The Clean Slate for Worker Power, a research project directed by Benjamin Sachs and Sharon Block at the Harvard Law School, recently released a report comprehensively reimagining the U.S. labor law regime so as to empower working people to construct an equitable democracy and economy. The report outlines a sweeping array of policy reforms, from establishing a system of sectoral bargaining to expanding the scope of mandatory bargaining subjects to loosening preemption doctrine so as to unlock state and local innovation to democratizing corporate governance.

In sports news, the unions representing athletes in the country’s largest professional sports leagues — the NFLPA, MLBPA, NBPA, and MLHPA — endorsed  the PRO Act on Tuesday. It is conceivable that the support of these powerful unions with high cultural visibility may heighten public awareness of the issue and help dislodge the stubborn aversion among a key group of centrist Democratic senators —  some of whom are avid sports fans — to dismantling the filibuster.

In international news, violent protests in demand of economic justice continue to reverberate across Colombia.  The demonstrations were catalyzed by a tax reform plan introduced by the country’s reactionary president last week, which threatened to sharply raise the prices of many essential goods and services. Although the president swiftly moved to rescind the proposal in the face of the intense popular opposition, the protests have continued to escalate, transforming into a broader democratic expression of disaffection over the country’s spiraling poverty and inequality.

The protests took a dramatic and lethal turn on Monday, as security forces in Cali, a large city in the country’s southwest, reportedly fired into a dense crowd of protestors. Some have described the scene as a “massacre.” Hundreds of protestors were injured and least a dozen killed. Unions have urged a sweeping national strike in response to the state violence.

In labor law developments, in a recent case the NLRB’s Republican majority found that telecommunications giant AT&T violated the law when it disciplined a steward for recording a meeting at which an employee was discharged. But, significantly, the Board declined to invalidate the company policy on which the discipline rested, thereby repudiating in part its Lutheran Heritage doctrine, which required setting aside an otherwise lawful workplace rule where it was used to suppress protected activity.