The paper’s circulation had fallen from a peak of 150,000 in the mid-'50’s to 44,000 subscribers for the last issue, with the impact from Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 restricting public-sector unions likely to drive it down to 38,000, according to former editor Dominique Noth.

The paper’s following began to erode as deindustrialization sent jobs to the anti-union South, says Noth, the editor for the past decade. “The drop in manufacturing began to show up in the 1960’s,” he says. The unraveling of Milwaukee’s industrial base unraveled even faster from 1970 to 2000, despite the highly skilled workforce that had earned the city the nickname of “Machine Tool Capital of the World.” Between 1977 and 2002, Milwaukee lost 80% of its manufacturing jobs. Home-grown firms like Briggs & Stratton, Master Lock (see here and here), Allen-Bradley (later Rockwell), AO Smith/Tower Automotive (see here, here, and here) and Johnson Controls abandoned the workers whose labor had created their wealth and headed off to Mexico, China and other low-wage, high-repression sites.

Citing a budget deficit of $304 million in the coming fiscal year, the city’s School Reform Commission voted in March to close 23 public schools, about 10 percent of the city’s total schools. And this week, the district announced a staggering 3,783 layoffs—676 teachers, 769 assistants and 1,202 school safety staff—if additional funds cannot be generated from the city, the state and concessions from public sector workers.

The closures were not Philadelphia’s first, nor were the layoffs—nine schools were closed and more than 3,000 jobs were eliminated in 2011. In that year, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett slashed more than $1 billion to public education in the state’s budget (along with other brutal cuts to the social safety net throughout Pennsylvania).

Those measures were considered devastating at the time. The currently proposed closures and cuts go even deeper.

But in both hemispheres, reports about health and safety scares tend to gloss over an underlying malaise afflicting the food system: the many hazards that are concentrated further up in the production chain, in the slaughterhouses and processing plants where corporations regularly subordinate workers’ health and safety, along with public health concerns, to their insatiable hunger for profits.

Patriot Coal CEO Bennett Hatfield had indicated that the company would continue to negotiations with the union, saying after the court decision, “while the Court has given Patriot the authority to impose these critical changes to the collective bargaining agreements, and our financial needs mandate implementation by July 1, we continue to believe that a consensual resolution is the best possible outcome for all parties.” But the UMWA now says that Patriot has cancelled all bargaining sessions for this week and next week, which suggests the company plans on implementing a contract without input from the UMWA.

But for many older Americans who were set to retire when the recession hit, that dream came up short when they suddenly lost their jobs. Though older workers were the least likely to become unemployed during the economic downturn, for those who did, recovery has been incredibly difficult. More and more older Americans are past retirement age, but still looking for work. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of unemployed Americans age 65 to 74 more than doubled, according to data from the American Community Survey. 

Doug Deaton was forced to take social security in 2009 at age 62, after identity theft and job loss left him financially strapped. He worked his entire adult life, as a teacher, in public relations, as an actor and even as a sales manager for Amtrak. Taking early social security means his payments were reduced by almost a third—from around $1,150 to $728 a month. Not enough to live on, says Deaton, who says he owes quite a bit of back rent to his landlord.

Yet according to a recent lawsuit, even with all that surveillance Bloomberg LP couldn't make sure that its technical support workers got a lunch break, or clocked out on time at the end of their shifts. The class action suit filed on behalf of those employees alleges that the company wrongly classified those workers as exempt from overtime pay even as they regularly worked much more than 40 hours each week.

“People make Bloomberg,” was one of the slogans Peter Enea recalls being displayed on the walls at Bloomberg LP, where he worked in technical support from 1999 to 2010. The company aimed for a “Times Square feeling,” Enea says, with lots of hustle and bustle, TV screens even in the bathrooms, scrolling news feeds everywhere. Their business was providing financial information to the overlords of the financial system itself—more than 315,000 Bloomberg terminals, which cost more than $20,000 apiece, transmit communication, trades, news, and data to traders and bankers around the world. Enea and his colleagues provided technical support to major clients—bankers at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were regularly on the other end of his phone. According to the New York Times, Bloomberg LP had revenue of nearly $8 billion in 2012, with roughly 85 percent of that money coming from the terminals—padding New York City Mayor and company founder Michael Bloomberg's $27 billion fortune.

Under current federal law, employees working for the federal government have whistleblower protections that provide avenues for them to follow should they want to report potential abuses. As part of last year’s Whistleblower’s Protection Enhancement Act, rights for whistleblowers were enhanced for many categories of federal employees, but intelligence employees were excluded from coverage under the act. Likewise, intelligence workers—both federal and contract employees—were excluded from whistle blower protections offered to military contract employees under the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

While federal workers employed in intelligence gathering have less whistleblower protections than other federal workers, they are still able to raise their complaints with the Inspector General of the agency employing them or with members of Congress sitting on the Intelligence Committees. Under President Barack Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 19 (PPD-19) issued last October, intelligence workers directly employed by the federal government received enhanced whistleblower protections against retaliation. By contrast, though intelligence employees employed for federal contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton are also allowed to report potential abuses to the Inspectors General of the agencies that contract with their employers, they have no protections against employer retaliation, such as being fired.

“Intelligence community contractors have been shut out of all of the recent reforms,” says Angela Canterbury, director of policy at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). “They received no coverage under the WPEA for federal employees, the PPD-19 for IC civil servants, and were carved out of the contractor whistleblower protections in the NDAA—based on objections from the Congressional intelligence committees—leaving them with no specific protections for whistleblowing under the law. If you look at intelligence contractors, they have no protections under any of the laws. It really is an accountability loophole.”

The rally—put together by Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), Chicago Jobs With Justice (CJWJ), Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU)—coincided with Wal-Mart’s annual shareholders meeting in Bentonville, Ark. The meeting comes in the wake of a series of prolonged strikes by Wal-Mart workers across the country, the first such strikes in the firm’s history.

More than 14,000 employees and shareholders attended the Bentonville gathering, some of whom took the chance to lobby for improvements, such as asking the company to join a pact designed to improve work conditions in Bangladesh. The board rejected all the proposed changes.

Outside of the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market on Monroe St., the goals were similar.

Two of the men handing out flyers on this particular evening, June 4, had been fired from Dishes' 45th Street location—one after complaining that his wages were being slashed in retaliation for a wage-and-hour lawsuit he had filed, and the other after lobbying for the first worker’s reinstatement.

Until recently, both were happy employees who had been with the company for more than a decade. They took pride in their cooking skills and had—or thought they had—a good relationship with their boss, the restaurant's owner, Moshe Mallul, who lives at the Murray Hill apartment complex. (Mallul could not be reached for comment.)

Also present on the Murray Hill street corner were current Dishes employees, part of a committee organizing with the Laundry Workers' Center to call for their colleagues’ reinstatement and a fair settlement for what they say are years of owed overtime pay. The Laundry Workers' Center, staffed by volunteer organizers, shook up New York's labor movement last year when it teamed with Occupy Wall Street-affiliated solidarity groups to win unprecedented victories at the Hot & Crusty bakery, including an independent union and a hiring hall. Now the workers from Hot & Crusty are passing on what they learned in their struggle to their comrades at Dishes.

The mother’s name is Esperanza, which means “hope,” and the baby’s birth is  the harbinger of a new day for workers fighting for basic rights to organize, a fair wage, and safety and health protections. They win those rights after the women's auxiliary stands up for the men and forces the company to grant their demands.

In fact, a real baby, whose naming would await completion of the scenes, makes a cameo in the historic film. Juan Chacon, the Silver City union president who played the strike leader in the movie, was about to have a baby with his wife, Virginia. So the filmmakers (including Academy Award-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson) gave the two-week-old a key cameo in the movie’s christening scene. (See the 36-minute-mark here.)

By coincidence, more than 15 years ago, during research for the New Mexico supplement to my book Copper Crucible (about the1983 Arizona miners' strike), I interviewed that infant, Esperanza Chacon, by then a grown-up living in New Mexico. And, by further coincidence, she was working not for the mining czars, but for Wal-Mart.

Today—as workers press a historic campaign against Wal-Mart’s substandard labor conditions—that interview rings in my mind.

So far, reports have focused on whether or not the City of Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) did its job by properly investigating a number of complaints from nearby workers and passersby about the safety of the construction site. In a press conference earlier today, Philadelphia Commissioner of Licenses and Inspections Carlton Williams said, “No subsequent inspection occurred to indicate there was any unsafe conditions. We did not follow up and we are definitely looking into that."

However, new evidence uncovered by Working In These Times shows that federal authorities may also have also played a role in enabling the accident. According to Pat Gillespie, the business manager for the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council, union workers employed at a construction site across the street from the collapsed building called OSHA on four different occasions to report problems at the site.“[The union workers] went and talked to the people on the job who were non-union and they were rebuffed,” explains Gillespie. “So then they called both OSHA and L&I and let them what they perceived to be a hazard."

OSHA tells Working In These Times that it did inspect the site last month, but did not shut it down.

Inspired by the Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement, the workers in this first prolonged Walmart work stoppage traveled by bus from all corners of the country to Bentonville, where Walmart’s headquarters are located. Along the path of their “Ride for Respect,” they held protest rallies at Walmart stores against the company’s behavior towards its employees, and they picked up more strikers.

The striking workers hope to persuade corporate executives to take two simple steps: First, they want the executives to sit down and talk with them about making Walmart a better employer. Though Sparks acknowledges the group may not get everything it wants, OUR Walmart’s goals in such talks would include providing more full-time work that pays at least $25,000 a year. Second, they want Walmart to stop punishing and firing workers who speak out regarding problems with work at Walmart.

The idea is that the nominations will force Republicans’ hand. If they filibuster Obama’s nominees then it will serve as a rallying cry for filibuster reform; if they allow a confirmation vote, then Obama will have significantly changed the balance on the D.C. Circuit.

Though the D.C. Circuit is one of 12 regional circuit courts across the country, it has unique reach and influence, with broad jurisdiction over any matter before federal agencies and a reputation as a training ground for the Supreme Court. Nine of 14 current judges were appointed by Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and the court is overwhelmingly Republican. Over the past few years, the court’s conservative opinions—such as their rejection of the president’s recess appointments—have, ironically, entailed the sort of judicial activism that Republicans loudly claim to oppose. The cumulative effective of these decisions has been to disrupt longstanding views on separation of powers and federal regulations.

Political momentum behind the passage of a bill appeared strong. House Republican leader Tom Cross said pension financing is the most pressing issue the state has faced in 50 years. Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, said he was “put on earth” to solve Illinois’ pension liability. And public-sector labor unions, which have historically opposed any pension reform, got on board in May. But despite all this, Illinois Speaker of the House Mike Madigan and Illinois Senate President John Cullerton, both Democrats, were unable to agree on a bill.

Thousands of employees at the United Arab Emirates-based construction firm Arabtec went on strike on May 19, calling for wage increases in an unprecedented act of rebellion under a notoriously authoritarian government. According to Reuters, the UAE Labor Ministry announced that it was working closely with Arabtec to suppress the protests. Some 200 protesters were taken into custody in response to the four-day strike, and many were reportedly threatened with deportation or arbitrarily terminated.

The illegal work stoppage was a rare demonstration of outrage by the migrant workers lured by the UAE's mirage of prosperity. 

Despite the defeat, the 10-year strike leaves a complicated legacy for Chicago’s labor movement. Its confrontational tactics have resonated throughout the city and struck fear into the hearts of bosses.

But in early December, when both women applied for an administrative position at Exxon Mobil’s pipeline terminal in Patoka, Ill., human resources supervisors liked Caland much better. They contacted her three times asking her to interview, and even indicated the position would be held open for her for four days. Priston‘s application was ignored.

Priston and Caland are not actually real people. They and their resumes were invented by the national employment equity groups Freedom to Work and the Equal Rights Center to test the hiring policies of a company that has bucked national trends by refusing to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Illinois is one of 21 states that prohibits employment discrimination against gay people and one of 16 that also prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

So Freedom to Work filed a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil in Illinois on May 22 based on the differential treatment of the two fictitious resumes.

Now, less than a week after testifying in front of top members of Congress, Vanegas is facing deportation. From a press release by Presente.org:

Presente.org has issued a petition demanding that the Obama Administration halt the deportation of Antonio Venegas, a federal contract worker fired and placed into deportation proceedings for participating in a strike last Tuesday. ...

Following the walkout, Vanegas and nine of his coworkers were fired but were reinstated after the community demanded action. Over the weekend, he was arrested by Federal Protective Services police as he entered the building where he had worked for three years, and after three days in ICE detention was released with instructions to report for further deportation proceedings. Vanegas is now effectively excluded from his place of work.

...In addition to being extremely unfair retaliation against a worker demanding his rights, Vanegas’ arrest and exclusion  violates Department of Homeland’s Security’ rules prohibiting it from interfering in labor disputes.

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) argued in court that Patriot should not be let out of its debts, charging that its parent company, Peabody Energy, had designed Patriot to fail as a ploy to get out of $1 billion in retiree obligations. According to a financial analysis by Temple University Professor of Finance Bruce Rader, Patriot Coal was spun off from Peabody Energy with 42 percent of Peabody’s liabilities, but only 11 percent of its assets.

However, Judge Kathy Surratt-States of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Missouri ruled that Patriot can stop payments to the union pension fund as soon as July 1 and no longer has to cover the full cost of retiree healthcare plans, instead paying a fixed amount into a healthcare fund administered by the union. 

In her 102-page decision, Surratt-States wrote:

Unions generally try to bargain for the best deal for their members, however, there is likely some responsibility to be absorbed for demanding benefits that the employer cannot realistically fund in perpetuity, particularly given the availability of sophisticated actuarial analysts and cost trend experts.

Last Thursday, CTU President Karen Lewis, comfortably re-elected to a second three-year term a week before, hosted a voter-registration training session at a church in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the city's South Side. Lewis told her audience of CTU members that despite months of opposition—which included a three-day march, downtown rallies, two pending class action lawsuits and a third lawsuit that the union expects to file today—“a lot of us knew” the board would vote to close the schools, “which is why we had already scheduled this meeting.”

The real problem, Lewis said, is that the mayor handpicks both the Chicago Public School (CPS) leaders who propose policies and the board members who then approve those policies.  “We must change the political landscape in Chicago,” Lewis said. “If we have mayoral control and can’t get rid of it tomorrow, then we need to figure out a way to change the hearts and minds of the voters.”

So Lewis wants to channel the energy and defiance of CTU members—who overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike last June—into increasing voter turnout, and pushing for candidates who support policies such as an elected school board.

But last week, at a meeting of the International Labour Organization, dozens of major global clothing brands—none based in the United States—announced they had signed onto a broad safety accord designed to be more comprehensive than previous corporate codes of conduct. The initiative, led by labor rights groups and unions, is just the beginning of a long road to labor justice, but could move one of the world's deadliest manufacturing sectors toward meaningful international accountability.

“When the questions got too hard to answer, he asked his corporate security to kick us out,” says CWA District 1 Organizing Coordinator Tim Dubnau. “We told him that we had a right to be here but if a police officer told us to, we would leave. The police detained us for an hour outside pending an investigation, then released us.”

Earlier this week, CSB went public with its complaints that law enforcement agencies in West had removed evidence and altered the scene during their criminal probe. CSB wrote in a congressional letter that its staff was unable to independently collect physical evidence or conduct testing—escalating a jurisdictional battle that resonated back in Washington.

... Officials for the State Fire Marshal’s Office and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives denied this week that they froze out CSB, saying they “attempted to fully cooperate.”

A new investigation by the Center for Public Integrity shows that the chemical industry is dramatically underreporting accidents. From the Center for Public Integrity and NPR:

[A June 2012 petrochemical leak at an Exxon complex] in Baton Rouge is one thread of a larger story about the often toxic, sometimes hidden releases emanating from oil refineries, chemical plants and other industrial facilities along the chemical corridor of Louisiana and Texas. Those unplanned emissions—known in regulatory parlance as “upsets”—are occurring more often than industry admits or government knows, according to more than 50 interviews with regulators, activists, plant representatives, workers and residents, and an analysis of tens of thousands of records by the Center for Public Integrity.

Normally Patricia Ramirez would have been inside the ballpark cooking for fans, but on Saturday, she was outside handing them flyers and urging, “No hot dogs, no garlic fries, please don’t buy the food.” By first pitch at 1pm, her voice was getting hoarse.

“I’ve been chanting quite a bit,” she explained. “I think before evening time, I might not have a voice.” It is the first time the 65-year-old Ramirez has taken part in a strike, and she said she was “pumped up” by support from the fans.

According to a study released on Friday by the Washington, D.C.-based research group Good Jobs First, the citizens of Mississippi—which ranks dead last among U.S. states in median household income—are bestowing an estimated $1.33 billion in subsidies on Nissan over a 30-year period for the privilege of hosting the factory. 

“This is a clear message that we’re sending to Centerplate and the Giants,” says Billie Feliciano, a long-time worker at the park. “We’re serious."

The Giants have home games scheduled on May 24, May 25, May 26, May 29 and May 30.

Vanegas is one of 100,000 low-wage workers in the Washington, DC area, according to Good Jobs Nation, many of whom are employed by federal contractors or in federally owned buildings like Union Station, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and the Ronald Reagan Building. He and about 100 of his colleagues went on a one-day strike yesterday in order to draw attention to their low pay. Despite provisions in the federal Service Contract Act stating that federal contract workers like Antonio Vanegas should make at least the local prevailing wage, up until a few weeks ago Vanegas was making $6.50 an hour–less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 and well below the D.C. minimum wage of $8.25. Additionally, Vanegas works 60 hours a week, but claims he receives no overtime pay for hours he works past 40, in violation of the Federal Labor Standards Act.

“There are many workers in the food court who are like me, who don’t make enough to pay the rent, put food on our tables and take care of our families,” said Vanegas in his testimony. “That’s why I’m here and why so many workers like me are on strike today. We want the federal government to be a good landlord and rent prime retail space to employers who follow the law. We want the government to lead by example and guarantee that all workers who do work on behalf of the federal government earn a legal and living wage.”

The House of Representatives and Senate have proposed the United States “tighten our belts” by slashing billions of dollars from poor people’s food budgets. The main mechanism for shrinking the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding is the removal of “categorical eligibility.” Basically, most states have used this policy to streamline enrollment: Families are made eligible for food stamps based on their receipt of other benefits, such as housing or childcare subsidies. That often means broadening eligibility for working-poor families or those with overall household income or savings that exceeds regular, stricter thresholds for qualifying for food stamps.

By dramatizing a farm scene amid the bustle of Greenwich Village, Chelsea and the surrounding neighborhoods, the activists of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers highlighted the connection between farmworkers’ daily struggles and the villain of the drama: Wendy’s restaurants, which are the primary target of the group’s Fair Food campaign for decent labor standards in an industry built on modern-day serfdom.

The Union Square rally–featuring a brass band adorned with Wendy’s trademark red pigtails and tomato-shaped placards proclaiming “Justice" and "Derechos" for farmworkers–was part of a nationwide series of Fair Food demonstrations that are helping bridge the conceptual gap between food consumerism and farm labor, a sector replete with poverty wages and brutally exploitative conditions in the fields. The Coalition has been campaigning for months to push Wendy’s and the Florida supermarket giant Publix to sign a Fair Food agreement like the agreements brands like Chipotle and Trader Joe’s have already signed.

Daniel Horowitz of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board said, “This is the worst amount of damage to a community the Chemical Safety Board has ever seen. We simply can’t have explosions like this happen again."

Although the stand-off has been simmering for years, it takes on special urgency now because failure by the Senate to confirm new nominees for the board would paralyze the panel in August, said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chair of Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. That’s because the current NLRB chair’s term of office will expire then, leaving the board without the three-person quorum legally required to conduct any further business.

Harris, who has been the interim head of the Department of Labor since Hilda Solis's resignation in January, has taken the agency on the road in favor of a wage raise. He traveled to Baltimore this week to meet with low-wage workers and promote President Barack Obama’s State of the Union proposal to lift the federal minimum from $7.25 to $9.00 an hour. The president's plan would also automatically link future increases to inflation, as a way of preventing the gradual erosion of purchasing power that has plagued low-wage workers since the 1980s, Harris says.

The labor department’s promotional tour has hit some 23 cities since the February 12 State of the Union address, with more to come. The effort has been largely overshadowed, however, by the March 18 nomination of Thomas Perez as the new secretary of labor and a confirmation fight that is still underway in the U.S. Senate. Nevertheless, Harris says he is pressing forward because “there is a lot of hunger out there” to see the wage increased.

But although the company announced its push for union democracy in February, a subsequent study by academics in Hong Kong and mainland China reveals that many workers don’t even know whether they’re in a union, and many others don’t have a clear idea of what their union does or how it works. And that actually makes perfect sense, since China’s unions are ill-defined, bureaucratized institutions—politically ineffective by design.

But United Maintenance may not be non-union for long. On Tuesday, current workers and union staff announced that 70 percent of the roughly 300 new employees at United Maintenance have signed cards in favor of joiningSEIU Local 1--the same union that represented the laid-off janitors. Now, organizers are demanding the company recognize the workers’ choice.

In 2010, Hedger worked as a veteran printing pressman at Fort Dearborn Company, a large commercial printer in the Chicago suburbs. He also served his local union as shop steward and a member of the bargaining committee. When the union members voted down a contract that the company had tried to push through quickly, a Fort Dearborn vice-president said he was “sick of this union circus” and threatened to fire Hedger.

The wealth generated at the port, though, hasn't trickled down. While Wal-Mart and other retailers are doing just fine, the products they sell are transported by port truck drivers who still make low wages—a nationwide average of about $12 an hour. Since the industry was deregulated in the late 1970s, port truck drivers have been classified by their employers as “independent contractors,” meaning that they're paid by the load, not by the hour, and the bosses don't shell out for taxes or benefits.

For instance, four years before a tragic explosion in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine as a result of coal dust build-up, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board issued a report recommending that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) write a rule to prevent the accumulation of combustible dust. But it was not until 2009 that OSHA began the process of gathering information to write a rule. Then in 2010, OSHA downgraded the rule to a “long term action,” delaying the draft rule's required approval by a Small Business Advocacy Review Panel (SBARP). On April 5, 2010, the coal dust at Upper Big Branch sparked, and the resulting explosion killed 29 miners.

Yet the combustible-dust rule is still awaiting SBARP pre-approval.