Laura Clawson

Republican governors don’t need a personal reason to cut off $300 a week in added unemployment aid for 4 million people. Making life harder for people struggling to get by is the Republican way. But some of the Republican governors who’ve announced they’re opting their states out of the federal unemployment supplement do have that personal reason, in the form of business interests.

West Virginia Gov.

A couple months ago I was in line at the grocery store when the cashier snapped at me to keep a 6-foot distance between myself and the people around me. My first reaction was irritation and a sense of being unjustly accused—I was literally standing directly on top of the social distancing marker the store had on the floor, and I wasn’t moving.

In a calendar year in which I’ve been able to finish reading very few books—so diminished is my mental capacity and so sapped is my emotional resilience by the stresses of the coronavirus pandemic—one book just knocked me off my feet and reminded me why reading novels is such an essential part of life. That book is Courtney Milan’s The Devil Comes Courting.

The pandemic did not change rising economic inequality in the United States—go figure.

If a worker steals from their employer, they can be fired or even face criminal charges. If an employer steals their workers’ wages, they … usually get to keep the money with no penalties. Wage theft is outrageously common, and it’s rarely treated as a serious civil violation, let alone a criminal one, despite taking money from people who desperately need it to get by.

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which represents many grocery workers, is … not happy about the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions’ (CDC) new guidance that vaccinated people can go unmasked indoors. Food and retail workers, after all, have been contending all along with people who refused rules about masks, and are now guaranteed to have to contend with people who may be lying about being vaccinated.

Care work was already work before the pandemic, and there was already a crisis. But the coronavirus pandemic made the crisis exponentially worse.

The big push is on to blame the American Rescue Plan for businesses not being able to find enough workers to fill their jobs. Business owners—restaurant owners in particular—are lining up to tell reporters how those darn lazy workers would rather stay home and collect unemployment than go back to work.

After more than a month of footdragging—and before that, nearly a year of outright refusal under Donald Trump—the Labor Department finally released an emergency workplace safety standard for COVID-19.

The new rules mean that employers in low-standards states like Texas and Mississippi will have to provide workers with PPE, at least for the next six months.

President Joe Biden is addressing a joint session of Congress—the traditional replacement for a State of the Union address in a president’s first year. This year, of course, the format of the speech is also shaped by COVID-19. There will be a limited audience.

Biden has serious legislative priorities to advocate for, including the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which he unveiled Wednesday morning, along with the American Jobs Plan and immigration reform.

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is definitely operating on the “any attention is good attention” theory lately, and she got the attention she craves when she posted a picture of herself drinking sangria and flaunting a ring with the message “fuck off.” Truly, it was her own Melania Trump “I don’t really care, do you?” moment.

Well, turns out the maker of that ring is not on board with Sinema’s project.

In January, President Joe Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to release an emergency temporary standard on COVID-19 safety in the workplace by March 15. Well, March 15 has come and gone, as has April 15, and there’s no emergency standard, despite what Dr. Anthony Fauci described this week as “an unacceptably high level” of COVID-19 cases every day in the United States.

Do not—Do. Not.—dismiss this as just a handful of Republicans: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are starting an “America First Caucus” in the House of Representatives, and they might as well go ahead and call it the You Will Not Replace Us Caucus or get real honest and call it the White Supremacist Caucus, because the introductory description of the group’s purpose, as reported by Punchbowl News, is breathtaking.

The Republican refrain about everything but tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy has long been “But how can we afford it?”

A giant tax cut for those at the top? Sure! No problem! Bridges, trains, schools, an upgraded and secure power grid? It’s just too expensive.

You want to know why it matters to everyone that the percent of workers covered by a collective bargaining contract has dropped from 27% in 1979 to 11.6% in 2019? The Economic Policy Institute’s Lawrence Mishel offers three reasons:

“For the ‘typical’ or median worker, declining unionization translates to a loss of $1.56 per hour worked, the equivalent of $3,250 for a full-time, full-year worker.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, far-right activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, have quite the scheme going. She takes in dark money contributions to her Tea Party-connected nonprofit, Liberty Central, and organizes Republicans on exactly the kind of issues that often reach the Supreme Court.

President Joe Biden is creating a commission to consider the possibility of expanding or reforming the Supreme Court. The bipartisan commission is created in an executive order being signed Friday, and will have 180 days to report back. The commission is not tasked with offering specific recommendations, however.

The Senate voted against including a minimum wage increase in the American Rescue Plan in March, and as long as Republicans have the option of filibustering it, they will block any meaningful increase in what’s now a poverty-level federal minimum wage. But because $7.

Line speeds in meat processing plants are a classic example of something that’s simultaneously a worker safety issue and a consumer safety issue. And this week, both workers and consumers got a major victory when a federal judge threw out a Trump-era rule allowing pork processing plants to operate at higher speeds.

According to U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen, the U.S.

The internet is a vast and wonderful and terrible place filled with things to read, some of which are—I know, weird—not at Daily Kos.

Marty Walsh, formerly the mayor of Boston, was confirmed as labor secretary on Monday in a 68 to 29 vote. Walsh was the head of the Boston Building Trades Council before being elected mayor. He was elected after starting his working life in construction, a member of Laborer’s Local 223—a local he went on to lead.

Marty Walsh, formerly the mayor of Boston, was confirmed as labor secretary on Monday in a 68 to 29 vote. Walsh was the head of the Boston Building Trades Council before being elected mayor. He was elected after starting his working life in construction, a member of Laborer’s Local 223—a local he went on to lead.

Friday’s news was dominated by Thursday’s move by Georgia Republicans to do everything they can to suppress the vote enough to win. And, since SB 202 specifically targets Black voters, this has to be regarded as an intentional restoration of Jim Crow for the purposes of voting at least.

Friday’s news was dominated by Thursday’s move by Georgia Republicans to do everything they can to suppress the vote enough to win. And, since SB 202 specifically targets Black voters, this has to be regarded as an intentional restoration of Jim Crow for the purposes of voting at least.

We called huge numbers of workers essential but didn’t raise their pay or respect their safety in the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s only now that most “essential” workers outside of health care are starting to get vaccinated. But that process is finally happening in more states, after just a few prioritized those workers in the early phases of the vaccine rollout.

Meatpacking workers are a key case.

As its workers in Bessemer, Alabama, seek to unionize, Amazon keeps touting its $15 an hour pay—more than double the federal minimum wage, which applies in Alabama. But it turns out that’s not such a great thing to brag about in that area.

State and local governments hemorrhaged jobs in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, and the damage remains: Employment in that area remained at 1.4 million jobs, or 7%, lower in February 2021 than it was in February 2020. Three states—New Hampshire, Nevada, and Maine—have seen state and local government jobs drop by 10% or more. In a majority of states, it’s 5% or more.

Workers attempting to unionize at Tate’s Bake Shop are getting hit with an all-too-common, and totally vile, union-busting message: They say they’re being threatened with deportation. 

Yes, Tate’s—now owned by Mondelez International—hired an anti-union consultant, who apparently looked at the company’s many undocumented workers and went for the threat that would scare them the most.

Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, are still voting on whether to join a union, in a mail vote that ends March 29. The company’s ongoing harassment campaign aimed at defeating the organizing effort has many workers looking forward to that date, when the barrage will end—much as Republican negative campaigning is aimed at turning people against politics and good governance.

In the fight for a $15 minimum wage, don’t forget about tipped workers. While the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009—and Congress hasn’t passed an increase since 2007—the tipped worker minimum wage has been at $2.13 an hour since 1991. The theory is that workers get at least minimum wage thanks to tips, or else employers make up the difference.