On Tuesday, the Missouri supreme court invalidated a 2018 state law aiming to dismantle collective bargaining in the public sector. The statute would have imposed a variety of restrictions on the activities of public sector unions — complicating the certification process, requiring that they regularly secure renewed certification and dues checkoff authorization, and sharply limiting their ability to strike or picket, among other things.

These restrictions, the bill’s sponsors overtly disclosed, were designed to pave the way toward “the ultimate goal of right to work” — which Missouri voters decisively rejected in a ballot initiative the year the bill, reprising the language of the failed referendum, was legislatively introduced.

The statute included a last-minute carveout for police and other “public safety” unions, which the Missouri supreme court found ran fatally afoul of the state’s constitutional guarantee of equal protection.

A new report released Tuesday by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) — a coalition of SEIU, IBT, CWA, and UFW — uncovers that Amazon employees are injured nearly twice as often as workers at other warehouses. The report attributes the sharp disparity to the intense productivity targets Amazon imposes on the millions of people laboring in its fulfillment centers, which are central to its business model. Indeed, SOC’s report coincides with the unearthing of leaked pamphlets revealing that Amazon refers to its warehouse employees as “industrial athletes” and instructs them to “prepare their bodies” for their toil.

While Amazon’s overwhelming unionbusting tactics successfully quashed the historic union drive in Bessemer, the degrading and dangerous conditions exposed by the SOC report will inevitably continue to spawn organizing efforts.

On Tuesday, a coalition of powerful labor unions in California, the CLF, endorsed Governor Newsom in the recall election he appears increasingly likely to face later this year. Yet support for Newsom is not uniform among the Golden State’s labor leaders, as the president of the largest public sector local in the state, SEIU 1000, refused to endorse the governor, highlighting the wage cuts he imposed on state workers last year, an effort to shore up the state’s pandemic-induced budget shortfall. (Newsom has since promised to restore the wages.) Still, notwithstanding local 1000’s misgivings, the president of SEIU California joined the CLF in voicing opposition to what he described as a “destructive, costly and distracting recall.”

Lastly, an industry survey published Tuesday finds that shortages of raw materials and labor power continue to suppress manufacturing capacity and preclude firms from meeting the consumer demand surging to new heights as the pandemic abates. While an “overwhelming majority” of firms are seeking to hire new employees, the survey reports, more than half are struggling to do so.