No staying home sick for Michigan workers.
No local government in Michigan has passed a paid sick leave law. None of them appear to be thinking about it.
Just in case, though, Republicans in the Michigan Senate passed a preemption bill preventing them from doing so. Now, why are they passing this law to prevent local governments from doing something they're not doing? If you're thinking of a four-letter acronym beginning with A and ending with C, you're onto something, Working America's Doug Foote explains:
At the ALEC national conference in 2011, attendees were given copies of [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker’s paid sick days preemption law. As PRWatch blogger Brendan Fischer describes, legislators were also handed a “target list” and “a map of state and local paid sick leave policies prepared by ALEC member the National Restaurant Association.”
This law keeping cities and towns from making their own decisions on this issue makes no sense for Michigan. Michigan just happens to be on a list of boxes for ALEC to check, so they can continue a status quo where workers show up to work sick, or get fired for taking care of a sick child, simply because they have no other financial option.
The preemption bill is being fast-tracked through the Michigan state House.
A fair day's wage
- Cablevision workers in Brooklyn have voted to unionize, but the company keeps refusing to bargain in good faith on a contract and has illegally fired union activists. The National Labor Relations Board has issued complaints against Cablevision, but Cablevision is of course taking its appeal to the court that invalidated President Obama's recess appointments, a decision under which the NLRB can't currently operate at all, as far as that court is concerned. And soon, if Republicans keep blocking Obama's NLRB nominations just to be obstructionist, the NLRB won't be able to function at all according to any court. Which will leave these workers—who have just been trying to exercise their legal right to join a union—screwed.
- Meet the billionaires who run Walmart.
- Whole Foods suspends workers for speaking Spanish on the job.
- David Dayen on student loans:
Princeton professor Jesse Rothstein argued in a recent working paper that graduates burdened by debt will choose higher-paying jobs to pay off the loans, draining the talent pool for lower-paid, but critical, “public interest” job sectors like education, government or nonprofits. This further erodes the nation’s seed corn and funnels the best and brightest into the financial industry or other higher-paying power centers, reducing entrepreneurship in the bargain. Student debtors also put off major purchases like houses or cars, and the Federal Reserve believes this is having a serious negative effect on our economy.
- Can Illinois public workers get a fair pension deal? The picture is bleak, but they're not totally screwed yet.
- Check out this list of movies about workers and the workplace.
- Home care workers file for largest union election in Vermont history:
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Education
- Diane Ravitch on the president's proposal to bring high-speed internet to almost all schools:
Technology is a wonderful thing, and all schools should be connected to the Internet.
But I would respectfully suggest to President Obama that there are far larger issues he should tackle right now, like defending the very existence of a teaching profession, defending academic freedom of educators, supporting the nation’s public schools, resisting privatization, and helping states provide equality of educational opportunity, with enough resources to meet the essential needs of students.
- What do mass school closings tell us about who cares for Chicago's children?