Last year, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and Wisconsin’s Republican legislature approved a law making it illegal for Wisconsin’s cities to require that businesses provide their workers with paid sick days. Milwaukee had crafted a law mandating paid sick leave for workers within the city, but Walker and Wisconsin GOP nullified it. A judge, in ruling that the state had the ability to preempt Milwaukee’s law, said “I don’t feel real good about how this happened politically.”

Louisiana’s legislature is now considering a similar bill to preempt local efforts at requiring paid leave for workers, as Half in Ten and the National Partnership for Women and Families noted:

S.B. 521, legislation that would take away Louisianans’ right to enact local paid sick days policies, is about to be voted on by the House — one of the last steps to enactment. Currently, more than 600,000 workers in Louisiana don’t have paid sick days, and if this bill becomes law, cities and parishes would lose the chance ever to put common-sense paid sick days standards in place…Louisiana already prohibits municipalities from setting their own minimum wage and can’t afford another anti-worker policy.

Just a few cities in the country — Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle — along with the state of Connecticut require that workers receive paid sick leave. The United States is all alone in the industrialized world in not requiring some form of paid leave as a matter of national policy. Each year, the U.S. economy loses $180 billion in productivity due to sick employees attending work and infecting other workers.

A judge from the National Labor Relations Board has overturned a union election at a Target store in New York in which workers ostensibly voted against becoming the first of the retail giant’s locations to organize. The judge ordered Target, which is notorious for its anti-labor practices, to hold a new election after agreeing with the United Food and Commercial Workers, who had accused the company of intimidating workers ahead of the election, Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

The decision comes almost a year after The United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1500 contested the 137-85 vote against unionization in June 2011. It argued that Target illegally intimidated workers for months leading up to the vote. Target denied the allegations. [...]

“Target completely poisoned the democratic process from day one,” said Patrick Purcell, assistant to the president of the UFCW Local 1500 in an interview with The Associated Press. “And now a judge agreed with everything we said.”

UFCW workers complained of intimidation immediately after the vote last year, and in November, the NLRB found additional evidence that Target officials illegally threatened to close the store if workers organized. It also found that Target supervisors “interrogated workers about their union activity,” complains the judge apparently found to be true.

In March, Target announced that it was temporarily close the store for six months for renovations, a move workers alleged was in retaliation for their organization efforts (1,100 Target stores are undergoing renovations nationwide, but most will remain open throughout the process). According to workers who filed the complaint, those who were the most vocal in their union support were deemed ineligible for transfers to other stores or for re-hire once the store re-opened, and they were given paltry severance packages to boot.

Target, however, says it “respectfully disagrees” with the decision and that its actions leading up to the election were “fair and legal.”

4,690 people were killed at work in 2010, up three percent from 2009, the Center for Public Integrity reports. That means that more Americans died in their workplaces in one year than died during the entire war in Iraq.

But while Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to protect defense spending from budget cuts, they are simultaneously looking to defund the agency that protects workers from physical harm in the workplace.

Many on-the-job deaths were met with only a small fine, an average of $7,900. Some workplaces were never inspected at all. And because of understaffed regulation offices — and the looming threat of further budget cuts — the numbers aren’t likely to change:

It would take the perpetually short-staffed OSHA 130 years to inspect every workplace in the U.S. Managers and their underlings must strike a balance between meeting “performance goals” set in Washington and conducting comprehensive inspections when deaths occur. A target of 42,250 inspections nationwide was established for fiscal year 2012, up 5.6 percent from the previous year’s goal. The number of federal inspectors, meanwhile, has stayed mostly flat; there were 1,118 in February 2012.

Republicans have proposed slashing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) budget by 20 percent, and have argued that OSHA should be focusing on enforcing penalties for killing an employee.

Republicans consider enforcement of OSHA standards ‘job-killing’ regulation. On the other hand, a lack of enforcement, decreased inspections, and an even smaller budget for regulation actually lead to workplace deaths.

The ability of American workers to be upwardly mobile in the economy depends heavily on where they live, according to a state-by-state analysis from Pew Charitable Trusts. The study, the first of its kind, found that workers in a group of states largely clustered in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to achieve upward mobility, while workers in southern states are far less likely.

For the most part, the states in each group differ on one major characteristic: the states where upward mobility is more likely are almost all union states, while the states where mobility is less likely almost all are not. Of the eight states that outperform the national average for upward economic mobility, seven are union states, with Utah the lone exception. Eight of the nine that underperform the national average, however, are so-called “right to work” states, with Kentucky the only exception:

When relative mobility is considered, union states look even better. Every state but one (Utah) that outperforms the national average on relative mobility, defined as the percentage of residents starting in the bottom half of the national distribution who move up 10 or more percentiles in a 10-year period, is a union state. Meanwhile, 14 of the 15 states that come in below the national average are right-to-work states, with Missouri the only exception:

Though the study didn’t find (or attempt to find) a direct correlation between union representation and mobility, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan told USA Today that higher mobility there is likely linked to higher wages in manufacturing and public sector jobs, both of which tend to be more heavily organized. Those ties also exist in the other union states, which rely more on manufacturing than the right-to-work states.

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, unions played a significant role in the construction of the American middle class, boosting the mobility of lower-income workers. The decline in union representation, meanwhile, correlates closely with a sharp rise in income inequality over the last 40 years. Other studies have shown that workers who join unions earn higher wages and are more likely to have health and retirement benefits, and that union membership increases the likelihood of upward economic mobility.

Nearly eleven years after terrorists brought down the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center can again boast of itself as New York City’s tallest building. One World Trade Center, built to replace the towers, surpassed the Empire State Building yesterday afternoon, and by the time it is finished sometime next year, it will be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and the third tallest in the world.

The reconstruction of the World Trade Center was done almost entirely with union labor. More than 3,200 workers were involved in the reconstruction effort, and as American Rights At Work notes, labor unions have been connected to the site since 9/11:

It’s fitting: union members were among the first responders; union members served in the immediate cleanup; and now union members are part of the rebuilding.

When One World Trade Center is completed, it will stand exactly 1,776 feet tall to mark America’s independence. Its roof, at 1,368 feet tall, will match the height of the original World Trade Center’s North Tower.

“The latest progress at the World Trade Center is a testament to New Yorkers’ strength and resolve, and to our belief in a city that is always reaching upward,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement. “This building has been a labor of love for many, and I congratulate the men and women who have worked together to solve the challenges presented by this incredibly complex project. Today our city has a new tallest building, and a new sense of how bright our future is.”

Our guest blogger is Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Worker Rights Consortium.

Apple’s response to its current public relations crisis regarding its labor force in China has been to promise big improvements in working conditions at its supplier factories. Unfortunately, there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of those pronouncements.

After all, Apple has been promising to end labor rights violations at these factories for six years, but has neither delivered on these pledges nor done anything to hold the suppliers accountable.

Consider the example of excessive overtime, one of the glaring problems at Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier. Workers at Foxconn’s plants in China have frequently been compelled to work upwards of 90 extra hours a month, sometimes far more, while the legal maximum in China is 36. Independent investigators have been reporting these abuses for years and auditors paid by Apple itself have just confirmed that massive overtime violations are still ongoing at Foxconn.

After these violations were first exposed in 2006, Apple issued a public report pledging corrective action. “Employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct,” Apple admitted, but “[Foxconn] has enacted a policy change to enforce the weekly overtime limits…and a management system has been implemented to track compliance… Supervisors must receive approval from upper level management for any deviation.”

Apple added, “We are committed to ensuring compliance with our Code of Conduct and will complete audits of all final assembly suppliers in 2006… In cases where a supplier’s efforts in this area do not meet our expectations, their contracts will be terminated.”

That certainly sounded like a strong stand by Apple: any supplier that did not meet the company’s labor standards would be terminated.

But as it turns out, Foxconn did not meet Apple’s standards. Instead, Foxconn continued to violate overtime laws, systematically, for the next six years (and counting). Since there are hundreds of thousands of workers making Apple products for Foxconn, the individual violations of Chinese overtime law that have been committed in the assembly of iPods, iPhones, and iPads now number in the millions.

Read more

Our guest blogger is Karla Walter, a Senior Policy Analyst with the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The Senate is expected to vote tomorrow on whether to block a commonsense rule that creates a standard process for union elections and gives workers a fairer way of choosing whether to form a union. Unions boost incomes for all middle-class households — union and nonunion alike — so this vote is an attack not just on workers who would like to join a union, but on the entire middle class.

The new rule is needed because there is currently no limit on employers’ or unions’ ability to demand a pre-election hearing on most any issue, which can be used to delay an election. Workers who want a union too often give up due to these delays. According to research by John-Paul Ferguson of Stanford Business School, 35 percent of the time that workers file a petition for an election, the election does not end up happening.

The National Labor Relations Board issued the rule last winter. Now, Senate Republicans and their conservative allies are bending the facts on what the rule does to suit their argument.

Katherine Lugar of the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which petitioned the Senate for a vote on the rule, claims that it will have a “dramatic effect on American businesses’ ability to grow jobs.” But the idea that workers’ rights and the NLRB are causing our economic problems is absurd. Unions are a shrinking factor in the economy, and when they were at their strongest, the U.S. economy was at its strongest. Moreover, the NLRB has been around for more than 75 years, during which the United States experienced tremendous investment and job growth.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), the main sponsor of Senate Joint Resolution 36 to block the union elections rule, is claiming it will “force employees to make the critical decision about whether or not to form a union in as little as seven to 10 days.” But this is just plain wrong. The rule does not specify a time frame for elections, but rather it helps ensure that workers who want a union election get one by addressing roadblocks that commonly are thrown up when the NLRB attempts to set up an election.

Enzi’s inaccurate claims don’t stop there. He also asserts that employers will be required to turn over workers’ email addresses and phone numbers to union organizers under the new rule. This is generally a good idea that allows organizers to communicate using modern technology, but it’s not a requirement of the final rule. A draft version of the regulations did consider these provisions, but the National Labor Relations Board did not include them.