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California Gov. Jerry Brown looks on during a news conference at Google headquarters on September 25, 2012 in Mountain View, California.

The domestic workers rights movement suffered a significant legislative defeat on Sunday when California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed that state's proposed Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The law would have mandated that all of California's estimated 200,000 domestic cleaners, health care workers, private cooks and child care professionals receive regular meal breaks and pay for overtime.

Brown indicated his support for domestic worker protections in general, but said the bill left "unanswered questions" about enforcement and a potential increase in the cost of domestic labor. Jill Shenker, field director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), dismissed those concerns. "We've been working with the families and employers of domestic workers all along the way, who feel there are absolutely solutions to the affordability question and ways to make the bill work," she told Lean Forward.

The New York legislation, which was signed into law by Democratic Gov. David Paterson in November 2010, mandates that employers pay overtime to workers who have worked more than 40 hours in a week and institutes a number of protections against unfair labor practices like withheld pay or sexual harassment. "In short," wrote Demos fellow Sharon Lerner, "people who hire domestic workers now have to behave like regular employers."

While Shenker said the NDWA was "very disappointed," with Brown's veto, "organizing over the long haul is nothing new for domestic work."

Many of the NDWA's 35 nationwide affiliates continue to organize around local concerns. Domestic worker groups in San Francisco and Houston are organizing around allegations of employee wage theft, and their New York City migrant workers center affiliate is running a campaign against domestic worker trafficking.

Affiliates in Illinois and Massachusetts, Shenker said, are contemplating state-level campaigns for a New York-style bill of rights, but "there are so many factors around organizing sponsors, and all kinds of things, so I don't want to say for sure that something's happening."

Workers in domestic services have typically enjoyed fewer protections than other workers. California Domestic Worker Coalition director Andrea Mercado said this trend "is really the legacy of racism and discrimination in our country."

Both the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act radically expanded worker protections in the United States but specifically withheld those protections from domestic workers and agricultural laborers. (The latter bill was amended in 1974 to cover domestic work.) Workers in both of those industries were predominantly African-American, and they were excluded from the laws as a concession to Southern segregationists. Today, according to a 2010 report [PDF] by the Excluded Workers Congress, 95 percent of America's 1.8 million domestic workers are "female, foreign born and/or persons of color."

Securing legal protections for those 1.8 million workers presents challenges unlike those facing other industries. Because domestic workers tend not to gather together in large workplaces under a single employer, they usually cannot bargain collectively with management.

"Domestic workers are working with individual employers behind closed doors, and often have multiple employers," said Shenker. She also noted that the relationship between domestic employees and their employers was often far more informal and intimate than in a typical workplace.

"For domestic workers, the employer-employee relationship is not one people think about in terms of a traditional factory—labor and the boss," she said. "There's a lot of intimacy and love that's at play in an employment relationship, and in domestic worker organizing our approach has really been shaped by that truth."

Shenker said part of the Alliance's organizing strategy has involved partnering with employers and "recognizing the mutuality of that relationship." She said that the California campaign had seen "strong partnership with employers and people with disabilities," the latter of whom might require home care.

Indeed, Shenker's account of the NDWA's strategy strongly emphasized community coalition building, particularly with farm workers and immigrants rights communities—two other groups that have historically been excluded from legal work protections. On the same day that Brown vetoed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, Shenker noted, he also vetoed a bill that would have required employers to provide farm workers with adequate access to water and shade from the sun.

Though Brown's veto was a setback for the movement, Mercado predicted that domestic workers rights would only become a more urgent concern in the years to come. "We know that this industry is growing, and that with the aging of the baby boomer population this country is going to have unprecedented need for more and more caregivers," she said. 

Shenker further argued that many of the issues affecting domestic workers are becoming increasingly relevant to other industries. "More and more work across the country is looking more and more like domestic work," she said, citing the growing number of workers who work at home, have multiple employers, and do their work on a contract basis.

NBC's 2012 Education Nation tour kicked off with a conversation about the viability of using charter schools to improve the American education system. While two of the panelists onstage for the discussion—MSNBC contributor Jonathan Alter and Better Education for Kids' Derrell Bradford—argued that charter schools were good for the country, National Education Association Vice President Lily Eskelson and University of Texas educational policy professor Julian Vasquez Heilig offered a more skeptical view.

"Here's why you cap charters," Heilig said during Sunday's panel, moderated by MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry. "Because 83 percent of them do not perform better than our urban schools, our traditional urban schools." He pointed to a recent study he had co-written on the charter network KIPP, which he said found, "about 40 percent of African American students left KIPP in Texas over the last ten years. That's their dirty little secret."

Alter questioned the validity of Heilig's data, and suggested that charter schools offer a good site for testing new models of education. "The highly performing charters are schools that all schools can learn from," he said. "So what I'd like to see more of is sharing of best practices between those charter schools that are working—and some of them don't work, many of them don't work—but the ones that are working have 90, 95 percent graduation rates in very impoverished neighborhoods. These are terrific schools."

In a statement responding to Heilig's study, KIPP said, "Vasquez Heilig relied on previous studies that claimed KIPP achieves results through high student attrition, while completely ignoring findings from the independent research group Mathematica that KIPP loses fewer black male students than neighboring district schools."

Charter school proliferation has been a hot topic of debate lately, and it was one of the major factors that caused the Chicago Teachers' Union to go on strike earlier this month. One Chicago public school teacher, John Kuijper, told Lean Forward that charter schools in Chicago were helping to create a "two-tiered" education system.

The Republican Party does not like unions. That's why Republican governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich have worked to dismantle public employee collective bargaining protections. It's also why the party's 2012 platform calls for a national "right-to-work" law which would make it significantly harder for unions to collect member dues. But apparently the GOP isn't entirely anti-union; it is still possible to override their visceral distaste for organized labor and their knee-jerk support for bosses. All you need to do is make football less entertaining.

That's right: in response to the NFL's lockout of its unionized referees, and prompted by Monday night's refereeing debacle, prominent Republican figures have criticized the replacement, non-union workers. Rather than welcome the National Football League's attempts to weaken its workers' union, they have taken a stand against "replacement refs."

Here, for example, is the aforementioned Governor Scott Walker demanding that the NFL "return the real refs." (h/t ThinkProgress)

And here he is again, insisting that, no, really, private sector unions are okay with him:

Paul Ryan temporarily embraced collectivism and trashed the Galtian, individualist replacement refs who took their fates into their own hands by defying the union. Here he is comparing replacement refs to Barack Obama, of all people, and urging Americans to "replace the replacement ref."

The National Republican Congressional Committee apparently found that line of attack to be clever instead of baffling (Who is the "replacement ref president" replacing? George W. Bush? Do they want to reinstate ... George W. Bush?), so they repeated it in a tweet.

On the replacement refs, Obama and the Republicans actually agree: President Obama told the Des Moines Register that while he understands the replacement refs have "been put in a tough situation," he wants the NFL to quickly resolve its contract dispute and "get the permanent refs back."

On September 17, 2011, a small group of activists rolled out their sleeping bags in Zuccotti Park, a small patch of concrete in the middle of Manhattan's Financial District. Monday marks the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street's beginning; since that day one year ago, other occupations have flourished across America and the world, though most of them have since been disbanded in the face of inclement weather and unfriendly—often even violent—police crackdowns.

"Occupy was successful in changing the conversation," said Melissa Harris-Perry on Sunday's edition of her show. "Bringing attention to the 99 percent. But they fielded no candidates, advanced no single unified agenda. ... One year later, where's Occupy?"

According to Harrison Schultz, a member of the Occupy movement, things are still moving forward. "There's so much I could possibly talk about," he told Harris-Perry. "I can only really speak for myself. You get ten different occupiers in a room, you get ten different opinions. But what I've been working on, specifically, is presenting an actual plan to the Occupy movement to actually rapidly end the economic crisis and permanently alter capitalism."

Citizen Radio's Allison Kilkenny defended the hesitation of many movement activists to get involved in electoral politics. "I'm an ally of Occupy, so I actually dig the way they do things," she said. "You know, remaining outsiders from the political system. A lot of people are like, 'Why haven't they run a candidate yet?' And the problem is, that system of our governance is broken. That's the whole idea of Occupy. That's why Occupy exists at all."

In the weekend leading up to Occupy's first birthday, organizers have been staging various events and activities around New York City. This will all lead up to an all-day series of actions on Monday.

M. Spencer Green / AP

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaks during a news conference at Tarkington School of Excellence in Chicago, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 as Vincent Iturralde, right, principal at at Tarkington listens.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said yesterday that he believes the two key issues in the Chicago Teachers Union strike are legally "non-strikeable," the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Tuesday. Of teacher evaluations and the rehiring of fired teachers, he said, "the legal answer is, they’re not allowed to be strikeable on it. Those are the two final issues that we’re dealing with of significance." However, he added he would rather bargain with the union than fight a legal battle against it.

Martin Malin, a professor at Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law, said that such a battle would be "uncharted legal waters." When Lean Forward asked Malin if Emanuel was right and the CTU strike was illegal, he burst out laughing. "There's enough legal ambiguity here to fill a law school final exam," he said. "The answer is maybe. We're dealing with probably uncharted territory here."

"Strikes are legally protected only if they are over mandatory subjects of bargaining," University of Oregon Professor Gordon Lafer, an expert in American labor law, told Lean Forward. Mandatory bargaining subjects vary by state and industry; in Illinois, mandatory bargaining subjects for public school teachers are outlined in the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, or IELA. In June of last year, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn approved the law SB7, amending the IELA so that several new bargaining subjects were explicitly labeled "permissive" instead of mandatory.

If certain bargaining subjects are permissive, said Lafer, "they can be part of the negotiations, but one can't strike exclusively over these issues." SB7 made the length of the school day and year permissive [PDF]. Section 4.5 of the IELA stipulates that class size and "[d]ecisions to layoff or reduce in force employees" are also permissive.

"It's important to know that it is very, very common for people to strike over a disagreement that involves more than one issue, where some of the issues are mandatory and some are permissive," said Lafer. "The law says that it is not legal to strike if the strike is only over permissive subjects."

In a terse statement replying to Emanuel, the Chicago Teachers Union said, "The union is not on strike over matters governed exclusively by IELRA Section 4.5 and 12(b)." As previously reported, CTU's demands include stipulations about compensation, benefits, and classroom air conditioning.

"While new Illinois law prohibits us from striking over the recall of laid-off teachers and compensation for a longer school year, we do not intend to sign an agreement until these matters are addressed," said CTU President Karen Lewis in her statement announcing the strike.

Some rank and file CTU members have been open about the fact that their grievances go beyond mandatory bargaining subjects. "The law says we can't negotiate directly on student conditions," Xian Barrett, a Chicago school teacher, told Lean Forward. "But ultimately, to us—not union leadership, they have to comply with those rules—but to us rank and file, that's unconscionable."

In order for Emanuel to take legal action against the union, he would need to file for an unfair labor practice complaint with the Illinois Labor Relations Board. "The labor board would have to decide whether there's enough there to issue a complaint," said Malin. If there is enough for a complaint, the board would then have to decide whether to request an injunction on the union from a circuit court. And even if the circuit court granted the injunction, it wouldn't stop there.

"I would imagine, if a circuit court granted an injunction, the union would immediately file a notice of appeal and an emergency notice to stay the injunction," said Malin.

Ultimately, Malin said, Emanuel would have to consider both the legal and political implications of a court battle. "The mayor is damned if he doesn't, damned if he doesn't," he said. "If he doesn't [file a complaint], he's subject to political attack that he's not doing everything he can to open the schools. If he does, he opens himself to comparisons to the late 19th, early 20th century, when court injunctions were a favored legal tactic to bust unions."

However, Malin thought that the strike could have serious legal implications for the union going beyond just an injunction. "If the current strike turns out to be lengthy and gets messier, I would not be surprised if there's a call for further legislative restrictions on CPS [Chicago Public Schools] employees' right to strike," he said.

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Both Mitt Romney and Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus released harsh statements on Tuesday condemning what they said was President Obama's decision to "sympathize" with the people who attacked America's embassy in Cairo.

"It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks," said Romney in a statement. Shortly after midnight, Priebus tweeted, "Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic."

The Romney and Priebus remarks followed those made by U.S. embassy staff, posted online, in which they said, "The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions."

The attack on the embassy was reportedly inspired by a YouTube video, produced in the United States, which the attackers believed blasphemed Islam and mocked the prophet Muhammad.

The Obama administration refuted Romney and Priebus' insinuation that it endorsed the embassy's statement. A White House official told Politico that the embassy's statement was "not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government."

Nonetheless, on Wednesday, Romney reiterated his attack in a televised press conference.

"The administration was wrong to release a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt instead of condemning their actions," he said. "It's never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values."

When challenged by the press on the timing of his remarks, Romney defended his comment.

"The president takes responsibility not just for the words that come from his mouth, but also for the words that come from his ambassadors, from his administration, from his embassies, from his State Department," Romney said. "They clearly sent mixed messages to the world. And the statement that came from the administration—and the embassy is the administration—the statement that came from the administration was a statement which is akin to an apology and which I think is a sever miscalculation."

After the embassy statement met criticism, a follow-up tweet from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo's official Twitter account said, "Sorry, but neither breaches of our compound or angry messages will dissuade us from defending freedom of speech AND criticizing bigotry."

LATE UPDATE: The New York Times reports that the Cairo embassy's initial statement was released "before the start of the protests," and describes Romney as "[a]pparently unaware of the timing."

M. Spencer Green / AP

Chicago teachers walk a picket line outside Benjamin Banneker Elementary School in Chicago, Monday, Sept. 10, 2012, after they went on strike for the first time in 25 years.

At midnight on Monday morning, the Chicago Teachers Union officially began its first strike in 25 years, shutting down the city's public school system and leaving parents to find other accommodations for their children during the day. The union, which represents some 26,000 teachers and other school staff, cited concerns over job security, benefits, compensation, and inadequate air conditioning for classes. Several teachers told Lean Forward that they consider the fight to be less about their own working conditions than about the quality of education they're able to offer students.

"People continue to characterize this as a fight only about money," said Anthony James, one such teacher. "This is a fight for public education and, thus, for our children."

"Every CTU member has a list of indignancies to their students that they witness, which builds over time and results with we're that," said Xian Barrett, another public school teacher. To the extent that compensation and benefits are an issue, "I'd say the disrespect involved was probably greater than the exact salary issue itself." As an example, he pointed to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's decision to renege on an earlier agreement that would have given every teacher a four percent raise.

Good salaries and benefits are still at the top of the union's demands. "Recognizing the [Chicago Education] Board’s fiscal woes, we are not far apart on compensation," said CTU President Karen Lewis in a statement. "However, we are apart on benefits. We want to maintain the existing health benefits." Chicago public schools are facing down a projected $665 million budget gap.

Lewis added, "While new Illinois law prohibits us from striking over the recall of laid-off teachers and compensation for a longer school year, we do not intend to sign an agreement until these matters are addressed." CTU and the mayor's office have been at odds over a plan to increase the length of the school day without proportionately increasing teachers' salaries.

In July, a fact-finding report [PDF] by representatives from the union and the Board of Education found that the plan would have increased the work required of union members by 19.4 percent. The report recommended additional compensation for the extended hours.

Emanuel, speaking to the press, called the strike "a strike of choice" and said the two remaining points of contention were over school staffing decisions and teacher evaluations. According to a Chicago Public Schools statement released the day before the strike, the Board of Education's final offer—deemed a "fair and reasonable proposal"—included a 16 percent salary increase, support for laid off teachers, and "improved monitoring of class size issues."

Teacher evaluations also loom large as a concern. John Kuijper, a Chicago teacher and CTU member, said evaluation programs like Race to the Top are, "turning schools into test prep factories, because they're tying teacher ratings directly to how students do" on standardized tests.

At issue is also class size, and what the Chicago Teachers Union says is inadequate—or nonexistent—air conditioning in many classrooms. "When you make me cram 30-50 kids in my classroom with no air conditioning so that temperatures hit 96 degrees, that hurts our kids," wrote Barrett at his blog Teacher X.

It is these kinds of conditions that are leading students to picket as well. High school sophomore Maribel Sandoval, 15, say that she and hundreds of her classmates have turned out to support the teachers. "Last week a number of students, they passed out because of the heat in the school," she said. "The way things are going, it's just not working out for any of us."

Lack of resources is an issue as well, she said. "We don't have enough resources—books and all of that—for school. I had to share a book with two or three other students. And the amount of students in class is ridiculous."

Kuijper said that structural problems in the city's education system had led the teachers' union to this point. In particular, he pointed to increased funding for charter schools, at the expense of public school coffers. "What we're really asking for is equity," he said. "Every charter school I've ever been in has iPads. In every classroom, they have smartboards, they have air conditioning. We have none of that. It's creating two separate and unequal systems."

Chicago's charter schools, whose employees are non-union, will remain open for the duration of the strike. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his predecessor Richard Daley have both been long time charter school expansion advocates, while teachers unions typically oppose the creation of schools with non-union (and frequently less well-compensated) staff.

"The charter schools in our area do not deliver a superior education, but they do very aggressive marketing campaigns, and they do tend to steer away from the students with highest needs and require more resources to educate,' said Barrett. "We're left with a situation where we have not enough resources to educate the remaining students who may be coming in with more challenges."

Kuijper blasted the education infrastructure Emanuel is working to create as "a two-tiered system with the haves and have nots, where you have people attending the charter system who are most compliant, most ready for charter school life."

"This only happens for certain races and classes of students," he went on. "It would never happen in the suburbs which are mostly white." A recent New York Times report suggested that charter schools have contributed significantly to the resegregation of New York's own education system.

University of Oregon professor Gordon Lafer, an expert in labor law, said, "A lot of people around the country are looking at this as a stand of the teachers' union against ... a set of things which people with money or political power, such as Mayor Emanuel, do not accept for their own kids." Powerful school reform advocates like Emanuel, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and philanthropist Bill Gates "all send their children to schools with small class sizes and face-to-face instruction."

Of the "two-tiered system," he said, "the teachers' union is really the only political counterweight of any significance to that trend."

While Kuijper said that charter schools were better funded and had superior accommodations, he pointed to research by the Economic Policy Institute that suggests, on balance, they don't have a better record than full public schools. The real advantage of charter schools, he argued, was that they lack accountability or transparency.

"I worked in a high-performing charter school for a year," he said. His school "issued demerits to students if they had their shoes untied. After four demerits they go to Saturday detention. After 12 Saturday detentions, you may not get your credit for freshman year."

"They bully these students into absurd degrees of compliance," he said. "In effect, they're creating a private school culture."

But for Barrett, there's far more at stake. "I think what we're seeing in Chicago is a different way of seeing a union's role, and a community's voice, in education," he said. "That's hard for people who are used to having a unilateral role in education decisions."

"We're going to fight as long as we need to fight," said Kuijper. "We're going to fight for what's right for kids."

Mitt Romney has weighed in on the strike, trying to tie the Chicago Teachers Union to the Obama administration. In a statement,he said that President Obama had sided with the teachers' unions, whereas he chose to "side with the parents and students depending on public schools." Obama has not yet spoken publicly about the strike.