Labor Notes

1. North Carolina call center workers are organizing with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Sitel treats their employees like early 20th century sweatshop workers, with the classic bathroom problem at the center of worker complaints. Like tenement sweatshops in 1910s New York, Sitel has vastly underprovided bathrooms for workers (1 bathroom for 200 women) and then punish workers for waiting in line to use it. Moreover, Sitel is threatening to fire workers involved in the union effort, leading to IBEW filings charges with the National Labor Relations Board. Classy company.

2. If you want to die on the job, I recommend working in Wyoming. Part of this has to do with the hard natural resource extraction jobs based in that state (oil, cattle) and part of it on the lack of a culture a safety or an enforcement regime for existing regulations.

3. After Indiana pushes through its new anti-union regulations (which progressives still aren’t paying any attention to. But hey, what did Romney say on Face the Nation? It’s very important!!!!! We need 4 million tweets about it!), Kentucky is almost certainly the next battleground, where workers will have a very hard time fighting back right to work a person to death laws.

4. Martin Luther King on right to work a person to death laws: “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right-to-work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works.’ Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining… We demand this fraud be stopped.”