Walker's 1900 era labor standards next....

Scott Walker's budget ushered in a 7 day work week, doing away with required "one day of rest." 

Oddly, Republicans continue to pretend employers would never threaten current employees with the loss of their job if they didn't "volunteer;" they could always bringing someone who will, right?:

Seven-day workweeks would be allowed and provisions for a "living wage" would be struck from state statutes, nullifying a lawsuit filed by Wisconsin workers aimed at pressuring Gov. Scott Walker to raise the minimum wage, under last-minute additions to the state budget ... allow factory and retail employees to work seven days without a day off, as long as they said in writing that they were doing so voluntarily.

Radio host and author Thom Hartmann doesn't appear to be aware of the 7 day work week law, or he would have added that to the story below about Scott Walker's speech announcing his run for president. Walker referenced a way of thinking that goes all the way back to the early 1900's. No surprise there:

If you want to catch a glimpse of what America would look like under President Scott Walker, you need to turn back the clock to one of the darkest periods in 20th century American history – the Lochner Era.

A bakery owner named Joseph Lochner sued the state of New York over its Bakeshop Act, which limited the number of hours bakery employees could work to 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week. Lochner … took it to the Supreme Court in 1905, he got the result he wanted. In a close 5 to 4 decision, the justices struck down the Bakeshop Act, citing Lochner’s right under the 14th Amendment to run his business without “state interference.” Apparently, the Bakeshop Act violated that most fundamental of liberties -- the right of employers to work their employees to death.

Until the mid-1930s, the Supreme Court would go on all-out rampage against workers’ rights … it struck down, among other things, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and laws banning “yellow dog contracts” - contracts that forced workers to say that they wouldn’t join a union. 

The guiding principle in most or all of these decisions was the idea that the government’s power to protect workers was limited to protecting their “health and safety” … things like minimum wage laws were struck down because they went beyond protecting "health and safety..."
There is, by the way, no “right to contract” in the Constitution. The Supreme Court made it up, just like it made up corporate personhood and money as speech. Everyone serious thinks the Lochner case was a big mistake. Everyone that is, except for Scott Walker.

As Ian Milhiser has pointed out in a great piece for ThinkProgress, buried deep in Scott Walker’s speech announcing his run for president was a shout-out to the “health and safety” thinking of the Lochner era. He said, "As long as you don’t violate the health and safety of your neighbors – go out and start your own career, build your own business, live your own life.” Sounds harmless enough, right? 

It does, until you remember that this line of thinking was used to strike down child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and basically any kind of law that kept workers from becoming wage slaves.

State Republicans now trying to kill the enemy of big business, the Family Medical Leave Act. Why not?

State Republicans now want to kill Wisconsin's Family Medical Leave Act because they say, it just duplicates the federal law which was modeled after our own. But the thing is it doesn’t.

Yes, the attacks on hard working Wisconsinites is getting more brutal. What this sets up is a federal one party Republican government that will then kill medical leave on a national level, with no state backup law.

Deceptively, Republican Rep. John Nygren “says the proposal to repeal is not backed only by the GOP,” suggesting Democrats are on board. Nope, the Democratic party is no longer a factor, because they’ve been replaced by the League of Municipalities, Counties Association, other organizations and business groups.

Well then, what are we waiting for? From WSAW: 

Wisconsin's Family Medical Leave Act has been in place since 1988. It recognizes that our state's workers have dueling responsibilities - between their jobs, kids or taking care of an elderly parent or sick spouse.

"This is not just an issue that's something that Republicans are asking for - are supportive of basically federalizing our law," Nygren said.

But like most state and local laws, the state FMLA is stronger than the federal knockoff. Democratic Sen. Julie Lassa explained:

"The federal law requires you to work more hours a year than the state law does, it also limits the type of care that a worker or their family can take time off to receive, as well as, it makes it easier for employers to be able to deny the family medical leave." 

Under the federal law, employees cannot substitute types of paid leave, and could, instead, go unpaid. "Policies like this that Republicans are looking at adopting, will make it much more difficult for those middle-income families as well as low-income families to be able to make ends meet."

Poll finds Conservatives believe Rich, not Minimum Wage Employees, Work Harder!

If you've every worked a minimum wage job before, it's hard to forget how hard and unforgiving some of them were. Republicans would like to think we're all lying. The shocking "truth" for them is, white collar managers work even harder than back breaking laborers. From the Daily Kos:

A new Pew Research Center/USA Today poll echoes Quinnipiac in finding a fundamental difference in how Republicans and Democrats see economic inequality and poverty: Republicans actually believe that rich people are rich because they worked harder and poor people are poor because they didn't work hard enough:

Corporate Paradise China forced to deal with troublesome "human capital."

The much touted "business paradise" of China, may be throwing Republican free market lawmakers like Dumb Ron Johnson a curve ball, forcing them to look elsewhere for their slave labor needs.

While the U.S. corporate elite look forward to building employee dorms for the desperate jobless who have had their unemployment and food stamp benefits cut, China is moving away from that business model.

With my tin-foil hat firmly in place, I can't help but wonder what this all means. With “re-education” job training programs already a part of the Republican Party’s scheme to do away with our safety net programs, how long will it be before they take the next step:

Fox News: The labor camp -- or "re-education through labor" -- system was established to punish early critics of the Communist Party but now is used by local officials to deal with people challenging their authority.

Is this what Republicans like so much about China? Since Republicans have already vilified people for just being liberal (unnoticed by the mainstream press by the way), they might like to use their disdain for these Godless Democrats as a reason to re-educate” them. See if the qualities listed below describe our current radicalized right wing and their plans for Americans:  

Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent Beijing lawyer: "There have been many methods used recently by this government that are against the rule of law, and do not respect human rights, or freedom of speech, but by abolishing the labor camps ... it makes it much harder for the police to put these people they clamp down on into labor camps."

American Information Technology Graduates lose jobs to Guestworkers hired for less.

If you believe the industry, the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) labor market has a shortage of workers that qualify for the available jobs. The tech industry is begging for guest workers to fill that gap.

Don't believe them. This phony argument has been going on for years. Check out this Lou Dobbs report from around 2004-2005: 

But the Economic Policy Institute found proof the guest worker program, H-1B's, is a source of cheap labor that freezes out Americans.

Our examination of the IT labor market, guestworker flows, and the STEM education pipeline finds consistent and clear trends suggesting that the United States has more

than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations:

The number of U.S. graduates with STEM majors appears to be responsive to changes in employment levels and wages. For every two students with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job … colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable … These responses suggest that the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry. But employment and wage levels in IT jobs have been weak, trends that are not consistent with strong demand.

Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels … The annual inflows of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half the number of all new IT job holders.

The data also strongly suggest that there is a robust supply of domestic workers available for the IT industry. The annual number of computer science graduates doubled between 1998 and 2004, and is currently over 50 percent higher than its 1998 level.

The implications of the data for enacting high-skill guestworker policy are clear: Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce. 

After African Police kill 34 Striking Platinum Mine Workers, 270 Fellow Minors now Being Charged with Murder.

It can’t happen here, right?

American’s already have a hard time imagining the horrors we read about in the newspapers from ever happening here. Outrageous worker abuses, even killings. But since 2008 and the tea party emergence, we’ve seen a Republican Party change overnight. In an uncompromising radicalized movement, just how long will it be before something unthinkable happens. Already we're seeing conservatives offer up austere changes that only affect the victims of the Great Recession; the poor, labor and seniors. Unthinkable once, sure, but not anymore. It's even been packaged as courageous acts of leadership, and not something repugnant.  

Try to wrap your minds around the events that took place in Africa against striking miners. Can it happen here? Did you ever think it could happen anywhere?  

NY Times: As the police opened fire on workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine two weeks ago, killing 34 people, Mr. Ramaphosa, now a multimillionaire business tycoon and senior leader of the governing African National Congress, found himself in a very different position: on the board of the company the workers were striking against, the London-based Lonmin. Ramaphosa (was once) the firebrand leader of the National Union of Mineworkers.

That’s right, a former union leader sat by while this was allowed to happen. With American rage against unions here, and the widening gap of social inequality, we’re starting to mirror events like this happening around the world:

Now, as the shock of the killings reverberates through the nation, seething rage from the poor in one of the world’s most unequal societies, (they’re) sensing that the A.N.C. has created a wealthy black elite, including men like Mr. Ramaphosa, without changing the lives of ordinary people.

Any of this sound familiar? If you thought that was bad, get this:

Prosecutors have said they are charging 270 miners arrested after the melee, (and) not the police officers who fired the bullets, with the murder of their colleagues.

It appears the ruling authority is well protected. Will we even notice?

We're China Now!!! Our Deified "Job Creators" Import Summer Students for Slave Labor Wages; $1 to $3.50 and hour.

Still feel like throwing more money at our "job creators?" This story is so appalling you'll never want to hear the words "job creators" again. And since consumers are the real job creators, there's little chance the media take the side of labor anytime soon. If a manufacturing state like Pennsylvania is behind bringing in students slaves making a measly $1 to $3.50 an hour, then corporate America is about to usher in a new Dickensian age like America has never seen.

NY Times: According to the State Department, the J-1 visa Summer Work Study program, which allows foreign students to work in the United States for a few months, is meant to promote “lasting and meaningful relationships” between the students and Americans. Try telling that to the more than 300 J-1 holders who went on strike at a Hershey’s distribution plant in Pennsylvania last week, with the support of the National Guestworker Alliance. These engineering majors and future lawyers from places like Turkey, Moldova and China came hoping to travel and speak English, but spent the summer packing and lifting heavy pallets of Kit-Kats, often on overnight shifts and for meager pay.

The America that the Hershey’s workers have seen is surely not the one the J-1 visa was created to promote. But perhaps it is the America we have become. Hershey’s business strategy is a microcosm of the downsizing and subcontracting that so many American companies have pursued during the past few decades in search of ever cheaper labor. 

It has become the country’s largest guest worker program. Its “summer work travel” component recruits well over 100,000 international students a year to do menial jobs at dairy farms, resorts and factories — a privilege for which the Hershey’s students shelled out between $3,000 and $6,000. They received $8 an hour, but after fees and deductions, including overpriced rent for crowded housing, they netted between $1 and $3.50 an hour. Hershey’s once had its own unionized workers packing its candy bars, starting at $18 to $30 an hour. Now the company outsources distribution to a non-union company that hires most of its workers from the J-1 program.

The Pennsylvania workers are not alone. Recent exposés by journalists and advocates have found similar abuse of J-1 visa holders at fast food restaurants, amusement parks and even strip clubs. Among other things, Congress should pass the proposed Power Act, which protects immigrants who report workplace abuses from being deported.

In a way, the students at Hershey’s got more insight into the realities of the American economy than they ever could have expected.