And it's perfectly legal due to a Depression-era loophole in federal labor law, as NBC reports:

Section 14 (c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was passed in 1938, allows employers to obtain special minimum wage certificates from the Department of Labor. The certificates give employers the right to pay disabled workers according to their abilities, with no bottom limit to the wage...

The non-profit certificate holders can also place employees in outside, for-profit workplaces including restaurants, retail stores, hospitals and even Internal Revenue Service centers.

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According to the report, close to 90 percent of respondents said that "the requirement to provide paid sick leave benefits would not cause the owner of the business to move the business from the District." Other research on the benefits of paid sick days in cities like San Francisco, Ca., indicates that the policy is responsible for a "range of economic, social and health benefits for employers, workers, and communities… The benefits of paid sick leave for employers include improvements in productivity, reductions in workplace contagion, and reduced worker turnover.” A separate report revealed that paid sick leave can also prevent the spread of flu epidemics.

Audit data also showed that more businesses in the District are providing paid sick leave than ever, with nearly 70 percent of businesses adopting the policy since 2004.

h/t ThinkProgress

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The Living Hope Wheelchair Association in Houston was founded to help men with these injuries who have no workers’ compensation. They’re underfunded, barely getting by thanks to the donations of churchgoers and caregivers. A small group of volunteers help these men and women with their most basic needs. And they know how to stretch a dollar. With meager donations, they’re able to buy things like catheters and diapers the injured workers need on a daily basis. As one volunteer showed me their supply, which he was proud of, I couldn't help feeling sorry for them. These are the kinds of things people would rather not have to talk about even if they have to use them. What struck me hardest is the fact that these people are hidden. People don’t talk about them because they've been used and abused. “A democracy can’t survive very long when it throws away its workers,” the volunteer said with an almost revolutionary tone in his voice.

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After simulating an influenza epidemic in Pittsburgh and surrounding areas, researchers found that giving people paid sick days reduced workplace flu infection rates by nearly 6 percent. The team of epidemiologists also investigated what they termed "flu days," an alternative to comprehensive sick leave that allowed workers two paid days off to recover from the illness. One flu day resulted in a 25 percent decrease in infection trasmission; two paid days off resulted in more than a 40 percent decrease, according to the study.

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Which is precisely what Scott Keyes from ThinkProgress did on Thursday after catching up with the senator at the Faith and Freedom Forum; Rubio's answer was predictably terrible:

SCOTT KEYES: The Senate this summer is going to be taking up the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which makes it illegal to fire someone for being gay. Do you know if you’ll be supporting that?

MARCO RUBIO: I haven’t read the legislation. By and large I think all Americans should be protected but I’m not for any special protections based on orientation.

KEYES: What about on race or gender?

RUBIO: Well that’s established law.

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The ad features a woman in a strikingly similar pose and style of dress as "Rosie the Riveter," who was introduced through the Westinghouse Co.'s iconic 1942 poster about women's labor during World War II, and would come to symbolize women workers in traditionally male professions and serve as a rallying image for gender equality more broadly.

The ad has received its share of criticism on Twitter, with many bristling at the message behind putting a mop in the hands of a barrier-breaking symbol for women's work outside the home.

Quick note to Swiffer: If you want to appropriate a symbol for gender equality in an ad about household chores, try casting a man in it next time.

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As Josh Eidelson reported for the Nation:

“I’m sick of seeing my co-workers and me essentially get pushed and pushed and barely be able to eat,” Taco Bell employee Caroline Durocher told The Nation Wednesday. “And I think it’s time that we pushed them back"...

The Seattle strike comes two weeks after New York's fast food workers campaign released a report alleging rampant wage theft in the industry, and hours after the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced plans to MSNBC.com for a nationwide tour focused on low wages and economic inequality. It also follows a day-long strike last week in Washington, DC, staged by federally-contracted workers – federal building fast food employees included – demanding that President Obama take executive action to improve their working conditions.

.... The fast food strike wave represents organized labor’s most dramatic challenge to the massive, fast-growing, and virtually union-free industry. As I’ve written previously, fast food’s low-wages, precarious employment, and emotional labor are increasingly representative of the larger economy. The shape of the strikes – single-day walkouts, by aminority of the workforce, with an emphasis on community support – represents anincreasingly prevalent labor strategy for attempting to build worker organization, squeeze management, and avert retaliation, in the face of legal and economic changes that havemade strikes more risky and less effective.

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The Dallas Voice reports:

Shareholders voted to reject a resolution, 81 percent to 19 percent, from the New York state comptroller calling for the company’s Board of Directors to add sexual orientation and gender identity/expression to the oil giant’s EEO policy. The 19 percent support for the resolution reportedly was the lowest ever...

ExxonMobil is the only company to ever receive a negative score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which rates businesses according to policies and practices affecting the LGBT community. ExxonMobil rescinded nondiscrimination protections for gay employees, as well as domestic partner health benefits, following a merger with Mobil in 1999.

It marks the 14th consecutive year in which ExxonMobil shareholders have voted down an LGBT nondiscrimination resolution. Last week, the national group Freedom to Work sued the Irving-based oil giant for alleged anti-gay discrimination in Illinois.

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Meanwhile, as Josh Eidelson reported this week, un-unionized employees (with union backing) kicked off "what organizers promise will be the first 'prolonged strikes' in the retail giant’s history... The union-backed labor group OUR Wal-mart says that at least a hundred workers have pledged to join the strikes, and that some workers walking off the job today will stay out at least through June 7, when Wal-mart holds its annual shareholder meeting."

The New York Times reported on the hazardous waste fine:

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“The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation days and paid holidays,” said John Schmitt, senior economist and co-author of the report said in a statement. “Relying on businesses to voluntarily provide paid leave just hasn’t worked.”

“It is striking that six years after we first looked at this topic absolutely nothing has changed. U.S. law and U.S. employer behavior still lags far behind the rest of the rich countries in the world,” Schmitt added.

The absence of paid time off hurts low-wage, part-time and small business employees most, according to the report:

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As reported by the Associated Press:

"The owner used extremely poor quality iron rods and cement," committee head Khandker Mainuddin Ahmed told The Associated Press a day after submitting the report to the government. "There were a series of irregularities."

The report found that building owner Sohel Rana had permission to build a six-story structure and added two floors illegally so he could rent them out to garment factories. Past statements from authorities said the owner had permission for a five-story structure and added three floors illegally.

The report also said the building was not built for industrial use and the weight of the heavy garment factory machinery and their vibrations contributed to the building collapse. Those factors had previously been cited.

The ground on which the building was built was not fit for a multi-story building, the report said.

"A portion of the building was constructed on land which had been a body of water before and was filled with rubbish," Ahmed said.

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Organizers expect the one-day walkout to include workers employed at Smithsonian museums, the Old Post Office and Ronald Reagan buildings and Union Station, where tourists, lobbyists and members of Congress arrive by Amtrak train to Washington, DC. The strikers are part of a recently unveiled organization, Good Jobs Nation, backed by labor and community groups.

A press release from Good Jobs Nation commented on the day's action:

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As Reuters reports:

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Labor activists have applauded the move, calling H&M's participation in the PVH-Tchibo plan "crucial." Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a Washington-based factory monitoring group, told the New York Times: “They are the single largest producer of apparel in Bangladesh, ahead even of Wal-Mart. This accord now has tremendous momentum.”

The plan mandates rigorous monitoring and building inspections, and requires retailers to help finance fire and safety improvements in the factories they work with, according to the Times:

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The latest accident comes after authorities forced 18 factories to shut down temporarily in order to comply with safety standards. (Six were apparently up and running again by Thursday.) The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Department of State, and Department of Labor, meanwhile, convened a conference call with 70 retailers and manufacturers that do business in Bangladesh to discuss coordinating efforts to improve working conditions. None of the companies said they planned to scale back production in the South Asian country.

The April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza complex in Dhaka was the world's worst industrial accident since the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India.

Meanwhile, as HuffPo reported, Benetton has finally admitted its connection to last month's tragedy:

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The International Labor Rights Forum and United Students Against Sweatshops have launched Gap Deathtraps, a campaign to pressure the clothing giant to abandon its policy of self-regulation and sign the legally binding Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement to ensure safer factory conditions.

According to the campaign website:

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But not all skilled (and deeply exploited) laborers go to work with a hardhat and a lunch pail. And just like their union brothers and sisters in warehouses and factory floors across the country, the struggle for real union representation is every bit as radicalizing.

Eliza Skinner has spent the past year writing jokes for the E! television show Fashion Police. Skinner pens about 200 jokes per episode (almost a full work week’s as far as ‘hours worked’), pitching them at a weekly meeting with the host, Joan Rivers, and the show’s producers. For this, she is paid roughly $500 a week.

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Major clothing retailers like Wal-Mart, Joe Fresh, JCPenney and the Children's Place were each found to have subcontracted manufacturing to the crumbling factory in Savar, where workers were making an average of $38 a month and coerced to report to work even after the walls of the building were literally falling apart. In November, fire ravaged another garment factory near the capital city of Dhaka, leaving 112 dead. Again, pieces of clothing from Sears, the Walt Disney Co. and other major retailers were found among the scorched remains.

In the aftermath of such tragic, and preventable, losses of life, many consumers are left asking themselves what role they can play in discouraging disasters like this from happening again. And, fortunately, there are answers. The collective power of workers is a real thing, and the collective power of consumers is, too.

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Via the report, titled "Responsibility Outsourced":

The failure of governments to protect workers’ rights in the global economy has left a yawning gap of regulation and helped spawn an $80 billion industry in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social auditing. yet the experience of the last two decades of “privatized regulation” of global supply chains has eerie parallels with the financial self-regulation that failed so spectacularly in 2007 and plunged the world into deep and lasting recession...

Many of the best-established CSR brands, such as the Fair Labor Association and Social Accountability International, are funded by big corporations and sometimes even by government subsidy. This report shows how the overwhelming influence of the company bottom line has dominated the agendas of the FLA, SAI and similar groups, while the workers who are supposed to benefit from CSR have been marginalized or altogether ignored.

The fact that a garment factory in Pakistan could get SAI certification based on some phone calls and some meetings outside Pakistan, and yet be so dangerous that a September 2012 fire killed nearly 300 workers, should have led to a complete overhaul of the CSR industry. But there is no sign the root and branch reform needed will actually happen. All the indications are that it is business as usual for CSR.

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