Women have been under economic assault in Washington for months. Deficit hawks have taken aim at social programs and civil rights protections that help keep women safe, healthy and able to participate in work and community life. To some lawmakers, none of that is more important than “saving” taxpayer dollars—which is often shorthand for robbing working women of both their earnings and their safety net.

The hostility toward women crested this week as conservative lawmakers pushed legislation that would gut the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). House Bill 4970 isn't just oppressive to survivors; it attacks the civil and social rights of all women. By raising barriers to economic assistance and legal recourse, the legislation sends the message to countless women living in violent households that their place is still in the home.

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.

MUSCATINE, IOWA—Today the town of Muscatine, Iowa, which overlooks the Mississippi River, looks relatively inconspicuous—one of many working-class river towns with grassy parks abutting the flood-prone wide river, brick factories-turned-bars along the main street and ornate but peeling Victorian homes up on the hill.

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.

Following private sector trend, Republic Services/Allied Waste insists on 401(k) plans

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.

EVANSTON, IL.—Most people know Sisyphus as the man forever condemned to endlessly push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again. Northwestern University performance studies chair D. Soyini  Madison probably isn’t the first one to use Sisyphus as a metaphor for the seemingly meaningless and soul-sucking nature of hard, repetitive manual labor—which so many people must do to survive, even as their work leaves them relatively little time and energy for really “living.”

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.

With almost $500 billion in annual revenues, ExxonMobil is one of the world's truly powerful corporations. With all its resources and riches, the mammoth energy firm—the largest on the Fortune 500 list—Texas-based ExxonMobil is not loyal to America. Former CEO Lee Raymond made clear that his company’s only loyalty was to maximizing returns for shareholders when he pronounced, “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.” Or, Raymond might have added, based on what’s good for U.S. workers and communities."

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.

For a moment in Washington, it seemed like the White House was finally getting serious about reforming the agricultural labor system, with a common sense rule about preventing harm to child workers. But under pressure from the agribusiness lobby, the administration appears to have retreated from an initiative to tighten protection for childrens’ safety and health in agricultural jobs.

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.

In the Kingdom of Jordan, conflict erupted in the Palestinian refugee community, but it wasn't the kind of unrest you might expect in a society of survivors of war. The protesters were employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). They launched a strike to press for fairer wages and working conditions, which led to a sit-in at the agency’s Amman headquarters and affected a workforce of about 7,000 that provides health, education and social services to a Palestinian refugee population of about 1.5 million. The dispute was apparently just settled, following “mediation” by the Jordanian government, with a deal for a pay raise of about $70 (USD).

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.

JOLIET, ILL.—“You’re a rotten animal, that’s what you are. You are a piece of a road kill. Stay off my picket line scab!” shouted Caterpillar worker Gareth Beeson, through his “Scablaster 3000” megaphone on Sunday.  

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.