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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On Friday, following a two-year campaign by watchdog groups, ALEC published hundreds of its model bills online. The coalition of organizations pushing for greater transparency included the Center for Media and Democracy, ColorOfChange, Common Cause, Greenpeace, People for the American Way, Progress Now and a variety of labor organizations.

The full list of model bills is available here. It includes template bills pertaining to charter schools, climate (mis)education, union-busting right to work bills, workplace drug testing laws and more.

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The move, confirmed by the company Monday, follows a series of recommendations from an international panel hired by Apple to audit conditions for the 1.2 million workers in Foxconn's mainland factories.

Foxconn said it will deepen employees' involvement in union elections so the unions can more effectively represent their interests. It said it hopes this will impact labor standards throughout China.

Foxconn previously came under heavy scrutiny for labor policies that allegedly led a dozen workers to commit suicide. It has also faced increasing protests and strikes as Chinese workers become increasingly aware of labor rights.

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“At 11 at night, I would ring the doorbell to get let in, and then from there, we would be locked in the store all night, until 7 am when they opened the store,” Honorio Hernandez, who cleaned Target stores for three years, told Eidelson. Hernandez said that generally at night, only one manager oversees the premises, and "in an emergency, workers would have needed to get the manager to unlock a door and let them out of the building."

Via the Nation:

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"While child labor reflected a small percentage of the workforce, Apple is investigating its smaller suppliers – which typically supply parts to larger suppliers and hence face less scrutiny – to bring them into compliance," Reuters reported. Apple's senior vice-president of operations, Jeff Williams, said that the company was increasing efforts to look "deep in the supply chain" to check for child workers. "When we do find it, we ensure that the underage workers are taken care of, the suppliers are dealt with," he said.

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The Koch-backed political assault against unions by both public and private sector has also gained ground in recent years, with state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana voting through measures that weaken unions. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka released a statement in response to the new statistics, lamenting, "Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate.”

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But, as the New York Times reported Tuesday, "in a series of recent rulings and advisories, labor regulators have declared many such blanket restrictions illegal. The National Labor Relations Board says workers have a right to discuss work conditions freely and without fear of retribution, whether the discussion takes place at the office or on Facebook."

The Times noted that the NLRB will enforce an end to restrictive online speech policies and will ensure companies rehire workers fired for social media comments. However, as Josh Eidelson noted last year for Slate when a number of cases brought the issue of social media comments to the NLRB's attention, the issue is not over whether an individual worker can be fired for critical comments on social media, but whether a group of workers collectively discussing their company can be protected from retribution:

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As the New York Times noted, "the unemployment rate for veterans of the recent wars has remained stubbornly above that for nonveterans, though it has been falling steadily, dropping to just below 10 percent for all of 2012. That was down from 12.1 percent the year before. The year-end unemployment rate for nonveterans was 7.9 percent in 2012." On any given night roughly 68,000 vets are homeless in the United States, and studies have found that vets on average stay homeless longer than nonvets. Clearly, for many thousands of young men and women returning from the America's protracted Middle East battles, finding security and stability is a struggle.

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Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union expects more than 8,000 bus drivers and matrons to strike, affected over 150,000 school children. As was the case during the week-long Chicago teachers strike last, city officials are framing the strike in terms of harm done to children and parents.

"With its regrettable decision to strike, the union is abandoning 152,000 students and their families who rely on school bus service each day," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement. The city is providing free Metro cards Wednesday to students and parents affected by the strike and reimbursed private transport for special needs children.

The walkout was precipitated by the city's push to privatize their yellow buses. In an attempt to cut spending on transportation, the city has put bus contracts with private bus companies up for bid. The drivers union has vociferously opposed the move, arguing that drivers will be thrown into precarity if new bus companies win city contracts and don't hire them. Mayor Bloomberg has stressed that job protection clauses to allay these concerns cannot legally be written in to private contracts.

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Gov. Paul LePage caused an uproar in March 2011 when he ordered the mural removed from the Labor Department lobby, claiming it presented a one-sided view that bowed to organized labor and overlooked the contributions of job-creating entrepreneurs.

Beginning Monday, the mural was back on public view in an atrium that serves as the entryway to the Maine State Museum, Maine State Library and Maine State Archives. The space is open to the public six days a week.

Richard Bamforth, of Augusta, was angry when LePage first ordered the mural removed, calling it silly and petty. But he acknowledged the new venue seemed to be more appropriate than a hidden-away state office building.

"This is a much more visually appealing setting, I think," he said as he, his wife and their 19-year-old granddaughter examined the mural in the spacious, well-lit atrium.

The 11-panel mural had been bolted to the walls in the Labor Department building since 2008, when Democratic Gov. John Baldacci was in office. It was created by artist Judy Taylor, of Tremont, using a $60,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.

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Over 52 million people -- predominantly women --  worldwide are employed as domestic workers, an increase of over 19 million workers since the mid-1990s, according to the report, which notes that its figures are likely considerable underestimations as the domestic workforce is hard to accurately survey. Of these millions of workers, ILO found, "only 10 percent of all domestic workers (or 5.3 million) are covered by general labor legislation to the same extent as other workers. By contrast, more than one-quarter – 29.9 percent, or some 15.7 million domestic workers – are completely excluded from the scope of national labor legislation."

The report highlighted "working time" as one of the biggest problems for the domestic workforce: "More than half of all domestic workers have no limitation on their weekly normal hours under national law, and approximately 45 percent have no entitlement to weekly rest periods."

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After being shipped in from Africa, Central Asia, and other mining hot spots, thousands of diamonds end up in Surat everyday, a growing metropolis in the Indian state of Gujarat. Once there, stones of different origins -- both legal and illegal -- are mixed together to get cut and polished inside the city's many microfactories. As Foreign Policy's Jason Miklian writes:

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Reportedly poor, unsafe working conditions in the retail giant's U.S. warehouses led last year to repeated strikes and threats of legal action by subcontracted workers. According to Eidelson, however, labor groups are unimpressed by Wal-Mart's response -- namely that Wal-Mart would employ the system it uses to monitor international distribution warehouses to monitor U.S. ones. The move seems particularly striking in the wake of a deadly fire in one of Wal-Mart's Bangladeshi distribution centers in which 112 workers died. Via the Nation:

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NEW YORK –  Some security guards at John F. Kennedy International Airport have voted to go on strike next week if their employer doesn't respond to their concerns over issues including training and equipment.

Security worker Prince Jackson said about 100 employees of Air Serv Corporation voted Thursday to authorize a strike for Dec. 20. The employees are not unionized.

Another group of workers, for Global Elite Group, is scheduled to hold a vote on Friday.

Air Serv said it plans to speak to its employees about their concerns in the coming days and weeks. Global Elite said its management is in constant dialogue with its staff.

The workers handle security issues for the facilities, such as directing traffic in front of the terminals and making sure non-passenger areas like the tarmacs are secure.

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According to a report by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman at Politico, the union counteroffensive is setting its sights on fighting conservative state leaders in next year's gubernatorial elections, particularly in the Midwest. Via Politico:

The AFL-CIO has already built up sizable campaign operations in Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada and Wisconsin – the site of a titanic 2012 gubernatorial recall fight – in addition to Ohio and Michigan, union officials said. The labor giant deployed new staff to those states about a year ago as part of what AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka has called the “permanent infrastructure” of national unions.

... Labor leaders have vowed to make Snyder regret signing the “right to work” law he approved this week. Beyond Michigan, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett have appeared vulnerable in polling.

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Well, the voters spoke in November and dramatically voted down Proposal 2, but then this right to work discussion just continued to escalate and was becoming very divisive. So the way I viewed it is, it's on the table. It's a hot issue. Let's show some leadership. So I stepped up to say when I review it, I think it's a good thing. It's about being pro-worker. It’s about giving freedom of choice to workers.

Watch a clip of the interview via MSNBC below.

UPDATE 1.50 p.m. (EST): The Michigan House has approved both right-to-work bills, pertaining to both public and private sector workers, and the legislation will now be sent to Gov. Rick Snyder, who vowed he would sing the bills into law.

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It was a sneak move -- GOP lawmakers only announced Thursday morning that they intended to enact the so-called right-to-work bill (aptly described by its opponents as the "no-rights-at-work" bill). Right-to-work laws ban requirements to pay dues or fees to a union as a condition of employment --  studies have consistently shown that states with right-to-work laws have lower wages for union and non-union workers.

As a study by Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute found:

[O]ur findings -- that "right-to-work" laws are associated with significantly lower wages and reduced chances of receiving employer-sponsored health insurance and pensions -- are based on the most rigorous statistical analysis currently possible. These findings should discourage right-to-work policy initiatives. The fact is, while RTW legislation misleadingly sounds like a positive change in this weak economy, in reality the opportunity it gives workers is only that to work for lower wages and fewer benefits.

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Last month, a fire in a factory used by Wal-Mart killed 112 workers. There were no fire exits. Despite the fact that more than 700 Bangladeshi garment workers have died since 2005, Wal-Mart and Gap refused last year to pay higher costs for safety. Bloomberg cited comments from a document produced by Wal-mart’s director of ethical sourcing and a Gap official for the Dhaka meeting. It stated:

"Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories. It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”

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As the Los Angeles Times reported:

It ends a grueling battle between both sides that threatened to damage the fragile U.S. economy. Since the strike began, 20 ships diverted to rival ports in Oakland, Ensenada and Panama, while other freighters docked offshore waiting for a resolution... The strike began Nov. 27 as the clerical workers' union voiced frustration about shipping line employers outsourcing jobs, an accusation the Harbor Employers Assn. has denied.

Though the union is small, it was backed by the 10,000 regional members of the ILWU, which honored the picket line and refused to work. By the end, the strike shut down 10 of the 14 cargo container terminals at the nation's busiest seaport complex.

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