“I just feel that if we don’t stand up now, it’s never going to happen,” said Tomecka Wilson, a 32-year-old who works for the seafood chain Captain D’s. “They’re making billions off of us making little to nothing. So they can afford to share a little bit more.”

Organizers expect 50 to 70 St. Louis workers to strike over the next 24 hours, including workers from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Hardee’s and Domino’s. The strike got an early start this morning, when a group of workers at a Jimmy John’s went out on strike in protest over alleged humiliation by management: They say their boss required them to wear signs stating that they worked too slowly. “It’s clearly getting national traction,” said Ed Ott, a lecturer in labor studies for the City University of New York, consultant for unions, and board member of New York Communities for Change, the group spearheading fast food organizing in the nation’s largest city. “This is potentially the largest organizing drive in decades.”

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“At the end of the day,” Macy’s employee Krystal Maxie-Collins told Salon, “it feels like I’ve done all of this to help everyone else, to help the store, help the managers, help the customers, but it doesn’t feel like anyone is looking out for me.” Maxie-Collins, a mother of four who works part-time for the state minimum wage of $8.25 plus a commission, said she had initially been hesitant about the strike because of the risk of retaliation. But “what we are fighting for, the reason for doing it, kind of overrode the fear of doing it.” “Usually the things that are worth it,” she added, “you have to sacrifice for.”

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Asked for comment on the strike, spokespeople for McDonald's and the National Restaurant Association referred Salon to their statements from yesterday. In an e-mailed statement, de Blasio said, "Fast Food Forward is fighting for solutions for working people right here and now, and it deserves the support of all New Yorkers."

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“The precedent we have for these democratic union elections is not very encouraging,” said Eli Friedman, a professor of international and comparative labor at Cornell. Even if “they’re run reasonably well, and you get some kind of activist” elected as a local union leader, “the problem is when they actually try to do anything for their members, they – as in many places – will face retaliation from management.” Worse, “oftentimes higher levels of the trade union, or the government, will collaborate with management to either make this person’s life incredibly difficult, or just force them from office.”

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The passengers escaped the ship late Thursday, five days after an engine fire disabled the vessel. But, amid the scenes of bathrobe-clad passengers kissing American soil, there’s been comparatively little attention to the crew that was stuck with them -- and kept on serving them. Though they likely suffered most, the cruise workers’ misery lacks the allure of irony: They’re not accustomed to vacationing in luxury. Indeed, thanks to the efforts of Carnival and company, they can’t even count on the basic labor standards available under U.S. law.

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The speech’s claim to liberalism rests on at least three grounds. First, Obama spoke with unusual urgency about the threat of climate change — a pleasant surprise given his recent reticence on the topic. Second, he argued for a role for government in a mixed economy, including the need not to scrap Social Security or Medicare (though he also praised “initiative and enterprise,” and reiterated his call for “hard choices” to attack the deficit). And third, the president celebrated the role of collective action and organizing in American history, including by militant queer activists – making Obama’s the first inaugural address to acknowledge the existence of gay people.

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“Now the bosses are going to know that the workers have rights, too,” said Maria Garcia, a member of the labor group Arise Chicago, which spearheaded the campaign to pass the law. Interviewed in Spanish, Garcia said she’d experienced wage theft at both of the past two restaurants where she’d worked.

“Wage theft” encompasses a range of offenses. Garcia said that in her case, it had included unpaid overtime and hourly rates below the minimum wage. The term was popularized by labor activists seeking to stir moral outrage at the all-too common issue: “Wage theft” suggests that refusing to pay wages that workers have earned is a form of robbery, rather than a mere accounting dispute. Recent years have seen increasing traction for campaigns to strengthen wage theft penalties and remedies. Those efforts have also inspired a counter-attack: Last year, Florida Republicans and big businesses pushed a bill that would have overridden local wage theft measures. “We believe the existing court system is the best place for these claims,” a spokesperson for the Florida Retail Federation told the Huffington Post.

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“We remain strongly opposed” to chained CPI, AFL-CIO government affairs director Bill Samuel told Salon. “It’s a very substantial benefit cut.”

“Chained CPI” is a proposed alternative method of calculating cost of living adjustments, which would reduce future increases in Social Security benefits. Samuel said that for many seniors on fixed incomes, even “the current system may not be adequate.” He called the claim that chained CPI could be implemented in a way that would be fair to such retirees “sort of ludicrous.”

Obama has repeatedly touted chained CPI as an aspect of a potential “Grand Bargain” with Republicans to reduce the deficit. In a “Meet the Press” interview aired on Dec. 30, the president highlighted it both as an example of his willingness to make concessions to the GOP and part of his “pursuit of strengthening Social Security for the long-term.”

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Lew, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, joined NYU as chief operating officer and executive vice president in 2004. At the time, NYU was the only private university in the United States whose graduate students had a union contract. By the time Lew left two years later, NYU graduate students had lost their collective bargaining rights. In between, picketers hoisted “Wanted” posters with his face on them.

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“Nobody thinks that a bunch of hedge fund managers from Greenwich are going to make their schools any better,” said Lindsay Farrell, the executive director of the Connecticut Working Families Party, one of the groups that spearheaded the opposition effort. “And the right to vote has been a hard-fought right. So people were reluctant to give it up and didn’t trust who they were being asked to give it up to.”

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Snyder’s announcement last week that he’d support right-to-work has taken the sheen off his carefully cultivated image as a pragmatic alternative to hard-charging GOP counterparts in Ohio and Wisconsin. But it secures a dream of the anti-union Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, whose associates are well-represented among Snyder’s donors, and whose economic agenda has been ascendant within the modern GOP.

“I think he was being a puppet for larger interests outside of the state,” United Auto Workers vice president Cindy Estrada told Salon Monday afternoon.

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According to Councilmember Jumanne Williams, 10 out of 11 strikers were allowed to resume work when they arrived at Brooklyn’s 425 Fulton Street Wendy’s, but management told the eleventh that she was being fired for absenteeism. Williams said that workers provided management with written notice that they were striking Thursday, but a manager claimed not to have received it. “We tried to speak with the general manager that was there, and he wasn’t forthcoming in talking to me,” said Williams. “So I decided to ask all of the customers that were there if they would leave in support of the worker that was fired. That did happen – they left. We began to protest in the store.”

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New York City workers are organizing at McDonald's, Burger King, Domino’s, KFC, Taco Bell, Wendy’s and Papa John’s. Organizers expect today’s strike to include workers from almost all of those chains, with the largest group coming from McDonald's; the company did not respond to a request for comment.

But employees were clear about their reasons for walking out. “They’re not paying us enough to survive,” McDonald's worker Raymond Lopez told Salon in a pre-strike interview. Lopez said he decided to join today’s strike because “This company has enough money to pay us a reasonable amount for all that we do … they’re just not going to give it to us as long as they can get away with it. I think we need to be heard.”

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Building on last year’s successful referendum campaign to overturn collective bargaining attacks in Ohio, the AFL-CIO racked up 80,000 volunteer shifts and 2 million voter contacts in the state. An all-out labor effort also helped deliver victory for labor stalwarts like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin. While unions’ effort to write collective bargaining rights into Michigan’s constitution fell flat, they beat back well-funded anti-union measures in Michigan and California that their enemies would love to take national.

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That sure doesn't sound right. But is it? Salon went for guidance to SUNY disaster historian Jacob Remes , author of the forthcoming book "Disaster Citizenship: Urban Disasters and the Formation of the North American Progressive State." What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

So are our intuitions wrong here? Is Hurricane Sandy really an argument for big business, and against big government?

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On Sunday, Mike Elk of In These Times revealed a political packet mailed to the 45,000 employees of a Koch Industries’ subsidiary, the Atlanta-based Georgia Pacific. The packet included a list of Koch-endorsed candidates and warned that electing the wrong people could be ruinous to the economy. The company also requires that workers get permission before running for office or joining the boards of nonprofits. One worker told Elk that a supervisor told him he wouldn’t get a promotion because he was “too political.” A local union official told Elk that he was getting calls from Georgia Pacific employees who were afraid they’d be fired for appearing in a photo with a local Democratic state Senate candidate outside their union hall, because the plant where they worked was visible in the backdrop.

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If Walmart doesn’t address OUR Walmart’s demands, said striking worker Colby Harris, from Dallas, “We will make sure that Black Friday is memorable for them.” He said that would includes strikes, leafleting to customers, and “flash mobs.” Harris was joined on a press call announcing the deadline by leaders of the National Consumers League, the National Organization of Women, and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, three of the national organizations that have pledged support for the workers’ efforts. Absent a resolution, said NOW President Terri O’Neill, NOW members will join Walmart workers outside stores on Black Friday to ask customers “whether they really want to spend their dollars on a company that treats workers this way.”

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“A lot of associates, we have to use somewhat of a buddy system,” Dallas worker Colby Harris said last night. “We loan each other money during non-paycheck weeks just to make it through to the next week when we get paid. Because we don’t have enough money after paying bills to even eat lunch.” Harris, who’s now on strike, said that after three years at Walmart, he makes $8.90 an hour in the produce department, and workers at his store have faced “constant retaliation” for speaking up.

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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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