“I hate when my boss tells me she won’t give me a raise because she can smell me,” he said.

Johnson, 44, needs the two paychecks to pay rent for his apartment at a single-room occupancy hotel on the city’s north side. While he’s worked at McDonald’s stores for two decades, he still doesn’t get 40 hours a week and makes $8.25 an hour, minimum wage in Illinois.

This is life in one of America’s premier growth industries. Fast-food restaurants have added positions more than twice as fast as the U.S. average during the recovery that began in June 2009.

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The release noted that "the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year," but hundreds of protests in 46 states beginning Thursday evening have drawn attention to the retailer's poor labor practices while according to The Nation, workers struck at stores in Dallas, Kenosha, Wis., San Leandro, Calif., and Clovis, N.M. At least one worker went out on strike at stores in Ocean City, Md., Orlando and Baton Rouge. Rep.-elect Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) joined a Walmart worker as she walked off her job in St. Cloud.

Walmart stores rang up almost 10 million transactions from the time doors opened for Black Friday shoppers at 8 p.m. Thursday until midnight. Meanwhile the following strikes and protest actions have been reported:

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Ships waited at six of the seven terminals at the Port of Oakland, as intermittent rain soaked hundreds of angry workers who carried signs and blocked entrances during the one-day protest over stalled contract talks.

Passing motorists blared horns and supporters pounded drums as strikers chanted, "Shut it down, we're a union town!"

"We're letting management and the public know that they can't treat us like that," said Lynn Riordan, a communications staffer for Service Employees International Union Local 1021.

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"Black Friday," wrote Eidelson, "workers have pledged -- barring concessions from the company -- will bring their biggest disruptions yet." Walmart employees across the country have a host of grievances including unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, sexual harassment, excessive hours, forced labor and low pay. Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC flagged a leaked internal document (first obtained by HuffPo) that revealed that base pay  at Walmart's Sam's Place stores can be as low as $8 an hour (or $16,000 per year), with wage increases in increments as low as 20 or 40 cents per hour. To put this in context, Gawker recently highlighted a Demos study that says that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

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The Wall Street Journal described the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union as “The union that brought the 85-year-old baker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread to its knees.” Over at RedState, a headline tried to mix anti-union sentiment with conservative humor: “The Demise of Twinkies? Yes, It’s True. Parasitic Unions Kill Their Hosts (or, in this case, Hostess).”

As Hostess moved to end its operations last week -- a bankruptcy judge asked the company Monday to try mediation with its unions; those talks are scheduled to begin today -- commentators were eager to blame the rigidity of unions.

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The answer obviously depends, in part, on whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama wins the race.  When we elect a president, we are also, in effect, appointing or reappointing thousands of committed progressives or equally avid conservatives to federal jobs where they try hard to carry out policies they support or to block ones they despise. Romney may be a cagy moderate at heart, and Obama may yearn to live up to the bipartisan rhetoric of his 2008 campaign. But most of the people who have the necessary skills and experience to work for a president are determined to move the nation to either the right or the left.

At the same time, what will happen after Inauguration Day raises the question of which parts of the left one is talking about. Four of its largest sections -- the LGBT community,  promoters of immigrant rights, environmentalists and organized labor – usually come together at election time, but they do not have similar prospects for growth or success.

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“I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared…” Pico Rivera Wal-Mart employee Evelin Cruz told Salon yesterday about her decision to join today’s strike. “But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tired of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.” Rivera, a department manager, said her store is chronically understaffed: “They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.”

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The civil disobedience also brought attention to the strike, which has continued for weeks with no media fanfare. Workers cite unsafe conditions and low wages as fueling their industrial action, along with complaints about long shifts with no breaks and sexual harassment. Micah Uetricht reported for Labor Notes on Monday's march, the strike and the reasons underpinning it:

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One morning earlier this year, in the borderland town of Brawley, California, 75-year-old Ignacio Villalobos perched on a chair in his trailer, removed a plastic bag from the well of a rubber boot, and finished dressing for work. Dawn was still an hour away, and in the wan light of the kitchen, Villalobos took off his house sandals and pulled the bag over his right foot. He bunched it at the ankle, then slipped his foot into his boot.

“These shoes aren’t made for water,” he said, adding that morning dew and irrigation keep farm fields damp—even in the desert of the Imperial Valley where he was working. Villalobos estimated that a pair of decent used boots would run him $30, almost half a day’s wages; the bags were free.

Villalobos moved quietly, trying to keep from waking his grown nephew, Roberto, who was sleeping in the back bedroom of the trailer. For years, Villalobos and his partner, Juana, had raised Roberto, whom they had taken in as an infant. Then, last year, Juana died after battling diabetes and heart disease, leaving the two men on their own. Villalobos tied his boot before repeating the process with his left foot and grabbed a bag of bologna sandwiches he had made that morning. By 6:15 A.M., he was out the door.

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Wednesday, leaders of a North Carolina union released a letter appealing to President Obama and the Democratic National Committee for support in their efforts to win union rights. “Despite the added work and dangers for Charlotte City workers in preparation for and in the aftermath of the DNC, and the fact that $50 million in federal funding has been allotted to the City of Charlotte to host the DNC,” the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 150 wrote, “the City of Charlotte refuses to address the needs and rights of the City workers.”

“The workers are working like dogs,” said garbage driver Al Locklear, the president of Local 150’s Charlotte chapter. “They want to run us to death.”

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Last June, nearly 100 Wal-Mart employees announced the formation of a new membership organization called OUR Walmart, which demanded improvements on the job. Though backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, it hasn’t sought union recognition (UFCW also backed a previous non-union organization of Wal-Mart workers in 2005). OUR Walmart currently claims thousands of Wal-Mart workers in hundreds of stores as dues-paying members. As its efforts have escalated, OUR Walmart leaders say Wal-Mart has targeted them for punishment.

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Earlier this month, the U.S. Conference of Mayors held its annual meeting in Florida. It’s a diverse group, including leaders from both parties and all parts of the country. But it pulled off a unanimous endorsement of a pivotal piece of legislation: the anti-union education reform template proponents call “parent trigger.”

Parent trigger is the latest flashpoint in the wars over “education reform” (a term now claimed by right-wing front groups, defensive teachers' unions and activists of many stripes). It exemplifies the near-consensus of the media and financial elite: That teachers’ interests are opposed to those of kids and parents; that smoking out bad teachers trumps improving teacher retention; and that what’s needed in a crisis is to concentrate power. It also shows, anti-Walker rhetoric notwithstanding, that workers’ right to bargain is no Democratic Party sacrament.

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The document contains draft text of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement currently being negotiated between the U.S. and eight Pacific countries. The Obama administration has shrouded the negotiation in secrecy, but the document, published by a coalition including the consumer group Public Citizen, sheds a light on the process -- and the view isn’t pretty.

“The leaked document,” says Todd Tucker, the research director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, “shows that in all of the major respects, this is exactly the same template that was used in NAFTA and other agreements that President Obama campaigned against.” Public Citizen warns that the provisions of the agreement would allow other countries to join in the future, giving it the potential to become a new global trade agreement, larger than NAFTA.

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“Before, we used to build everybody else’s structure,” says Trumka, “and now, we’re going to build our own structure.”  He says to expect three changes: more focus on door-to-door organizing rather than TV ads; more funds toward building a permanent, independent political infrastructure and less towards candidates’ coffers; and more outreach beyond union households.

What could this look like for Obama’s reelection effort in Ohio or Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign in Massachusetts? Less direct campaign cash from unions and fewer union-backed TV ads on their behalf. More union volunteers, acting apart from the Democratic campaign, persuading and mobilizing people to vote for the candidates. And an organization pledged to better hold the candidates accountable if they win.

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In a new video, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly says his caucus wanted to pass a right-to-work bill last year. The video, shot on March 27 of this year by a Democratic Party tracker, who provided the footage to Salon, captures Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald talking at a bar with a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The reporter asks Fitzgerald whether he was surprised when Walker described his plans to attack public workers’ collective bargaining. “No, it wasn’t a shock to me …” responds Fitzgerald. “My caucus wanted to go further. I had people in my caucus that was, you know, were wondering if we were going to do Right to Work in this state. So to tell you the truth, the collective bargaining, to me, I thought was more of a middle ground if you can believe that.”

Fitzgerald says “a number of people thought” they would push right-to-work, just as Republicans were in Indiana (where it passed this winter) and Minnesota (where it stalled). “When I heard about the collective bargaining,” he says, “it didn’t surprise me at all.” (Fitzgerald did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

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Take Minnesota. 2010’s red wave flipped both the state House and Senate, putting Republicans in unified control of the Legislature for the first time in 38 years. In January 2011, just after they took office and just before an uprising erupted in neighboring Wisconsin, Minnesota Republicans introduced Right to Work – a bill to defund unions by banning contracts that require workers represented by them to pay for representation. To get around newly elected Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, Republicans proposed Right to Work as a constitutional amendment, requiring approval from the voters, but not the governor.

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The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, Calif. in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with a past we've mostly forgotten.

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Saltsman trots out the old canards against the minimum wage, claiming that research indicates that a minimum wage increase "simply doesn’t help the poor — in fact, it hurts them." He cites studies which showed that states with their minimum wages between 2003 and 2007 found no associated decline in state poverty rates. Saltsman gives three reasons for this:

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