Sotheby’s, and amplified media attention  – though it hasn’t yet yielded a victory.

Job security at stake

According to the Teamsters, the key sticking point in negotiations has been job security.  Tysh was part of a “New Directions” slate that ousted the past leaders of Teamsters Local 814 in the union’s 2009 elections. Tysh, now a member of the local’s bargaining committee, says they inherited an otherwise strong contract marred by a crucial weakness: language allowing some work to be done by temporary workers rather than union members. Tysh says that in the past, management honored a “verbal commitment” that the size of the union workforce would stay above 50 people. When management stopped honoring that commitment, bringing in more temporary workers as the number of union members declined, the contract offered little recourse.

A May 3 piece details the lack of opportunities and jobs for youth in South Africa, who face a 51-percent unemployment rate and see trade unions standing in the way of government programs to create more jobs for youth, since unionists fear employers will use youth to replace older workers and undercut the power of unions.

The story notes that South African young people are as a whole highly educated, and this, combined especially with the legacy of apartheid—which relegated almost all black people to manual labor —means they are loathe to take even skilled labor jobs because of the "degrading ‘hoers and tillers’ image their parents acquired under apartheid."

One story in the series highlights Spain’s overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated "army of one million waiters" as a symbol of the way labor law reforms billed as making Spain more competitive and reducing unemployment have backfired and divided workers:

May Day has historically had a pro-migrant message, from its origins in 19th-century working-class Chicago, to its revival in 2006 as a day of protest for immigration reform. But this year, even with the added momentum of Occupy Wall Street, the pro-immigrant mobilizations were relatively modest, according to advocates, though the struggles facing immigrants are growing more dire.

While the Occupy banner blanketed much of May Day, demonstrations in several U.S. cities incorporated immigrant rights groups, including protests against Arizona’s draconian immigration law SB 1070, currently under review by the Supreme Court, and the Obama administration’s sweeping deportation policies. New York City's May Day Solidarity Coalition brought together groups that link labor, immigration, and economic justice, like the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and Domestic Workers United.

Such worker input is now enshrined in a contract agreement signed between the union and the Chicago Board of Education this week, a measure the union is calling “landmark.” It also addresses the school district’s plans to increasingly replace actual cooking in many schools with “warming kitchens” where pre-made food would be warmed up.

The union says that according to the school district’s 2008 bid solicitation for pre-made food, 178 elementary schools currently have only warming kitchens and – as of that time – that was the plan for all new elementary schools. UNITE HERE says pre-made food is bad for kids and also for cafeteria workers' job security. UNITE HERE senior research analyst Kyle Schafer said that hundreds of jobs could have been at risk if the school system went through with its previous plans for more warming kitchens.  

The pro-“#volunteerism” tweets were part of an effort by Solis to promote a new Department of Labor "Bridge to Work" demonstration program that allows up to 10 states to let companies employ workers receiving unemployment compensation without the employer necessarily having to pay those workers. Essentially, workers would be allowed to work without being paid in the hopes that the skills they gain would eventually lead to paying jobs.

With "Bridge to Work," the Obama administration is effectively endorsing the growing trend of young people—e.g., fresh college graduates—having to work unpaid internships in their field of interest before landing a paid position. The Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey estimates that between 1 to 2 million people a year work as unpaid interns in the United States.

But critics say that with the new program, the Labor Department is going one step further by suggesting that if you are unemployed at any age, it's a good idea to work for free to to help get a paid job. “Unpaid work and volunteerism should not be seen as "stepping stones" to a regular job: after all, today there are more unpaid internships around than ever before, and yet youth unemployment is near its all-time high,” says Ross Perlin, author of the book Intern Nation (which In These Times excerpted here). “Unpaid internships and "volunteer" situations (in cases where the person is really anything but) in fact tend to destroy jobs rather than create them, because firms learn that they don't have to pay for work, they don't have to hire.”

But in a slight to workplace safety advocates, last week the Obama Administration announced that it was withdrawing a set of proposed rules that would have regulated child farm labor. "The decision to withdraw this rule—including provisions to define the 'parental exemption'—was made in response to thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effect of the proposed rules on small family-owned farms. To be clear, this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration," read an official statement. 

The anncouncement outraged workplace safety advocates. "Typically, I can find words to express my outrage. I can't even find the words on this one," says former OSHA official Celeste Monforton. 

The rules were held up for nine months by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an unusually long delay. The administration finally released the rules for a public comment period after two 14-year-old girls working on a farm in Illinois were electrocuted last summer, as I reported last September. Proponents felt confident that once the rules passed through the OMB, they would be published. So it came as a shock when the administration not only placed the rules on hold, but declared that it would never consider them again. 

A look at the different fates of two different workplace safety rules reveals the Obama administration's election year priorities, workplace safety advocates say. As I've reported, OMB has for more than 14 months delayed implementation of a proposed Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule that regulates workers’ exposure to cancer-causing silica dust. But it recently required less than one month to approve (and send out for public comment) a USDA rule that could harm the safety of poultry workers. It typically takes the OMB about 90 days to release a proposed regulation for public review.

“OSHA’s efforts to control serious, unregulated workplace hazards—including silica, combustible dust and others—are far too slow," says Change to Win Health and Safety Director Eric Frumin. "When it is up to OSHA to fix these problems themselves, they have shown they can do that quickly. But for decades, OSHA has had to confront severe industry pressures via congressional opposition, White House interference and hysterical media accounts.” 

In a statement to In These Times explaining why the silica rule has been held up for 14 months, OMB spokeswoman Moira Mack said “The administration works as expeditiously as possible on rules. When it comes to complex safety rules, it is critical that we get it right.” 

The Republican Party has collectively cast more than 8,000 votes against the interests of America’s unemployed workers, says Rick Sloan, director of the International Association of Machinists' (IAM) “UCubed” (“Ur Union of Unemployed”) program. The union started the initiative in 2007, as the recession began to hit.

Generally, GOP politicians have accompanied votes for public-sector cutbacks and against extended unemployment benefits with blame-the-victim vituperation directed at the jobless. The Democratic retort has been largely lackluster, Sloan says.

“[I]n the crucial swing states, look at the raw numbers of the officially unemployed—it’s been larger than winning margin over the last several elections," he says. “The Democrats haven’t figured out that their voters are the ones being hammered,” he asserts. “A New York Times poll last fall showed that just 15 percent of the jobless are Republicans. Until Democrats figure out that they must speak to these folks... this is political sucide, as shown by the 2010 elections.”

Stepping into this void has been UCubed, a largely online effort which Sloan says aims to serves as “a megaphone for the jobless," both union and nonunion. The program tries to build a progressive framework for the jobless to interpret their plight, intensify pressure for a sweeping Works Progress Administration (the Depression-era jobs program launched by FDR), and motivate the unemployed to support candidates who are aligned with their economic interests.

But as detailed in a recent book by Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, Aspen turns its obsession with sustainability in a dark direction when it comes to the immigrant workers that keep its upscale tourist and second-home economy running. The authors argue that under the guise of environmentalism, the town and its surrounding communities have instituted official and de facto policies that make it nearly impossible for immigrants to live near their jobs, and otherwise treat them unfairly and make their lives extremely difficult.

The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants Versus the Environment in America’s Eden argues that attitudes and actions in Aspen and the surrounding Roaring Fork Valley are indicative of a widespread and long-standing trend wherein "environmental and nativist movements share a great deal of common ground, far more than most progressives and liberals would like to believe." By "nativist" they mean xenophobic and racist groups who often believe in strict population control and immigration control, especially for certain groups of people. I think the authors’ larger thesis is an over-generalization of a complicated topic (which I explored for Earth Island Journal in 2009), and it is important to remember that in Aspen as in any community, the loudest voices and the policies passed don’t represent the views of all residents.

Now the union is negotiating a new contract that could easily lead to the first teachers strike in the city since 1987. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is demanding drastic changes in the contract, many of them designed to implement and expand legislative and administrative changes that political leaders knew would conflict with the contract of the 25,000 teachers and support staff of the CTU.

For example, amidst protests from parents in varied neighborhoods, Emanuel decided to lengthen the school day from one of the shortest in the country to the longest (7.5 hours, but as a compromise with parental opponents, 7 hours for elementary students). But the mayor offered no plan for how schools would use the extra time or how the cash-short system could afford the expansion except by getting more work out of teachers without pay. 

Emanuel and his superintendent, Jean-Claude Brizard, are pushing at least "five big changes all at once," says CTU vice-president Jesse Sharkey, "but none of the people pushing them has a good idea of how it will work. They're blowing up the system."

Last week the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released major decisions regarding the rights of two groups of workers that face frequent discrimination. On Monday, the EEOC delivered an opinion finding that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans “sex discrimination” in employment, applies to discrimination against transgender workers. On Wednesday, the EEOC approved a new set of guidelines restricting employers’ use of past criminal convictions to disqualify job applicants. Both decisions parallel, and could impact, legislative efforts already underway.

The EEOC was created by the Civil Rights Act and enforces that landmark legislation's workplace discrimination protections. Its five commissioners are appointed by the president for five-year terms.

Transgender protections

The EEOC’s new transgender precedent came in the case of Mia Macy, a transgender woman who says she had, as a man, applied for and been promised a job with the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. When she attempted to take the job after her transition, she was told it had been given to someone else. After ATF’s Office of Equal Opportunity responded to Macy’s discrimination claim by asserting that anti-transgender discrimination was not covered by federal law, she appealed to the EEOC. 

Macy's lawyer argued that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination applied to discrimination for being transgender. The EEOC agreed, and sent the case back to ATF with the instruction that it evaluate the case in that light. That’s in line with the steady—but by no means unanimous—trend of lower court rulings, notes Jennifer Pizer, the Legal Director of the Williams Institute at University of California Los Angeles. Pizer, a former Lambda Legal Senior Counsel, says the decision is “very significant,” because it “establishes a national understanding that discrimination in a workplace because of a person’s gender identity or expression is a form of gender discrimination.”

This week Alec MacGillis of the New Republic reported that IBEW President Edwin Hill told the AFL-CIO Executive Committee about his conversation with Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz regarding the Democratic National Convention. After Hill told Wasserman-Schulz of the union’s decision to boycott the convention because it was being held in the “right-to-work” state of North Carolina, Wasserman-Schultz apparently responded to Hill’s complaint by saying, “No one cares about you."

Now it appears that Democrats do care about getting unions to fund the DNC. From Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama’s political advisers are pressing labor unions to contribute to the Democratic convention in September to cover a fundraising shortfall resulting from their self-imposed ban on corporate donations, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Democratic officials gave representatives of the major U.S. unions, including the AFL-CIO, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Auto Workers, a tour of the convention sites in Charlotte, North Carolina, April 23 in advance of a request for donations, according to the two people, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal strategy.

—It appears that a measure to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to make Minnesota a so-called “right to work” state has died. Earlier this year, I reported from Minnesota that labor leaders there were worried that if a right to work constitutional amendment got on the ballot, it would pass. From Minnesota Public Radio:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In another strange twist to the National Labor Relations Board scandal involving GOP member Terence Flynn sharing confidential NLRB information with top Mitt Romney adviser Peter Schaumber, the Romney campaign told reporters yesterday that Schaumber left the campaign in December 2011.

Since AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka first called on the Romney campaign to fire Schaumber on March 26, the Romney campaign has dodged questions from multiple reporters on whether Romney would do so. Then, Thursday, a Romney spokesperson told reporters that Schaumber left the campaign four months ago.  

The NLRB Inspector General report stated that Flynn had been informed of the investigation into his actions on December 5, 2011. “It’s hardly a coincidence that Schaumber resigned from the Romney campaign the same time that his inside source at the board was notified he was being investigated. It begs the question: Did the Romney campaign know why Schaumber was resigning? And if not, why not?” AFL-CIO spokeswoman Alison Omens said.

It's unclear why the Romney campaign apparently waited months to announce that their top labor adviser had resigned. It’s also strange that the Romney official who this week told reporters of Schaumber's departure did it on background—meaning the person would not attribute his or her name to the statement. The Romney campaign also has not explained why Peter Schaumber appeared on Fox Business News identified as a Romney adviser on January 12, 2012. Schaumber could not be reached for comment on why this occurred.

The three are high-school students at Santa Fe South School in Oklahoma City. They say they love school—even the public charter’s unusually long nearly eight-hour days—and they want to make something of their lives.

But when asked about college, all three look away and demure from answering. Eventually they talk tentatively of attending a local community college and then maybe transferring to Oklahoma State University. But, Marcos says, they find it hard to plan for college since they are undocumented immigrants in a state known for anti-immigrant laws and policies. On a daily basis they worry about being deported or having their parents deported. When Marcos and his friends practice for track meets or when Julia and her friends hop across a creek, they joke that they are running from the migra.

Discouragement and frustration about their future prospects, given their legal status, are so strong that both Marcos and Julia are considering going back to Mexico once they finish high school, even though they know their opportunities there would be much more limited, and drug war violence would be a serious risk. Several of Julia’s family members in Mexico have already been killed in the drug-related violence which now touches nearly everyone in certain parts of the country even, if they have no involvement with the government or the drug trade.

“Congress created this manufactured crisis..., and Congress must solve this,” declared Sally Davidow, spokeswoman for the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which has resisted congressional efforts to curtail USPS service and eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs.

This week, Congress took a step toward solving the USPS' problems—but postal workers' unions aren't too happy. On Wednesday, with a 62-37 vote, the Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan effort sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). The bill shores up USPS finances and halts closure of thousands of post offices and mail processing centers, unlike the House alternative—more on that below—and reduces retirement payments to $2 billion a year. It also provides early retirement incentives for nearly 100,000 workers. But contrary to what the postmaster general wants, it prevents the USPS from ending Saturday service for two years. (Kevin Drum has more details over at Mother Jones.)

Labor unions were displeased with the outcome, particularly the inclusion of a workers compensation provision union leaders vehemently opposed. The measure, introduced by Sen. Collins, would give workers injured on the job 50 percent of their pre-disability pay upon reaching retirement age, compared to 75 percent under current law. (About half the federal employees who currently receive workers' comp are postal workers.) An amendment from Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) would have eliminated the change, but the amendment failed 46-53, much to the dismay of union organizers.

“The Senate has missed an opportunity to make real and positive changes in a program designed to assist dedicated federal workers injured in their duties,” National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley said in a statement. The National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association released a similar statement on the workers’ compensation changes.

APWU President Cliff Guffey was less harsh. "Although the bill is flawed, the amended version is far better than the original," he said. 

Some symptoms of the social despair have been grimly spectacular. Greece was jolted one recent morning after aging pensioner Dimitris Christoulas put a pistol to his head in Athens’s main square. In 2010 Americans were shaken by the suicide-by-plane of Andrew Stack, whose anger at the political establishment propelled him into an Austin office complex. Poorer regions have flared with public self-immolations, particularly in the communities of the “Arab Spring” where many youth come to see life as a dead-end street. Underlying these more dramatic examples are statistical patterns that reflect society's unraveling.

A recently published Lancet study showed spikes in suicide across Europe during the recession. While many factors could contribute to this pattern, researchers found a significant correlation between unemployment and suicide trends.

Strikes involving thousands of workers in the "right-to-work" state of Texas are extraordinarily rare. Yet on Monday, 3,600 Lockheed Martin workers, members of IAM Local 776 who make F-35 and F-16 fighter jets in Fort Worth, Texas, went out on strike to protest proposed healthcare and pension cuts.

Workers are upset about a proposed contract that would make workers’ pay much higher insurance deductibles. Lockheed Martin has already implemented this plan for its nonunion employees. 

Workers are also upset about a plan that would eliminate defined-benefit pensions for new hires. In recent years, many other unions have agreed to this concession while retaining defined-benefit plans for current union members—a group of 15,000 GE workers agreed to a similar change for future hires last summer. Lockheed workers in Texas, however are fed up.

“The first time..., they take away pension for new hires. Next time around, when new hires [are in the union], they say 'we are going to freeze the pension.' Of course, the new hires that don't have a pension aren't going to strike, so then the pension is frozen,” says IAM spokesman Bob Woods. “Companies like Lockheed Martin simply want to eliminate defined benefit pensions plans.”

From factories in China and Bangladesh to transportation hubs where “perma-temps”  labor for dirt-cheap wages to feed supply lines to the company's ubiquitous stores, Wal-Mart has successfully resisted unions and kept wages low. Disclosures about Wal-Mart’s brutal but sophisticated low-wage strategies have failed to seriously dent the company’s image as a friendly provider of low-cost goods. And Wal-Mart has been essentially impervious to attacks by organized labor and the Occupy movement, two marketing professors argue.

But Wal-Mart's smoothly-running PR machine seized up this week when a major front-page New York Times investigation revealed that top Wal-Mart de Mexico executives shelled out approximately $24 million in bribes to speed up permits for its rapid expansion in Mexico during the last decade. (Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in Mexico, with 200,000 workers and one-fifth of all Wal-Mart stores.) The newspaper presents detailed evidence that top Wal-Mart officials knew about the illegal behavior, but effectively shut down the investigation and did not notify authorities in the U.S. and Mexico.

The bribery scandal threatens to shatter Wal-Mart’s carefully-manufactured image as a company based on strong moral principles and concern for the public. The bribes represent a flagrant violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which forbids payment of bribes by U.S. businesses to foreign governments. "What's perhaps worse, top executives in the U.S., including the current and former CEOs, allegedly knew about this and covered it up,“ NPR reporter Chris Arnold noted.

It remains to be seen how deeply Wal-Mart’s image will be wounded and if the corporation’s loss of legitimacy may lead to increased public awareness of and support for Wal-Mart workers' struggles for justice. Joe Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which has been seeking for years to organize Wal-Mart workers and to alert the public to a wide range of alleged abusive practices (e.g., wage theft, sex discrimination), issued a blistering statement on the meaning of the bribery disclosures:

Today, he struggles to make a living.

That’s not because of any decline in his talents or work ethic, or even the general chaos in the media industry. It’s because he is an undocumented immigrant, and chose to reveal the fact in a very public way last summer with a story in The New York Times magazine. As detailed in that piece, his mother sent him to the United States from the Philippines as a child; he was raised by his grandparents and didn’t learn he was undocumented until he tried to get a drivers license, at which point he entered a new world wherein deception and reliance on generous confidantes were key to pursuing his goals despite his secret.

Speaking to journalists with The Institute for Justice and Journalism at a conference at the University of Oklahoma this week, Vargas explained that since his "coming out" as undocumented, he is not legally able to be employed. Of course, almost 12 million people in the United States are undocumented, and most of them are employed—using fake Social Security numbers, working under the table or other situations. But given the high-profile nature of Vargas’s revelation, it's unlikely any employer who knows how to use Google would hire him.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Republicans typically accuse Democats of not doing enough to streamline regulations. But at a hearing on Capitol Hill last week, Republican senators defended the Obama administration against criticism from labor leaders and workplace safety advocates who say the administration has made it too cumbersome to create and issue new workplace safety rules.

The April 19 Senate hearing, titled “Time Takes Its Toll: Delays in OSHA’s Standard-Setting Process and the Impact on Worker Safety,” focused on why it takes so long for workplace safety rules issued by OSHA to be implemented. It coincided with the release of a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). 

The GAO report found that between 1981 to 2010, the time it took OSHA to develop and issue safety and health standards ranged from 15 months to 19 years, averaging more than seven years. The report found it took OSHA 50 percent longer than it takes the EPA to issue new rules, nearly twice as long as it takes the Department of Transportation and nearly five times as long as it takes the SEC. Twenty-five percent of all OSHA rules took more than 10 years to be issued, the GAO said. The increasingly slow process has limited the number of OSHA rules implemented (PDF) in recent years.

“The Reagan Administration issued new rules at a rate four-times faster than the current administration,” said Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), whose father, a coal miner, died of black lung. “I suspect that the lack of new rules is at least partly the result of relentless external pressure from business lobbyists and anti-labor groups. These groups pressure both OSHA and the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] to create delays that costs lives." 

While officials convened at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena earlier this month, the White House put the finishing touches on another free trade agreement, aimed at liberalizing markets in Colombia and the U.S. The deal has faced vocal resistance from labor and human rights groups in both countries, who argue that the agreement would effectively condone violence against activists and economic oppression. But for the governments looking to build economic ties, the fears raised by civil society groups were just background noise. The Obama administration tried to put the lid on the opposition by tacking on labor policies to address anti-labor violence and other abuses.

Now officials have tacked onto the deal a Labor Action Plan, which, at least on paper, promotes fairer labor practices and stronger protections for workers and unions. The White House has certified Colombia’s compliance with the plan—a condition of sealing the trade agreement, which is set to go into effect in May. Human rights and labor activists are not impressed, pointing to dozens of recent murders of trade unionists and other union-busting actions, along with ingrained weaknesses in Colombia's political system that foster corporate and government impunity.

Historian Greg Grandin spoke on Democracy Now! about the gap between what activists demanded and what they got:

One year after New York's new wage theft law took effect, the Progressive States Network has named the state the nation’s leader in confronting the issue. Speaking on a media call Wednesday, PSN Senior Policy Specialist Tim Judson said the 2010 law has proved “the strongest in the country.” But he warned that the national picture remains bleak: “Where wage theft is concerned, there are essentially no cops on the beat.”

“Wage theft” is a new term for an old issue: employers not paying workers their agreed-to wages. It takes many forms: withholding wages; not paying overtime rate for overtime hours; paying below minimum wage; pressing workers to work off the clock. In 2010, In These Times contributor Art Levine reported on the case of immigrant workers who were paid under $2 an hour for work at the New York State Fair. 

As Michelle Chen has reported, a survey conducted by the National Employment Law Project in 2008 estimated that wage theft costs the average low-wage worker a full 15 percent of annual income. NELP estimated New York’s unpaid wages at $1.5 billion denied to half a million workers. Analysis by the Drum Major Institute calculated that those lost wages meant a loss of $427 million in revenue for the state, which faces a $350 million budget deficit.  

Judson is the co-author, with PSN's Cristina Francisco-McGuire, of a new report, Cracking Down on Wage Theft: State Strategies for Protecting Workers and Recovering Revenues. They write that wage theft has steep costs low-wage workers, high-road employers, and cash-strapped governments.  "Existing wage payment statutes," they conclude, "have proved too modest and incomplete to be an effective deterrent against what has become a pervasive and entrenched problem.”

The AP reports:

Las Vegas union supporters have launched a seven-day hunger strike to protest a casino operator's alleged attempts to prevent workers from organizing. Roughly 17 protesters, including 10 current Station Casinos Inc. employees, have pledged to consume only water through Tuesday. The fast began Wednesday at a makeshift camp outside the casino operator's oldest property, Palace Station, near the Las Vegas Strip. ...

Organizers spent a month training the protesters to fast, said Yvanna Cancela, the Culinary Union's spokeswoman in Las Vegas. Medical professionals met with the participants before the protest started and plan to examine the workers for health issues every morning. ...

The union and Station Casinos have been locked in an ugly, years-long battle over the company's 13,000 employees.

In Rhode Island, changes to public workers' pensions are considered by some to unprecedented and trendsetting. Last November, the state's government shifted employees into hybrid defined 401(k)-style pensions. In addition, the pension rates decrease from 75 percent of a worker’s pay in the five years before they retired to roughly 70 percent. However, since the financial burden is now on workers, the rate could dip much lower if the market crashes again.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—After the AFL-CIO-backed primary challenge to Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) in 2010, many expected the labor federation and other unions to support primary challenges to moderate or centrist Democrats during this election cycle. But so far this year, organized labor hasn't "primaried" any Democrat up for re-election in the House or Senate. In late January, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told In These Times, “I don’t have any plans” to challenge sitting Democrats who have been less than friendly to labor's interests by backing their opponents. 

There has been one notable labor-backed primary effort this year, though: With the help of several local unions, The Working Families Party (WFP) of New York backed a candidate to challenge longtime Congressman Ed Towns (D-10th), whose district is in Brooklyn. Earlier this week, Towns announced he would not seek a 16th term. He didn't say why, and one of his campaign strategists claimed "he would have won," but some political observers believe the congressman bowed out because he knew he couldn't beat two challengers.

“This is a guy who historically has always been pretty unresponsive to labor and his own constituents. He has a long record of being in bed with the tobacco companies," says WFP Co-Chair Bob Master, who is also political director of CWA District 1, which includes New York. "In recent years he hasn’t met a trade agreement he doesn’t like or support.” 

WFP of New York, founded in 1998 with the support of some unions, endorsed New York State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries earlier this year. (A full list of all unions affiliated with WFP is here.) “Hakeem Jefferies is...a real champion on workers issues,” says Master. “The right wing is never afraid to take on Republicans that they are thinking are insufficiently devoted to the ultra-right wing agenda. Too often like we are willing to tolerate people that are barely with us...just because they have a big letter D at the end of their name.”

But constant remarks about their bodies, and unwanted touching, advances, mean-spirited "pranks" and other forms of sexual harassment are a regular occurrence for many of the more than 30,000 women—like Dickerson—who work in the warehouse industry in the Chicago area, according to a report (PDF) released this week by the group Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ). And women often face retaliation for reporting harassment.

In an extreme example that is currently the subject of a lawsuit, 19-year-old Priscilla Marshall, her mother and her teenage friend allege they were repeatedly subject to aggressive and abusive sexual assaults and language by a 45-year-old manager at the Partners Warehouse in Elwood, Ill. After the three women and Marshall’s uncle and the mother’s boyfriend complained, they were fired or suspended and accused of theft, which resulted in Marshall and her mother spending 15 and seven days in jail, respectively, according to the lawsuit filed March 9.

WWJ's Leah Fried told me that the same industry structure that allegedly allows for widespread violations of labor law, extremely low wages and unhealthy conditions also contributes to a climate of unchecked sexual harassment and retaliation. The warehousing (or logistics) industry is based on layers of subcontractors, so that major companies like Wal-Mart rarely own and operate the warehouses where their goods are stored and distributed. Fried said:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—According to the Department of Labor, grain dust is nearly nine times as explosive as coal dust, and often leads to massive explosions. Over the last 35 years, there have been more than 500 explosions caused by grain dust in U.S. grain handling facilities, resulting in the deaths of more than 180 people.

On October 29, 2011, an explosion rocked the Bartlett Grain elevator in Atchison, Kan., resulting in the deaths of six workers—four of whom were younger than 25. Last week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited Bartlett Grain Co. L.P. for five willful and eight serious safety violations of OSHA workplace safety laws. Among the violations, OSHA found that Bartlett Grain willfully allowed dangerous amounts of grain dust to accumulate. The federal agency, part of the Department of Labor, also found that Bartlett would suck up that grain dust using a compressed air system without first shutting down electrical devices that could cause ignition. It also found that Bartlett Grain was “using electrical equipment inappropriate” for the work environment. 

In a citation unrelated to the cause of the explosion, OSHA also found that Bartlett willfully failed to provide safety equipment to workers to prevent them from being drowned in silos of grain. The lack of proper safety equipment provided to workers unclogging grain silos, a common safety violation, led to two teenagers being trapped and suffocated to death while working in a corn silo in Mt. Carroll, Ill., in 2010.

In addition, OSHA cited a contractor employed by the Bartlett—Kansas Grain Inspection Services Inc.—for one willful violation for not providing proper fall protection for workers working on the top of rail cars, and for a serious violation for not having a hazard communication program.

But the partisan proxy war waged over the mommy question only underscores the country’s lacking vocabulary when it comes to discussing the totality of social and economic barriers facing women. Pay discrimination, domestic violence, attacks on reproductive rights, overlapping oppressions facing women of color—it’s misleading to try to lump all these issues together into a blanket term like “woman problem,” but there is one persistent theme: society’s fear of women controlling their own lives.

The distorted framing of the debate is captured in Mitt Romney’s contradictory comments about forcing mothers receiving public assistance into the labor force—in order to instill in them the “dignity of work.” This myopic binary between women of poverty and women of privilege reflects the evolution of the federal welfare state throughout the 20th century.