Leading off, one of the most important days of the year is coming up Tuesday, when Ohioans vote on Issue 2. If the measure passes, Senate Bill 5, which would strip public workers like teachers and other school employees, police, firefighters, nurses and snowplow drivers of their collective bargaining rights, would become law. Even the Republican mayor of one Ohio town says Issue 2 wouldn't help the budget problems in his town, while a Republican former Ohio Supreme Court judge also opposes the measure.
Anti-worker pro-Issue 2 groups are seriously outspending the good guys in the opposition. It is so important to tell everyone you know in Ohio to vote no on Issue 2.
- At Least Occupy Our TV, Please:
Maybe MTV and then VH1 and then whoever else will selfishly co-opt the movement for their own nefarious gains, thus unwittingly doing the good work of saying: Eat the rich. Or at least stop jealously reveling in their morbid excess. Maybe the Housewives will be forced to do a furious amount of cringing backpedaling, dialing everything back in an effort to be more sympathetic or with-it. There is, after all, no greater crime than to be out of vogue. Or maybe these folks won't scale back and they'll be reduced in the public's eyes to reviled freaks (more so than they already are), gluttonous and gout-ridden, like parodies of a medieval king. The latter scenario would require a sort of major cultural and ideological shift that is probably not likely to happen anytime soon. But the former could happen! The greed-is-good 1980s replaced the working class sitcoms of the 1970s with rococo fantasias like Dynasty, so maybe now the reverse of that will happen. Maybe we'll want to shift from aspirational to relatable, from focusing blindly and in vain on what we want to seeking out the shared recognition of what we (don't) have.
- Nearly all construction workers will experience one or more work-related injuries in their lifetime.
- In the midst of all the not creating jobs, House Republicans have eked out the time to attack the National Labor Relations Board 49 times (PDF).
- This was brave. Penn State University labor law professor Ellen Dannin went to South Carolina and told an audience at the College of Charleston that the media and politicians have been "extreme" and "inaccurate" when it comes to the NLRB's case against Boeing.
- The NLRB is looking into intimidation at Target that may have affected the outcome of a union representation election.
- What Atrios said:
It's time to do away with the term "technocratic." It creates a category of policies which are The Right Thing To Do, yet the rightness of the policies aren't tested against anything. They aren't tested against democracy (messy pesky voters!) or results (the economy sucks, technocrats, and this is your doing). But merely say the word and we've conjured up images of very sensible highly educated wonky people doing the right thing, even as they destroy the world.
- Lindsay Beyerstein offers a condensed look at predatory used car dealerships:
Faced with the choice between getting hosed buy a used car dealer and sleeping on the street, buyers will pay any price and accept financing on any terms. The dealers know it. Cars are priced above their Blue Book value and financed at an average interest rate of 20.7%, triple the national average.
Buy Here Pay Here dealerships are only nominally selling cars. Their real business is financing. And because they write their own loans, they are exempt from most forms of regulation.
- The gender wage gap is slightly lower in Florida than in the country as a whole. Which has the effect that "In 2010, women in Florida nearly reached the wages of women in the U.S."
- Whirlpool is laying off 5,000 people globally, but it's not saying where the layoffs will be located.
- American Rights at Work has put together a Unions 101.
Check below the fold for stories you may have missed at Daily Kos Labor.