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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.

John Gress / Reuters

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis (3rd L) leaves a House of Delegates meeting in Chicago September 16, 2012.

Chicago Public Schools filed a request on Monday morning for an injunction against the Chicago Teachers Union, declaring the union's week-old strike illegal and a "clear and present danger to the health and safety of the public." The request for an injunction also argues that the CTU is striking over demands that are not legally strikeable, a claim previously advanced by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

In the injunction request, the Board of Education argues that the strike endangers schoolchildren's health and safety by depriving them of access to school nurses, free or reduced price school lunches, and shelter from neighborhood violence. Additionally, says the Board of Education, special needs students will be deprived of access to critical special educations services.

The city of Chicago filed for an injunction after the CTU voted on Sunday to reject a "tentative agreement" and instead continue the strike. On Monday, a Cook County Circuit Court judge declined to hear arguments regarding the possible injunction right away, postponing the issue until at least Wednesday, by which time the strike may have already concluded. The union is expected to meet again on Tuesday night.

Zev Eigen, a professor at Northwestern University's law school and an expert in labor law, told Lean Forward that the court was unlikely to end the strike over health and safety concerns. "This part of the allegation is a weaker claim, because of the fact that there hasn't been a lot of violence on the picket line," he said. Injunctions over public health and safety issues normally end strikes when the strikes themselves are violent, which is not the case in Chicago.

However, "there's not a lot of precedent on how broadly the court should construe the clear and present health and safety risk," said Eigen. He pointed to firefighters—who are not currently legally permitted to strike—as an example of a group who might earn an injunction for even a non-violent strike. A peaceful strike by firefighters, he said, would present a clear and present danger to the public, because there would be nobody available to douse potentially deadly fires.

But in the case of teachers, Eigen said, a similar argument would be overly broad. All teachers strikes prevent students from attending school; if doing so constitutes a "clear and present danger" to their health and safety, said Eigen, "You're essentially making it so the teachers never have the right to strike."

However, he believed that the Board of Education had a stronger case on the question of strikeable issues. "My assessment is it seems like the union is striking on things which, under the [Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act], the city has the right to unilaterally impose as non-strikeable issues," he said. However, he added, there is not a clear precedent for how the court should proceed. "This is not a slam dunk argument on the facts," he said. "It's not clear what the court would do."

In a statement, CTU spokeswoman Stephanie Gardin blasted the injunction request as a "vindictive act instigated by the mayor." "This attempt to thwart our democratic process is consistent with Mayor Emanuel’s bullying behavior toward public school educators," she said.

Eigen called the injunction request a poor strategy which "reduces the likelihood of an amicable resolution," but also leveled the same charge against the strike itself. "I support the CTU," he said. "I support the teachers. I am very sympathetic on a lot of the issues that they're raising. My view is this strike is not the right way to raise them, nor are they on the right side of the law on the injunction issue."

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.

"We are here to nominate a president," said former president Bill Clinton, opening his prime time address on the second night of the Democratic National Convention. "And I've got one in mind." For the better part of the next hour, he delivered a detailed, animated endorsement of President Barack Obama and a firm denunciation of the modern Republican Party. It was, said MSNBC contributor and Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, an "extraordinary, virtuoso political performance."

In a wide-ranging speech that often strayed from the prepared remarks, Clinton dug deep into Obama's record, citing statistics and explaining specific provisions in the current president's health care policy, student loan policy, auto bailout, welfare waiver system, tax policy, approach to the national debt, and more.

Here, from the New York Times transcription of his remarks as they were delivered, is a representative passage:

So the president’s student loan is more important than ever. Here’s what it does — (cheers, applause) — here’s what it does. You need to tell every voter where you live about this. It lowers the cost of federal student loans. And even more important, it give students the right to repay those loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their income for up to 20 years. (Cheers, applause.)

Now what does this mean? What does this mean? Think of it. It means no one will ever have to drop out of college again for fear they can’t repay their debt.

And it means — (cheers, applause) — it means that if someone wants to take a job with a modest income, a teacher, a police officer, if they want to be a small-town doctor in a little rural area, they won’t have to turn those jobs down because they don’t pay enough to repay they debt. Their debt obligation will be determined by their salary. This will change the future for young America. (Cheers, applause.)

It wasn't all wonky detail, however. Clinton also brought a fair amount of acid to his description of the Republican Party's response. "It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did," he said, after saying the Romney campaign was hypocritical in its attacks on Obama's Medicare policy. He also blamed Republican obstruction for America's persistent unemployment problem.

"Though I often disagree with Republicans, I actually never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate our president and a lot of other Democrats," he said. The Republicans' "number one priority" for Obama's first term, he went on, "was not to put America back to work; it was to put the president out of work."

"We’re going to keep President Obama on the job," he added, to roaring applause.

One of the newer line of attacks Clinton deployed in his speech was that the Romney would bankrupt Medicare by 2016. "He wants to go back to the old system, which means we’ll reopen the doughnut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and we’ll reduce the life of the Medicare trust fund by eight full years," he said, adding: " That means, after all, we won’t have to wait until their voucher program kicks in 2023 to see the end of Medicare as we know it."

Though Clinton was there to present a unified Democratic front, he did allude to the famously acrimonious 2008 primary between his wife and Barack Obama. Noting that Obama appointed Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State, Bill Clinton said, "I’m grateful for the relationship of respect and partnership she and the president have enjoyed and the signal that sends to the rest of the world, that democracy does not have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest." The "blood sport" line was not in his prepared remarks.

The Obama campaign reportedly did not know the contents of Clinton's speech before he delivered it, but based on the punditocracy's reaction, they must have been pleased with the response. "I'm sitting here, I'm giddy!" enthused MSNBC's Ed Schultz. "I mean, this is exactly what Barack Obama needed." MSNBC's Chris Matthews said Clinton "brought the center home."

Barack Obama appeared on stage shortly after Clinton's speech concluded, and the two embraced, before walking off together.

In his keynote address on the first night of the 2012 Republican National Convention, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie delivered a fiery defense of conservative governance and principles. Notably, though, he barely spoke about Mitt Romney's record or principles; instead, he devoted much of his speech to laying out his own governing philosophy, accomplishments, and personal biography.

"The greatest lesson Mom ever taught me, though, was this one: she told me there would be times in your life when you have to choose between being loved and being respected," said the famously combative governor. "She said to always pick being respected, that love without respect was always fleeting—but that respect could grow into real, lasting love."

In fact, from his opening line on, Christie dedicated a significant portion of his speech to establishing his biographical working class bona fides. Such a speech, highlighting his own attractive qualities as a presidential candidate, could leave him well positioned for a presidential run in 2016 if Mitt Romney loses the general election.

That would also explain by Christie spent so much time highlighting his record as New Jersey governor. "They said it was impossible to touch the third rail of politics," he said at one point. "To take on the public sector unions and to reform a pension and health benefit system that was headed to bankruptcy. [But] with bipartisan leadership we saved taxpayers $132 billion over 30 years and saved retirees their pension."

New Jersey voters "rewarded politicians who led instead of politicians who pandered," he added, presumably including himself among the politicians who led.

Though Christie did praise Romney as someone who "will tell us the hard truths we need to hear," he declined to go on the attack against Barack Obama, as many earlier speakers had done. In fact, he did not mention Obama's name once during the entire speech. "It doesn't matter how we got here," he said instead. "There is enough blame to go around."

On Monday, the New York Post reported that sources had told them Chris Christie turned down an opportunity to be Mitt Romney's running mate because he thought Romney might lose. Last month, he said he would "certainly think about" running in 2016 if Romney was not the incumbent president.

Following Christie's speech, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called it, "One of the most remarkable acts of political selfishness that I have ever seen."