This week in the War on Workers: Verizon strikers returning to work

I was going to give you a recap of the week in the Verizon strike, but instead major news broke today:

Members of CWA and IBEW at Verizon Communications will return to work on Tuesday, Aug. 23, at which time the contract will be back in force for an indefinite period.

We have reached agreement with Verizon on how bargaining will proceed and how it will be restructured. The major issues remain to be discussed, but overall, issues now are focused and narrowed.

We appreciate the unity of our members and the support of so many in the greater community. Now we will focus on bargaining fairly and moving forward.

There's no guarantee this extension will culminate in a contract without a further strike, but for now, as of Tuesday, workers will be back on the job.

Your regularly scheduled programming:

Great video from the Steelworkers:

America needs more jobs—and it's not that the ideas aren't out there for how to create them. Some, President Obama could do on his own. Others, like creating school repair jobs would require congressional action; that's one that Obama appears poised to embrace. In all likelihood, Republicans would block it, but nonetheless it would be a great stand for the president and congressional Democrats to take, drawing a strong contrast between the Democratic desire to put people to work at the important task of fixing our school buildings and the Republican desire to ... keep people out of work and school roofs leaking.

With 23 polls showing a majority of Americans supporting tax increases as a component of deficit reduction, there were encouraging signs that Democratic policymakers might be hearing that and preparing to put up at least a little bit of a fight.

This week also saw some great jobs-related activism. Members of Congress across the country, including Super Congress members, faced protesters in their districts calling for jobs creation.

In the workplace

• OSHA has released a list of 178 employers classified as "severe violators." That means:

  First, a workplace has to be the subject of a federal or State OSHA inspection. In any given year, less than 1% of worksites will have a visit from a government safety inspector. Second, the employer has to receive citations with violations classified as “willful,” “repeat,” or “failure-to-abate” (W/R/FTA). The vast majority of violations, however, are classified as “serious,” with only about 4% in the W/R/FTA category.

  In 22 percent of severe violator cases, it was a death in the workplace that led to inspection to begin with.

• Allstate agents, who are small business owners, voted to affiliate with the Office and Professional Employees union (OPEIU); they won't have collective bargaining rights, but will gain other forms of assistance.
• Foreign students in the United States on J-1 summer visas walked off the job to protest exploitation.
• Domestic workers got a bill of rights in New York last year and are hoping for similar legislation to be passed in California this year. Like foreign students and small business-owning insurance agents, domestic workers don't fit the traditional profile of union or other workplace organizing; the fact that we're seeing organizing pushes on so many fronts and in creative ways is particularly exciting.

Nice try

• Although polling has tightened somewhat, Ohio's SB 5, the bill eliminating collective bargaining for public employees, still looks headed for repeal. That's the environment in which Gov. John Kasich started talking compromise, after having established a record as a major bully when he thought he could do what he wanted without repercussions. Kasich gave the Republican Weekly Address today, in anticipation of which Innovation Ohio put together a review of Kasich's economic record.
• Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst had tried to evade the question of whether they'd received money from Rupert Murdoch. Turns out, no surprise: they did.
• Notorious former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and a couple of other Michele Bachmann supporters have established a Super PAC to help her out. "Citizens for a Working America" was actually started in 2010 but now it'll be all Bachmann, all the time. It's always funny when conservatives put together these conduits for big donors to give massive donations and try to label them as "citizens" etc etc, but particularly so in this case since I spent nearly three years working at Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, which has 3 million members—just not the kind who can give big bucks to Super PACs.