Mark Kreidler
American Prospect

Creation of permanent local offices of labor standards is a new frontier for municipalities, something that didn’t exist before because, by and large, it didn’t need to. Times have changed.

“Municipality by municipality isn’t ideally how you would do this. In the ideal, you’d have a Congress that protects workers and honors the will of the majority,” said Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “But at the same time, these are ways to...

Carl Smith
Governing

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. In the absence of action from Congress and state legislatures, local governments are adding capacity to their programs to support workers.

“There's a lot of untapped potential for local governments to protect working people and to play a new role in that regard,” says report co-author Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard worklife program.

LiJia Gong, policy and legal director at Local Progress, and ...

Dan DiMaggio, Angela Bunay
Labor Notes

“Seven months ago if you asked me about a union I would’ve said, ‘I don’t know, cops have them?’” says Sarah Pappin, a shift supervisor at a Seattle Starbucks. But on June 6, she and her co-workers voted unanimously to join Starbucks Workers United, part of an upsurge of organizing by younger workers with little union experience that is breathing new life into the labor movement.

Now they’re dreaming even...