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.

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.”

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.

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:

Chart via USA Today

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:

Chart via Pew Charitable Trusts

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.

One World Trade Center under construction

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.”

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.

Foxconn also violates Apple’s health and safety standards, an ongoing problem confirmed by Apple’s auditors. According to Apple policy, “The companies we do business with must provide safe working conditions…as a condition of their contracts with us.” In 2011, Foxconn’s failure to provide safe conditions led to an aluminum dust explosion that ended the lives of four workers and seriously injured many more. An independent safety expert had this to say to the New York Times about Foxconn’s practices: “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”

But despite Foxconn’s contempt for Apple’s labor standards, Apple never terminated Foxconn’s contracts. Instead, it massively expanded them. Apple’s orders at Foxconn are now reportedly worth $40 billion a year, many times greater than in 2006.

Apple is no doubt aware that rewarding suppliers that brazenly violate its labor standards is not an effective strategy for getting suppliers to stop violating its labor standards. Clearly, Apple’s priorities lie elsewhere. A former Apple executive explained those priorities to the Times: “We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice. If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?”

Apple cares about labor abuses only to the extent that they cause it embarrassment and threaten its brand image. In 2006, Apple was able to limit the embarrassment with promises of reform that it obviously had no intention of keeping once public scrutiny waned. Now, in 2012, facing a burst of media and public attention that poses the greatest danger yet to its reputation, Apple is offering another round of promises. The only way these will lead to decent conditions for workers is if Apple remains under such intense public scrutiny that it has no choice but to deliver.

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.

QUESTIONER: What do you think of labor unions?

KELLY: They’re awful. That’s what I think of labor unions. They are terrible! The problem is not necessarily the labor union, it’s the government taking sides with the labor union.

For years, Target has enjoyed a reputation as the antithesis of Walmart. But like its big box counterpart, Target is notoriously anti-union — the company reportedly shows new hires a video warning against unionizing, threatening them with fewer promotions and less flexible hours if they were to organize.

When the workers in Valley Stream came forward with the idea of organizing under United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1500, Target ramped up its efforts to stifle the movement. Ultimately, the workers’ vote to unionize failed, due in large part to intimidation tactics employed by the company to strong-arm them into caving. In fact, Target is currently under investigation by the National Labor Relations Board for illegally interrogating and threatening Valley Stream employees.

Yet, Target’s campaign against the workers in Valley Stream presses forward. Last week, company management informed employees at the Valley Stream location that the store will be temporarily closed for six-months for renovations. Employees feel the move is in retaliation for their attempts to unionize; while the Valley Stream location is one of 1,100 other stores currently undergoing renovations, the majority of those locations are slated to remain open throughout.

And while “eligible employees” have been invited to transfer to other Target branches or take an unpaid leave of absence until renovations have been completed, “the most vocal pro-union employees have not been deemed eligible to return:”

Sonia Williams, one of the most active pro-union employees who has frequently spoken to the media, including The Huffington Post, found out last week that she wasn’t eligible to transfer or apply for unpaid leave, she said. She was offered, however, a severance package for her nearly 10 years of work that amounts, after taxes, to about $800, Williams said.

Management told her she was “on final warning,” but did not explain why, Williams said, noting that she had received no prior written or oral notice. Management had met with her once previously about one matter but her manager told her it had been resolved, she said.

UFCW Local 1500 is seeking to block the closure and possibly overturn the results of last year’s election with the aim of conducting a new vote. “This is just as horrible as it gets,” said Pat Purcell, assistant to the president of Local 1500. “It’s right out of the Walmart playbook. That store is being closed in retaliation for union activities of workers.” A Target spokeswoman, on the other hand, maintains that the plans for remodeling have been in the works for “a year and a half or two,” conveniently predating the union’s campaign.

– Fatima Najiy

Justice Anthony Kennedy

The 1993 law provided those with full-time jobs at private companies of more than 50 employees and employees of federal, state, and local public governments up to 12 workweeks of unpaid, job-protected leave annually for family and medical reasons.

But the Supreme Court’s plurality in this case, Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland, said that citizens can only sue state governments for damages when Congress finds “a pattern of constitutional violations” and tailors “a remedy congruent and proportional to the documented violations.” This sovereign immunity means that, while state employees have the right to take the leave, if the state blocks their exercise of that right, their only recourse is to get a judge to reverse the potential violation, in advance. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion of the court for himself, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Samuel Alito; Justice Antonin Scalia concurred with Kennedy’s result but not his reasoning.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, on behalf of Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, took the rare step of reading her dissent aloud in court. She called the result “regrettable” and observed that the Kennedy opinion “pays scant attention to the overarching aim” of the law, which was “to make it feasible for women to work while sustaining family life.” Ginsburg said that the law was a reasonable effort by congress to ensure the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment for public employees facing discrimination.

While the law remains in full force for employees of private employers, the court’s ruling significantly weakens the law’s protections for hundreds of thousands of public employees. With anti-worker rulings like this, it’s no wonder a mere 28 percent of likely voters like the job the Supreme Court is doing.

Mike Daisey

It’s not that the misdeeds of managers at FoxConn were a secret before Daisey’s story aired. Fantastic reporting on the subject has been done prior by Wired, which chronicled a rash of suicides at a factory run by Foxconn, a key member of Apple’s supply chain, and by the New York Times since, chronicling abuses at a number of Apple suppliers. But Daisey’s monologue stirred up a particular debate. A petition inspired by the broadcast attracted 250,000 online signatures in a matter of days; Daisey became a cable news regular, and the story hot talking-head fodder; and as the wave of stories crested, Apple itself invited independent auditors onto its assembly lines and pressured its primary manufacturer to increase wages in response to growing public outrage. For activists who have been trying for years to pressure technology companies into embracing stricter labor standards in much the same way they did the garment industry, this felt like a moment.

But for all of the attention that Apple’s toxic partnership with FoxConn received in the last few months, Apple’s stock climbed above $600 a share this week. Their latest product is expected to break more sales records. And by some measures Apple is now the world’s largest corporation. Consumers may have been moved to sign petitions, but not, apparently, to change their purchasing decisions. Daisey claims he was motivated to fabrication by a desire to speak for vulnerable Chinese workers, and to connect deeply with American listeners. But the effect of his work may not have been as deep as he believed it to be. What we need is honest accounts of what Apple does to the workers it its supply chain. Stories that are true, rather than simply moving, are the only possible starting place for a campaign to hold Apple—and ourselves—truly accountable for the conditions that the company and we as consumers benefit from.

Less than two months after he signed the bill, Daniels is already touting its success. Daniels claims more than 30 companies have asked about moving to Indiana, but so far he’s only named one, MBC Group, that added Indiana jobs. Unfortunately for Daniels, it seems he jumped the gun:

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation issued a statement in which company president Eric Holloway said expanding its Brookville, Ind., site was a “no-brainer” because of right-to-work and other factors.

Holloway says he did not notice the reference to right to work when he approved the statement and says the law had no effect on his decision to expand.

Indiana, of course, has tried “right-to-work” once before, passing a similar law in 1957. The law was so unpopular that voters demolished Republicans at the polls in 1958, and Democrats repealed it in 1965.

The law is again unpopular — 71 percent supported an effort to put it up to a referendum vote on the November ballot — likely because studies are again showing that it is bad for workers and won’t actually help Indiana create jobs.

The explanation of how the bounty system worked is a fascinating look at the financial stratification within NFL teams. The bounty system was organized by the Saints’ former defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, and he kept running the system even after he was specifically ordered by the team to shut it down. But the bounties themselves were offered—and paid—not by the team but by Saints players to Saints players. And they worked as incentives because special teams players who are in a position to inflict those injuries make less than the teammates who offered them the bounties. And that doesn’t even always work out. As Deadspin pointed out, the fines Bobby McCray was assessed for a hit to Brett Favre probably cost him more than he made based on the report’s assessment of what he would have made in bounties.

But however complicated the financial interests are here—and even scarier than the fact the bounties were being offered in the locker room is the news that folks outside the team appeared to be ponying up money—it’s a worrisome illustration of how the league’s compensation patterns could make bounties seem worth reaching for, and could lead to them violating their own collective bargaining agreement. It’s hard to believe that the Saints or any other team would offer bounties in the expectation that they were the only team doing it. And if everyone’s ignoring the collective bargaining agreement’s ban on bounties, then everyone’s ramping up their own risk of being injured by participating in the system. I don’t envy the NFL and the players’ union the task of tweaking those incentives and enforcement to try to make the ban on bounties operative.

Especially since players are coming into the NFL after years of a training that incentivizes hard hits, even if there pride rather than money at stake. I do think that there is a difference between a reward for making a good play and a reward specifically for injuring someone. But I don’t know how meaningful that difference is. I love football, and I struggle with that love and my questions about whether the game as played can be made safer while still remaining exciting.

Workers occupying the Serious Energy Plant in Chicago.

More than three years later, the same factory has had to be occupied again. Now owned by California-based Serious Energy, the factory was going to be closed until workers locked themselves inside. Now, Serious has vowed to keep the factory open for 90 days, giving workers time to either find a new buyer or purchase the business themselves:

Workers at a window factory on Goose Island ended a sit-in early Friday morning after the company agreed to keep the plant open for 90 days, union leaders said.

California-based Serious Energy will work with the workers to find a new ownership.

“We are committed to finding a new buyer for the plant or if we can, buy the place ourselves and run it. Either way, we are hopeful,” Armando Robles, president of UE Local 1110, said in a statement.

“We can run this company,” said Juan Cortez, a worker at the factory for 23 years. “We got smart people [to] manage the money. We can find customers. We know how to run the company.”

The protesting workers were joined by members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But such moves by workers are becoming increasingly rare. Work stoppages last year were the second lowest on record, according to data from the Labor Department.

Ironically, Romney has been attacking chief rival Rick Santorum for being too “pro-union.” “[W]hen it comes to Big Labor, Santorum has been about as conservative as Barack Obama,” a Romney campaign email declared. There’s almost zero truth to that statement, as Santorum has been strongly anti-labor.

Meanwhile, as governor of Massachusetts, Romney supported the police union, offering more money in exchange for their electoral support. The former president of the State Police Association of Massachusetts even said, Romney “stood by labor” as governor.

“This is an unneeded law,” [Republican state Representative Kyle Jones] said. “If I was to deny one of my employees a break, I would be in a very bad position with the company’s human resources representative. If you consider that this is a very easy law to follow in that everyone already does it, then why do we need it? Our constituents have already proven that they have enough common sense to do this on their own.”

The bill’s sponsor, state representative J.R. Hoell, argued that companies failing to provide lunch breaks would be shamed over social media, thus rendering the law unnecessary. “If they are not letting people have lunch, they could put it out though the news media, though social media. I don’t think that abusive behavior would continue, the way communications are today,” he said.

Of course, not every employer can be counted to to follow even the easiest of requirements to look after workers’ health and rights. Back in 2005, Walmart was forced to pay $172 million for denying workers their lunch breaks. Pyramid Breweries Inc. settled a case in 2008 for $1.5 million. Just a few months ago, California ordered Embassy Suites to pay workers tens of thousands of dollars for forcing them to skip breaks.

“The fact that in 2012, I would be even sitting in front of the Labor Committee talking about eliminating the lunch hour is outrageous,” said Mark MacKenzie, New Hampshire’s state AFL-CIO representative. “People should at least be able to be given the opportunity to eat.” Fortunately, the bill does not seem too appealing to most of the New Hampshire legislature, and the state House’s labor committee adjourned yesterday without voting on it.