Recent and Future Labor Victories!

Good news, and good potential news, on the union front:

Maryland has passed the nation's first statewide living wage law -- it requires employers doing business with the state government to pay workers $11.30/hour in the Baltimore/Washington area and less in other parts of the state. Baltimore was the first city in the country to pass a local living wage law (1994) and the idea spread quickly. More than 100 cities now have such laws. Let's hope that Maryland is, once again, a pioneer in an idea that will spread to other states.

Santa Fe, NM passed a citywide minimum wage law a few years ago. At the time, business leaders warned that it would destroy the local economy, but those Chicken Littles were wrong, as columnist Rick Wartzman in the LA Times points out in his article today. He suggests that LA and other cities should consider doing the same thing.

Kelly Candaele and I wrote an article this week for TomPaine.Com on the importance of the pending labor law reform bill in Congress - the Employee Free Choice Act. (This is a different and more straightforward version of the article we published in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week).  If passed,  the EFCA would help trigger a revival of union membership and, more broadly, of progressive politics.